Hello and welcome fellow Nerdarchists. I’ve got a great way for you to up your tabletop roleplaying game skills. It’s called The Lazy Dungeon Master written by Michael Shea. Don’t worry about which edition of Dungeons & Dragons you are playing. This book is useful. As a matter of fact I’m gonna go out on a limb and suggest you could use nearly all of the advice given for any tabletop RPG. This book is short, sweet and packed with valuable Dungeon Master tips. If you are looking for a how to DM resource this one is at the top of my list. It weighs in at an anemic 123 pages but offers storm giant sized value. If I would have stumbled across this book there is no way I would of bought it, but because a friend recommended it I decided to give it go. At 123 pages I was thinking what the hell is this Michael Shea guy going to tell me about how to DM? I mean, I’ve been gaming for over 30 years at this point.

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One of the things I found pleasantly surprising was Shea and I share the same design philosophy. Less is more and at least if it is not more you haven’t wasted a ton of time on it. He does such a better job of structuring this design philosophy than I could. Basically what I’ve been telling new DMs forever now is, “Don’t waste your time on a bunch of stuff you may never even use”.

Shea does more than that though. In The Lazy Dungeon Master he gives you a formula for creating adventures for your players that will be the stuff they’ll be talking about for years afterwards. Even if they don’t you won’t mind, because you didn’t spend hour upon hours toiling to create stuff your players didn’t care about to begin with.

The best DM tips to be garnered from this book are about time management and building your Dungeon Master Toolbox. You are taught how create just what you need and let your players guide the action and story. He advocates for building a story with your players not for your players. The Lazy Dungeon Master teaches you where to focus your attention.

There are so many things we can spend our time doing preparing for a game, but you have to ask yourself are you doing the things that are actually going to build a better game for you and your players? A lot of what Shea writes sounds like the 80/20 rule to me.

The 80/20 Rule

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.Management consultant Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who, while at the University of Lausanne in 1896, published his first paper “Cours d’ economie politique.” Essentially, Pareto showed that approximately 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population; Pareto developed the principle by observing that 20% of the pea pods in his garden contained 80% of the peas. It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., “80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients”. Mathematically, the 80–20 rule is roughly followed by a power law distribution (also known as a Pareto distribution) for a particular set of parameters, and many natural phenomena have been shown empirically to exhibit such a distribution.”

This rule can be applied to almost every thing in life. Why not let it guide us on how to DM better? Some of the DM tips contained within these virtual pages are how to get your players to share some of the workload to expedite game play as well as increase their involvement and focus on the game.

In addition to all of that the back of The Lazy Dungeon Master has three appendices full of useful and interesting information. The first one contains examples from all of the suggestions made earlier in the book. The other two are full of data to support the rest of the book in the form of excerpts from interviews as well as surveys from DM.

So Nerdarchy fully endorses this product as a way to level up your game. [NERDITOR’S NOTE: In the years since The Lazy Dungeon Master’s publication, Mike Shea has written several other books full of DM tips including Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, winner of the 2019 Gold ENnie for Best Electronic Book. Shea also has the Sly Flourish blog where he regularly shares insights and data to help players create better experiences at the gaming table together. You can also find his posts along with several other writers through the RPG Writers Network, a digital magazine that collects RPG blog posts. Below you can find links to his books.]

Until next time, stay nerdy.