2024 in Review and What Lies In 2025

How to Be a Better DM: Dungeon Master Tips for the DM Newbie, the Hobbyist and the Forever DM

In any publicly traded company, shareholders who own a portion of the company can expect a year-end review and a prospectus of what the new year will bring. This is to give some accountability of those running the company to those who’ve invested their time and money into it.

Well, seeing as how you’ve decided to invest at least your time into this podcast, I think it only fair that we give you some sort of report so that we can be somewhat accountable to you for what this show is doing and what it will do in the future.

Welcome back to How to Be a Better DM.

I’m Justin Lewis and for over 3 years now, you and I have been figuring out better ways to help you improve your DMing craft without having to devote extra time, money or stress.

You might be new to the show, in which case, thanks for giving us a chance and letting us invade your earspace, or you might have been with us from the beginning, in which place, please make yourself known to us because we actually have no idea who has been listening to us since the beginning. Whoever you are, we’re happy your here.

Let me let you in on how I view things.

I view you listening to us as an investment. Of course, we are doing everything we can to make sure you get tremendous value everytime you pop us in your earbuds and go for a run, or do the dishes, but frankly, we know what we are. We know we aren’t the most professionally produced show. You can probably tell simply by hearing my baby boy in the background. We also know that we don’t do this full-time and honestly, are still growing as dungeon masters ourselves.

But…

Many of you choose to listen to us anyway. In fact, many of you are grateful to us and have binged our show! Somehow, despite our weaknesses, you’ve still managed to find some good and enjoy it. To me, that shows that you are putting an investment into us. You’re devoting some of your precious time to listen to us and to us that investment of yours requires us to do the very best we can to make the show better.

So for this episode, don’t consider yourself a dungeon master only, but also consider yourself an investor in our show and consider me the CEO giving you a report of how things went this year. Now I know this analogy only goes so far, but I hope you get the idea.

Let me first start off by giving a brief summary of what we did this year:

• Monsters.Rent: When we first started 2024, we had just closed up shop on our previous business model of Monsters.Rent. Obviously, for us to be able to keep doing this podcast, we needed to figure out some way to use it to get resources so we could make it better. Previously, we tried creating a D&D mini subscription rental service. Unfortunately, we just couldn’t figure out how to make the logistics of it work. We had a nice run, but over time we just realized we couldn’t make it work.
• Session 0 Studios: So instead, we pivoted to Session 0 Studios. We brought on Cayden and Jake and created Session 0 Studios and started our new show The Pact and Boon. For those of you that don’t know, The Pact and Boon is our sister show which is an actual play show following the stories of 3 unlikely adventurers who start their journey in the pits of Hell. Full transparency, over this last year, we had quite a few road bumps with that particular show and have honestly had a pretty hard time aligning ourselves on how to keep it going. If you follow that show, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve been on hiatus for a second. First off, we’re very sorry about that. Because The Pact and Boon is so new, we got excited and bit off more than we could chew. So coming in the new year, we’re going to restart up the show and settle on a more consistent posting schedule even if we don’t post as much. We’ll also have a new element added in where each of us will switch off being the Dungeon Master! Starting in January of 2025 we’ll have Tanner running the show for a while so make sure to tune back in because it will be a very fun time!
• Conventions! With the switch to Session 0 Studios, we made a bigger play to go to events and conventions. I say bigger but really that just means we went from 0 events to technically 3. The first event was Dead Wars hosted by our friend Andrew Ashby of We Geek Together in Provo Utah. Andrew has been so great to us and our shows and we were very lucky to not only attend Dead Wars but also to host one of the panels at the event. Towards the end of this year, I was also able to host 2 panels at Dragonsteel Nexus 2024 which was so fun and, with luck, we’ll be able to release the audio for those of those panels on this show as podcast episodes so stay tuned!
• Podcast Guests: Over this last year, we were able to get some really great guests on the show! Among some of the more noteworthy were author Dan Wells, and influencers Jay Foster from Swole Initiative and Jay from Jay’s Tabletop Terrain. We were really lucky to make these connections and we’re hopeful to keep doing more with these guests as well as other guests in the future.
• Our Podcast Appearances: We also appeared as guests on a handful of podcasts which was such a great experience and is honestly one of the best ways to expand our reach and get our name out there.
• Services: As I mentioned, one of the biggest challenges we’ve had with the podcast was getting resources so we could improve the quality of the show, expand our reach, and honestly justify this project to our wives. This year were able to make some great headway into that department. We created a few affiliate relationships with brands like Monument Studios and Roll and Play Press, which, thanks to you, have proven to be pretty successful relationships! In addition to that, we began offering our Professional Dungeon Master services which have grown fairly well, though we expect that particular service to still be in its beginning stages. That service is particularly important because it gives us more experience and puts us in unique and challenging circumstances, all of which helps us create better podcast episodes and help you more and more. In addition to that, we began offering our Dungeon Master coaching services with the first session being a free offering to anyone willing to let us record that and put it up as a podcast episode. So far this service has been very fun, and a great learning experience. We’ve met some very awesome people (spoiler, we’ll be releasing their sessions as episodes in the new year so you can meet them too) and it’s really helped us learn how better to help more and more people.
• Instagram: Over the last year, I have put a fairly big emphasis into Instagram and growing our presence there. I have not become InstaFamous, and if you know me personally, you know that if it weren’t for the podcast, I wouldn’t really be on Instagram at all. I’m proud of the growth we’ve had on Instagram and that’s important to us because the more reach we have, the easier it will be for us to get higher-tier podcast guests and the more social proof we have. Essentially, the more reach we have, the better we can make the podcast and its content for you.

Overall 2024 was a really great year of growth and new horizons!

Now let’s get into 2025.

1. Let’s get real. First of all, let me be completely frank about the show. This is just from my perspective as I haven’t been able to chat with the other hosts about this yet. While I would love to do this full-time and be able to devote much more time to the show, it’s just not there yet, and unless some things change pretty drastically, I’m not sure that it would be able to sustain even one of our cohosts on a full-time basis. We are all going to do the very best we can, but for most of us, we have other commitments and frankly, other areas of life that require more of our time, attention and diligence. We love the show, and we care deeply for you our listener, but sometimes, you gotta do what you gotta do. So in this next party when I talk about all of the stuff I hope to be able to do in 2025, take it all with a grain of salt. We might not be able to do it simply because we’re doing other stuff to take care of our families.
2. Podcast Episodes: Ok with that out of the way, the first thing I hope to be able to do is to start releasing extra episodes every week. These episodes will often be Coaching Episodes, sessions from our Professional Dungeon Mastering, or the Homebrew Project we’ve been working on with Rob Van Auken. From time to it might be me giving one of my RAW episodes, and if you’re new what that means is that it’s an episode where I don’t really edit it, and the rules are if I yawn in the episode more than 5 times I owe you another episode. I’ve had a theory for a while that you’d appreciate a 2nd episode each week, and the only way to prove or disprove that theory is to get your feedback via direct messages or just to see whether or not you listen to those episodes.
3. Podcast Guests: Next, my plan is to get better guests on the show. I’m very likely going to have Jay Foster back on the show and maybe Jay from Jay’s Tabletop Terrain. I’m also hoping to start to reach out to bigger names like maybe Matt Colevile. I also want to have Zach from ZachtheBold on Instagram on the show and some of the people that I paneled with at Dragonsteel Nexus. The big thing I really want to do this year is to make real connections with guests rather than have them on the show and just have it be a once and done thing. I’d love to have the guests on the show and then maybe do a one-shot with them and really connect while having fun.
4. Social Media: This year, I’m going to experiment with social media a little more. I’m going to release the content I’ve been putting out on Instagram, but put it out on TikTok, and maybe even dabble a little into Linkedin, though that will mostly be team-building stuff and I’m still unsure about that. One thing is for sure though, I’m going to scale back the new social media content production to a much slower pace. Posting a new video every day was just too much, and honestly, I think it was somewhat counterproductive algorithm wise. I also think it would be better for me to spend my time creating better quality content rather than more content. But I also hate social media so yeah there’s that.
5. The Pact and Boon: As I’ve already said, we’ll be restarting the Pact and Boon and because of the work we’ve put in in other areas of Session 0 Studios, we do have a little bit more resources to make recording those shows better and easier for us so that it’s both a more convenient experience and a more fulfilling one for you.
6. Professional DMing: We’re going to continue working on getting professional DMing clients and building out our client base as well as expanding our skill set.
7. DM Coaching: We’re going to continue offering free recorded sessions and hopefully gain a paying client or two, though for now the free session episodes is helping us content wise as well.
8. Patreon: Since we already have Done For You DMing in the form of Professional DMing and Done With You DMing in the form of DM Coaching, we’re going to really work on our Patreon to offer Do It Yourself content in the form of courses, homebrew resources and more.
9. Youtube
10. Resource Modules
11. WolrdSmith.Io

Mentioned in this episode:

Brought to you by Session 0 Studios

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Dungeon Master for Hire

Start Leveling Up As a DM

Wouldn’t it be nice to gamify your dungeon master abilities? In D&D, characters can reach level 20, so why can’t dungeon masters? We’re happy to tell you that now, you can. We created the Dungeon Master Level-Up Guide. It’s a simple tool to gamify your progression to higher and higher levels of dungeon mastering. It includes Dungeon Master Levels 1 to 20 with associated XP requirements as well as a long list of Dungeon Master activities that will give you XP. Each activity has a Challenge Rating and an XP amount. In order to level up, all you need to do is find out how much XP you have, find out how much you need and pick activities to try. You can get the Dungeon Master Level-Up guide for free by going to session0studios.com/newsletter/, sign up for our newsletter and we’ll email you the Level-Up Guide. Finally, leveling up as a DM can be as fun as leveling up a character.

Level Up Guide