The Best Habit for Improving Your DMing
Being a DM is kinda hard actually. Your job is to be part storyteller, part NPC voice actor, part game designer, and part rules expert, along with 5 other roles that I'm probably forgetting at the time of writing this blog. It's made harder by the fact that a lot of the most popular RPGs out there don't exactly provide great advice for filling this role, if they provide any advice at all.
Like many forever DMs, my introduction to DMing D&D was relatively humble; I had seen my dad run games since forever, I knew I wanted to have my own campaign, and someone had to run D&D for my silly group of teenage nerd friends. Which is another way to say that the games I ran back then were pretty terrible and the only reason nobody called me on that was because we were all teenagers and none of us knew any better.
Getting better at running games is a marathon though, not a sprint. The more you play, the more systems you try, the more you get exposed to different theories and playstyles, the better you become at running the game the way you want to run it. All of that is super helpful, and if you even somewhat care about the quality of your games you should be doing all of that constantly.
But that's not what I'm here to talk about! All of that stuff is fairly obvious I think (or maybe it's not and I'm just being way too optimistic). The thing I want to talk about today is why you need to make reading books a daily habit if you want to level up your ability to run games.
For Inspiration, Right?
I feel like the initial gut reaction to this is going to be like "Yeah I need to read Wheel of Time or whatever current Brandon Sanderson series is going on so that I can be inspired for my D&D games". And while that is certainly a helpful facet of reading books, you can get inspiration from a ton of different mediums, including TV, Movies, and Video Games.
But, crucially, those other mediums are visual. What reading a book teaches you that those things cannot, is how to paint a picture using only your words. And describing what is happening in a shared reality is a big part of your job! You're not going to have multi-million dollar sets and fancy special effects to help you do the job of visual storytelling (unless you become the next Matt Mercer maybe).
But Surely DMs Read a Lot of Fiction, Right?
I really wish I could just believe this without cynicism, but unfortunately we live in the year of our lord 2025. I have spoken to way too many people who are nerdy, and play D&D or other TTRPGs, who not only don't read for fun, but are proud that they don't read! This infuriates me in a way I can't fully articulate, especially living in present day idiocracy. I am begging you all to read books, I don't care if they are bad, I don't care if the internet doesn't rank them in their top 10 books, I don't care if they are barely above fanfiction in terms of writing quality. Please for the love of God and everything, read a book!
Okay so how do I get started?
The key to building any habit is to dedicate time for it every day. My current approach is to make sure I read at least a half hour every day, I quite literally write it on my to do list and set a timer for it. Once you do this long enough, you will not need to set a timer and be meticulous about it.
As for books, probably the easiest thing to do is just pick any sort of long running fantasy series with a lot of material for you to go through. At the time of writing, Humble Bundle is selling every Wheel of Time book for $18, which is actually insane. You probably have a local library, which means you not only get what books they have literally for free, you also get access to online loaning platforms like Hoopla! You literally have no excuse, reading is free and awesome. Go do it. Do it even though nobody is going to give you a free personal pan pizza for doing it.
