The Dungeon Master shortage is real across every Midwest gaming community — there are always more players than people willing to run games. If you're considering stepping into the DM role, the best time to start is now, with lower stakes than you think and more support available than you realize. This guide covers what actually matters for a first session.
What You Need to Prepare
For a first session, you need: one adventure (use a published one-shot rather than writing your own — the D&D Starter Set's adventure or a free adventure from the Dungeon Masters Guild), a rough understanding of the combat rules, and a few pre-made characters for your players or the time to walk them through character creation before the session. That's genuinely enough to run a first session.
What you don't need: a fully realized world, perfect NPC voices, mastery of every rule, or an answer to every possible player question. These come with time. No one's first session is great; almost everyone's fifth session is good enough.
The Session Zero
Before your first game session, run a "Session Zero" — a brief meeting where you establish expectations: the tone of the game you're running, what kind of content is on and off the table, how you'll handle rules disputes, and any safety tools (Lines and Veils, the X-Card) you want to use. Session Zero prevents the kinds of misaligned expectations that cause problems in later sessions.
Running the Session
Describe scenes in the present tense ("You're standing at the edge of a dark forest. The road ahead disappears into shadow."). Ask "what do you do?" and let the players respond. When they try something, determine whether it's automatically successful, automatically fails, or requires a roll. Keep the fiction moving. Don't pause to look up rules for more than 30 seconds — make a judgment call, keep the game moving, and look up the correct rule after the session.
The key DM mindset: you are not the players' adversary. You're the world's narrator. You want the players' characters to survive challenges and have interesting stories. Monsters aren't there to kill characters; they're there to create tension that makes success meaningful.
When Players Go Off Script
They will. This is not a problem; it's the game working correctly. When players do something you didn't prepare for, the improvisation toolkit: say "yes, and..." (affirm what they're trying, add a consequence), "yes, but..." (let them succeed, with a complication), or "no, because..." (the attempt fails, with a reason that's logical in the fiction). Avoid "no" without explanation or consequence.
After the Session
Ask your players what they enjoyed and what they'd want more of. This is the most valuable feedback for a new DM. Take notes on what worked and what didn't. The improvement curve for DMs is steep in the beginning — most people who run three sessions are dramatically better than they were at session one. The hard part is getting through those first three sessions.