Dungeons and Dragons - What makes a good DM?

Well, since I started playing Dungeons and Dragons that question has come up more times than I care to count.  There are so many things that I feel a Dungeon Master needs to be capable of in order to make the game good.  You need to have an understanding of the basic rules, know when and how to change things as the need arises, creativity is must (and yes, you can learn this to a degree), know how to tell a story, and you have to be organized enough to keep track of what is going on and not have to spend half of the gaming session looking through books.

Basic understanding of the rules is probably the most important.  After all, it's hard to change things up when you don't know what the hell is going on in the first place.  You need to know how to create a character inside and out.  And by that I don't mean memorizing everything.  There are instructions in the Player's Handbooks on how to create characters, you should be able to find any questions your players have while creating their characters.  And if you have customized the process this is even more important because if you don't know your rules then who does? 

Impromptu gaming is an important skill as well.  If a player decides they want to throw a 10 lb. dumbbell at a creature then you need to come up with the damage and such associated with that task . . . not spend fifteen minutes looking over your charts for an answer.  This flows right into creativity and organization.  If you make something up for the game, write it down where you can find it if you have to reference it later.  This helps with consistency in the game.

And storytelling . . . to me that is the meat of the game.  It is the reason I play.  It should be a crime for a DM to not take the time to research how to read and write a story that makes some kind of sense.  I think the best thing a DM can do is take some free creative writing workshops and such on the internet, there are many of them if you take the time to simply search Google.  Something I find that compliments knowing basic story structure is keeping a thesaurus on hand (a good one, not some $5 junk, an actual large thesaurus), if you use your computer a lot in gaming then you can go to www.reference.com .  It's very useful.

My next few posts will get into the details of specific changes, and that's where we really start breaking out of the mold.  As usual here are some things you may find helpful in your journey to becoming a better DM. 

Happy gaming.