Originally Published 03 June, 2026

The Ultimate Guide To Playing More D&D

Everyone talks about “better D&D,” but sometimes quality is best paired with quantity. It’s something all too frequent in the D&D spheres: “we had to miss a session for this or that reason.” This is one of the worst things possible.

D&D is a unique kind of game. It’s one that supersedes other kinds of games in many ways. For many people, it’s more a lifestyle than a hobby. So why do we let our games fizzle and die?

It’s understandable. There are many kinds of issues that plague the modern D&D campaign. Players having other obligations, issues with picking a time to get together, abrasive players being obnoxious, characters hogging the spotlight, megalomaniacal DMs railroading stories. All of these different things can drag the game down, and make it less fun, less enjoyable or cause campaigns to fizzle out. They all cause you to play less D&D.

Therefore, attempting to solve these issues is a way to play more D&D. They can’t all be fixed, but if you’re a DM, you have the power to create an environment to play more D&D. To solve this, it takes stepping back a bit.

Instances of RPGs are often called “campaigns”, but this implies a few things. 1) that there is an overall goal present here and 2) it’s a discrete, finite thing. Instead, I think that we should view D&D as “tables.”

A D&D table is one where we play D&D, not a specific campaign or storyline. It is more like our modern conceptions of MMO video games, than it is Lord of the Rings. We have a world of creatures and monsters and people that just exists, with no trace of the pathetic fallacy. The players work at surviving in the world, and the stories that emerge from that, rather than any preplanned narrative.

A “normal” campaign is something quantum, and only exists at the behest of its observers. A campaign is when a group of friends says “We should play D&D sometime” and fail to do so. A table, however, is similar to its fictional world. It is distinctively not quantum, rather the game stubbornly exists, without making accommodations for its players in multiple ways.

Therefore, the first step in playing more D&D is to reframe the game from a limited “campaign” to an open “table.” Rather than scheduling a specific time when everyone can always get together to play, the game is simply hosted weekly, bi-weekly, monthly or whatever. Then, whoever can come, can come — whoever can not, does not. It doesn’t matter if the players don’t show up, because there’s nothing to miss; no story is being forsaken.

This also means that the group is free to exist more as a club than a defined group. Any amount of people can be a part of the group, having their characters phasing in and out of the world between sessions. A friend who’s curious about the game can be invited for a low-commitment session; if you meet someone at a game store who’s into D&D, add them in. Or don’t, and leave it with the handful of players who are already there. The point is to cultivate a space to play the best game ever made, and to do that, it needs to be flexible.

For the sake of flexibility, there needs to be another shift in perception, this time in the direction away from narrative, into a gamist and simulationist direction.

The West Marches is a D&D style codified by Ben Robbins. It served as a grandly experimental type of D&D campaign executed in the early 2000s. In a platonic sense, a West Marches style campaign is categorized by having a large, open world, subdivided into regions, in which smaller groups of a larger pool of players go on expeditions from a central hub. Robbins created a world that is focused on player experience within an open world.

This is a similar style to how D&D was played at its inception. In the original edition of Dungeons and Dragons from 1974, Gary Gygax recommends that “At least one referee and from four to fifty players can be handled in any single campaign, but the referee to player ratio should be 1:20 or thereabout” The original version of D&D can be played with up to 50 people. Let that sink in.

How is this possible? Well, those games were similar to the West Marches. It’s a style of D&D game that is heavily centered on the gameplay, over any kind of prewritten story. Plus these players were war-gamer grognards who really delved into the tactics of the game, seeing it as a test of their skill. The game was a game, rather than a loose fantasy theater production.

This style of D&D is more D&D. When you have D&D be more a weekly game night, there is freedom to play it more frequently. So to foster this, it doesn’t take a complete rewrite of how to play D&D, just a mindset shift. At least know that there are more options than “traditional D&D.”

This is really the only path to playing D&D more frequently, as well as ensuring that games don’t slowly fade away.

In service of this goal, there are a few more considerations I will propose. They’re not all necessary, but are closer to the way that I play D&D, and will help to ensure that your games can approach this open table style.

Firstly, abandon balancing encounters. The world needs to seem real, and in real life, battles are never a 1:1 fair fight. In a verisimilitudinous world, monsters are never going to be an exact match for the players, and the players shouldn’t either. This takes two things to really make right, otherwise encounters are going to be bloodbaths:

Not every encounter with monsters is going to result in combat. Maybe the goblins are too busy preparing for war to fight the PCs, maybe the wolves aren’t always starving for food, or maybe the kobolds are stupid enough to think that the players are their friends. Regardless, this can be simulated with a reaction roll, such as described here. They are a bell-curved representation of an initial response to the players’ presence. Not every monster is always hostile, and not every typically friendly creature is always nice.

Also, the monsters should just occasionally just flat out run. If it becomes clear that the fight isn’t going their way, they might feel the urge to bolt, tactically retreat, surrender or otherwise halt the fight. There are a couple of systems to do this out there, here’s the one from Old School Essentials, which has its own specific system for this. For systems that don’t already have their discrete resolution system for this, you can do the following. Base 50% chance of resisting fleeing when at half health (individual creature), or half numbers (multiple). Increase this number by 5% per level/ hit die / challenge rating of the monsters. Roll a d100, and if the number is lower than the 50 + 5% per level calculation, they succeed and stand their ground — otherwise, they runn, surrender or make some other move to not die. Weak creatures always flee, and undead, constructs and the like have no self-preservation and never flee.

With these implemented, and telling the players that they need to now be smart, tactical, and run from fights, you can drop any pretense of balance, and be free to portray the world as real and neutral.

Second — and to that point, because of this mindset — the world exists neutrally. The world needs to not just seem real, but be real in the player’s minds. The world shouldn’t be a reflection of DM malice towards the players, but a real-seeming fantastical world. Gotcha traps and danger from out of nowhere have no place in this style, because our reality, despite popular opinion, isn’t actively malicious towards its inhabitants. The same can be said about being too good to the players; the pathetic fallacy similarly has no place here. Handwaving, or inconsistently applying rules that negatively affect the players results in the destruction of verisimilitude.

Removing the need for rations, water, tracking ammo, or time records also removes stakes, and the players will stop caring about the game. To combat this, the world must be neutral and consistent. The DM needs to be an impartial judge or referee, not a master of ceremonies. Ben Robbins expresses this ideal really well, “The world may be active, but you the GM should appear to be passive. You’re not killing the party, the dire wolf is. It’s not you, it’s the world. Encourage the players to take action, but leave the choices up to them.”

In service of that real world ideal, you must ensure that strict time records are kept. Gary Gygax wasn’t just memeing, he knew that the reality of the world of the D&D game is based on accurate time keeping. The DM needs to know simply what and how time is passed. How long is the party in the dungeon? What might have changed at the home base in the time they were travelling to that tower? If this doesn’t happen, things matter less, and the world stops feeling real. Timekeeping of the campaign is the linchpin in which verisimilitude hangs on, and it must be upheld strictly.

To help in this task, it takes another tool from the toolbox, that being exploration procedures. In essence the goal is to make D&D more like a board game in a few key ways. While you still have the freedom of adjudication that powers the medium’s freedom, formalizing a turn structure can do wonders in making it more fun. Once you get into a strict routine with the procedures(I personally enjoy the Old School Essentials Dungeon and wilderness rules), they fade into the background, giving space for the game to come alive, without the DM having to devote mental resources to managing the minutiae. This has singlehandedly been the most impactful way I have improved my games.

A key aspect of using these procedures is the use of a caller. This rotating position is a sort of DM secretary. The caller collects the actions of the party members and relays them to the DM, rather than having everyone talk over one another. Again, this frees the DM from his arduous position as executor of a fantasy world. This process is what single-handedly allows games to have 20+ players in them.

Fourthly, this form of D&D works great online. All that is really needed is a form of voice-communication, and a channel through which to relay information. It can be any platform, really. Discord, Google Meet, or even iMessage potentially. When you have this gamified, structured kind of RPG, it is frictionless to play online, especially with a change I recommend coming up. If you want to go in depth, you can use something like Owlbear Rodeo as a Virtual Tabletop, or even just screencasted MS Paint. I’ve even heard of great success with exclusively text-based D&D.

Even if the games take place in person, it can still be beneficial to use technology. Something like a mailing list, Facebook group, Subreddit, discord server or whatever for in-person games is perfect. Anyone can just post saying they want to have a game on such a date, and people can RSVP, or otherwise let people know about availability. Even if the games are regularly scheduled, it leaves some camaraderie available off the table that might not have been there. Plus, “join the server for the game” is inherently less initial investment than “come to the session on Wednesday,” which is already pretty low.

Next, here are a couple of strategies cherry-picked from Advanced Dungeons and Dragons to make the game feel more real.

Firstly, character healing should be dropped, but survivability should be upped. Instead of characters auto-dying at 0hp, something that was the standard in the earliest form of the game, instead they are seen as unconscious when reaching 0hp. Rather than D&D 5e’s obscenely-skewed death save system, the characters instead die after a number of combat rounds equal to their level, upon being unconscious, unless aid is given. No roll is needed — adventurers know how to bandage wounds (some hirelings may not though!). This makes it so that there are consequences, but some capacity to get out of it. However, characters that have been revived from 0hp or lower cannot immediately fight. They need to instead rest for a full week in the inn before they can gain hp, and be back in fighting capacity (you try getting bludgeoned to near death and going to work the next day).

When a character needs to heal, it shouldn’t happen instantaneously on a night’s rest. Rather, they simply gain 1 hp per day spent completely resting(4 weeks, +1 for 0hp ones, is enough to bring any character back to full). It’s simple, realistic and keeps the math pretty low. This might seem absurd. Players are bound to say, “Wait, are we just skipping time until everyone’s healed? What about the characters who don’t need healing? I can’t play because my character is out of the action?”

Who said anything about one character?

To balance this more strict health system, why not let the players have multiple characters? With a system that’s simple enough, there can be this sort of stable of backup characters that can go on adventures independently of the other ones. If 2/3 of the main party is out of the action, the remaining group can take a bunch of bright-eyed level 1 characters into a high-level dungeon to get tons of gold and XP. Similarly, the characters should be required downtime in order to level up equal to 1–4 weeks per level, as well as potentially doing some other downtime activities, such as researching spells or crafting magic items (Check out Cairn 2e for some suggestions for this).

To assuage this a little bit, there’s another trick you can do. That being having time pass on a day-by-day basis along with real life. The world is real, and time marches on while the players are living their normal lives. Characters can rest, training can happen and whatever else gets done without an immersion-breaking time skip (I would avoid doing those when unnecessary.) Everything I just explained is all more thoroughly elaborated on in the AD&D Dungeon Masters’ Guide, which is really the bible of role-playing games.

Lastly, there is one, final trick that can be performed to make all of this so much better: ditch modern RPGs. D&D 5e+, as well as things like Pathfinder are so bloated in combat and rules that it encroaches on attempts at verisimilitude. When the DM is balancing 20 page-long stat blocks, and the players are making 12 moves in a turn, it can be overwhelming, and make the game harder to run in this style.

On the other hand, classic editions of D&D rely much more on the DM’s rulings in the moment, rather than the rules presented in a book. While this may seem bad, it’s similar to the procedures described above. They offer support where needed, but don’t butt-in where they don’t need to. Old-School style of D&D is more D&D. It’s the style that has been described in this entire article; the way that the original creators of the game made it. The game was intended as a gamified fantasy world simulator, not improv night with napkin-math combat and HP bloat. It was more of a board game than about playing a theater role. The game will also become more casual. It’s not about playing out some semi-theater routine, but rather hanging out with your friends and playing through a dungeon. This is the crux of playing D&D frequently.

There are tons of revamps of old systems, or you can choose to work your way through the original systems. Either way, most of the time, they cost only pennies in PDF form (or have SRDs available online), and frequently a few dollars for physical printings. Check out Whitebox FMAG for the most rules-lite experience. Or if you want a bit more support, something like Old-School Essentials, or Basic Fantasy are great. Ditch the bloated corporate-interest-infested systems in your game night, in favor of down-to-earth, frequent gaming with friends.

D&D is the greatest game ever made, and working to play it more frequently only makes it better

This blog is, and always will be, 100% human-generated.