Named for the D&D zine with the same title, HOW I RUN IT, puts over 35 years experience playing in and (mostly) running D&D games to work in providing a particular kind of gaming experience. I don’t know what category of D&D game I like to run exactly, except the kind that tries to be challenging and fun and for people for whom being challenged is fun. It is the style of DMing that sees tweaking rules, coming up with your own versions of monsters, inventing magical items, and a general DIY aesthetic as a core part of the game, as is aiming towards a “playing the world” and “play to see what happens” attitude that trumps emulating any particular kind of narrative construction.
“That’s what would happen in a book or movie” is never going to be our motive in tweaking results, rather we lean into the absurdities and disruptions that happen when playing such an open-ended and occasionally wildly random game.
In this kind of D&D, we don’t play through stories, we play through scenarios and situations that in hindsight will become the stories we tell.
This blog is a supplement to the zines, which will continue to be published once to thrice a year. It updates and further develops material that appears in those issues, along with adding new material and musings on running D&D.
Ultimately, however, the philosophy of HOW I RUN IT is that nothing here is meant to be proscriptive. That is, you should run and play D&D (or any other RPG) in a way that works best for you and your group’s preferences. Use whatever you find here as you think best, and I encourage you to tweak it and change it as much as you want, since that is how I came up with the vast majority of what I present here. In the end, that is what D&D means to me, making it your own, and not being beholden to any particular set of rules or approach as the “correct” way.
HOW I RUN IT. 