So you’re about to run your first session, and you’re already worried you haven’t prepped enough. Here’s the twist nobody tells you: that instinct to over-prepare is one of the fastest ways to run a worse game, not a better one.
When I was a first time DM, I genuinely thought more prep equalled a better game. I was wrong. So today I want to walk you through the six things I believed were true when I started out, and how to avoid each one so your first session is actually fun (for your players and for you).
If you’re a first time DM reading this the night before your first game, breathe. You’re going to be great. Let’s get into it.
1. Breathe, and tell your players you’re nervous
Before my early sessions, I used to get such bad stage fright that I couldn’t even eat beforehand. I put so much pressure on myself that I was scared to sit down at my own table, with friends I’d known for years.
Here’s what I’d forgotten: everyone is here to have fun. That’s it. It’s a bunch of friends around a table, and you’re all there for a good time.
The single best thing I did was simple: I told my players I was nervous. I was upfront about it and asked them for reassurance afterwards — to let me know I did okay and that they had fun. Because honestly, even when I could see it on their faces, it didn’t always register emotionally for me.
If you take one thing from this section: bring your table into it. Ask them to support you, and to tell you afterwards what they loved (and gently, what they didn’t). As a first time DM, that little bit of safety changes everything.
2. Over-prepping happens faster than you think
The trap hiding inside that nervousness is over-preparation. It took me about 10–12 sessions to figure out my own prep style, and along the way I wrote down everything: every NPC, every skill check, every line a character might say.
The result? I got lost in my own notes mid-session. I’d be scrolling through Notion in the middle of a scene, hunting for that one thing I knew I’d written somewhere. It killed the flow I wanted so badly.
That’s not to say prep is bad, it isn’t. But severe over-prepping is the fastest way to slow your game down and smother the fun. It feels like you need to know everything about your world to run it properly. You don’t. It’s far more important to go with the flow and make things up as you go.
And that messy process of learning how you prep? That’s not a failure, it’s the work. It’s literally what turns you into a good DM. So don’t quit after session two thinking “this is too complex.” Keep tweaking. It gets so much more fun once you find your rhythm.
3. Your players don’t know
You’ll botch an NPC. You’ll give them the wrong voice, or hand out a clue they weren’t supposed to get yet. And here’s the reassuring truth for every first time DM: your players don’t know.
They didn’t read your notes. They don’t know the plan. So roll with it. Act like it was intentional all along. The absolute worst case, dropping a major piece of info early, usually just means the campaign runs a session shorter. And honestly? As a player, I’d almost always rather have more information than not enough.
Don’t forget the secret weapon of this hobby: you’re not running this in one sitting. You’ve got a week, two weeks, maybe a month between sessions. So that NPC your party of murder hobos killed off too early? You’ve got plenty of time to invent a replacement, drop in someone new, or have them mysteriously reappear thanks to some powerful friends. There’s always time to fix the big mistakes later. You never have to solve them mid-scene.
4. You don’t need to know it all in advance
When I started, I felt like I had to read the entire campaign book cover to cover before I could run session one. You don’t. You need to know the next session, and maybe the one after.
Beyond that, you genuinely can’t predict what your players will do. They might kill the most important NPC in the story. They might wander somewhere you never planned. That’s fine, you’ll have time to adjust.
My old fear was, “but what if this becomes important in act 12?” The honest answer: by then, so much will have changed that it probably won’t matter. And if it does, you’ll learn it then and adapt.
Here’s the counterintuitive bit: reading the whole campaign upfront can actually hurt you. You start protecting the story as written instead of playing the world and reacting to your players. I run with the rule of cool. If my players want to do something funky and weird, I let them, and I bend the story to fit. That’s so much more fun than panicking in session three because something in session 25 “won’t work anymore.”
5. You are not the enemy
There are moments that feel like you versus the players. You run the monsters, the traps, the villains, the obstacles, so it’s easy to slip into feeling like the antagonist.
Worth saying out loud in session one: the DM isn’t the bad guy. The villain is. Because you’re not just playing the threats. You’re playing the whole world, the helpful innkeeper, the mysterious wizard, the allies who hand them a crazy magic item. That’s all you too.
One of my players realised this mid-session. He paused, looked at me and said, “Wait, you’re not the enemy here.” And once that clicked, everything opened up. He stopped trying to “beat” me and the game became genuinely collaborative.
Practically, this means: let the world live and breathe. If the players skip the camp they were meant to infiltrate, then when they finally show up, the camp is gone. A cold fire pit, trampled grass, abandoned gear. The goal quietly shifts from “infiltrate the camp” to “find where it went.” Keep that lens on: not just what are my players seeing, but what’s happening while they’re not there.
6. Enjoy it, this is the whole point
This is the most important one. The game is supposed to be fun for everyone, and that includes you. If a session has you so stressed you can’t run it, it’s completely okay to ask your players to turn it into a board game night instead. Rest. Take the pressure off. The best sessions almost always come from a DM who’s actually having fun.
And if a player keeps crashing the experience, talk to them — not as “I’m laying down the law as DM,” but as a group looking after something you all care about. A good table can handle, “hey, this is making it less fun for us.” That conversation protects the one thing worth protecting: the fun you have together.
Because ultimately, we’re not here as our characters. We’re here as people, spending time together and enjoying it. There are a hundred little reasons we play, but underneath all of them, the reason is fun. Never sacrifice that.
You’ve got this
If you’re a first time DM, here’s the short version: breathe, prep less than you think, roll with your mistakes, learn as you go, play the whole world, and protect the fun. Do that, and your first session will be a great one, and your tenth will be even better.
Want a hand on your journey? Come join our Discord community of DMs, new and experienced. It’s the perfect place to ask questions, share your first-session war stories, and get reassurance from people who’ve been exactly where you are. I’d love to see you in there. 🎲