My DM Screen

This is purely me sharing free resources with my audience.

This is my DM screen.

Now let's talk about DM screens!

Love them or hate them, the DM screen is symbolic of the hobby. Look, I'm just going to assume that if you read a blog that gets as technical as mine does, you know about these things. In fact, I'm going to assume you even have an opinion about the value/usage of the DM screen. (On the off chance that you're new, the topic of whether a DM should use a screen is actually a bit of a debate.)

So, here's some links to other people who love/hate DM screens and what they think of the topic. Then I'll throw in my 2 cents, and finally I'll explain my personal DM screen.

Matt Mercer is pro-screen

Matt Coleville uses the screen

This n00b (sarcasm) doesn't use one (and covers the values of them more clearly than the big guys)

So, when I started playing RPGs, I didn't have a DM screen. (Or miniatures, or dice for that matter!) In fact, I didn't even know a DM screen was a thing that I could have! Then I saw this:

...and I realized this was a real thing, not just some silly nonsense game my friend was making up. D&D wasn't just a kind of vague meme-like idea. It was a real game.

Still, Dexter's performance as a GM was reason enough for me to avoid the screen for many years. It wasn't until I started reading blogs by really old gamers that I decided to give it a try. And I was very happy with the results.

The biggest complaint I hear people have against the DM screen is that it creates a barrier. I don't know about you guys, but at my table, the DM chair is almost always vacant. I spend almost all of my time standing, moving around the table, interacting with the players, dice, props, etc. So, my DM screen is mostly just a shade for my notes. This is important because, yes, I run crawls, and that means there are detailed maps with keys that the players should never see- not even by accident.

I developed this active DMing style from the early days when I played the game.

We didn't have a table. Or a good comfortable space to play in. Sometimes we didn't even have chairs. It took me years to finally find a store that carried weird dice to buy. So my games usually looked like this:

...except, imagine there are no windows, the lights are dim, the furniture is all aging garbage, the room is a pig sty, and there is nothing remotely cool happening in the real world.

My family didn't have any main tables except the kitchen table, and this kind of play was not welcome in the main areas of the house. So, we all sat on the ratty old furniture in the storage space and drew numbers out of a bowl instead of rolling dice, and wrote on lined paper character sheets with dusty old books as lap-desks. The room was not spacious or organized, and everyone was all over the place.

To keep people in it together, I had to stand up. I had to be in the center. I had to move and involve everyone. (I didn't get any good at it until just before my friends all stopped playing RPGs) (The idea of using my whole body game from an interview with some old rock star I saw, he was talking about how to create stage presence that involves everyone, even the people in the nose bleeds at a stadium show.)

I keep doing that to this day.

My inability to become active with the group is the main reason I dislike DMing online. THAT is a real barrier.

My first DM screen was a prototype of the one I made a tutorial for on this blog early in its development. (That is also my single most popular blog entry.) I made it primarily as an oversized notes folder for carrying stuff to other peoples houses. It never got used as a "screen" because I rarely had a table, and otherwise just forgot to set the darn thing up.

As I got older, I also became increasingly interested in RPGs as games, rather than just a fun form of collaborative fiction. I got into game design as a hobby and started learning game design history and theory. As this happened, I became more interested in running the games as they're written. (Or, at least, rewriting the rules and then sticking to THAT.) As this interest developed, I began to become increasingly concerned with all the charts and mechanics that I used to fudge my way through.

That reached its peak when I started running hex crawls. I made my DM screen back then because I needed all the important stuff in the books without any of the explanation. I knew the explanation. I knew the rules. I did not have the charts and tables memorized. I didn't need a cheat sheet. I needed a massively compressed corebook on constant display.

I've been working on that screen for years now, and it has changed a lot. In fact, in the time it took me to write this article, it's already changed a lot! And I have plans for further changes to make! Here's a look at my working file as it exists at this second. You know, if you want to see how this thing grows and changes over time.

So, let's go over the details of what my screen is seeking to achieve.

The first 4 pages are the DM side.

The first page is a compiled class table. All of the PHB class tables collected into one, including xp threshold per level and tiers. If anyone asks, "Hey, how many [resource] should I have?" I KNOW.

The second page is a guide to setting DCs. It gives benchmark examples. Almost all of the examples in there are actually from the PHB mechanics, like that stuff about foraging and tracking. The rest is me making shit up and jokes it fill slots. I know what's what. You have fun with that mess.

The third page is a combat flowchart. It shows how the combat turn structure works. That's... uh... yeah. That's it. I forget this shit constantly. Having it laid out in a clear simplified format is helpful.

The last page is a giant fucking mess. It is everything I thought might be useful as a DM at one point or another. I have since realized that all the wealth stuff should be on the player side. Also, the secondary stats should probably be... like... manditorily recorded on charsheets... Whatever. This part is under construction.

The second 4 pages are the player side. I try to put player-relevant stuff here.

Someone might ask why I set it up like this, rather than alternating for 2-sided printing. Here's why:

Sometimes I only want to print one half. Like, if I want to attach them to the outside of an existing screen. Also, I can do double-sided printing by just manually putting the printed sheets back into the printer tray.

Ok, the pages.

Page 5 is a step-by-step guide on making a PC. It is a direct rip of the guide from the PHB! Except I fixed it, because whoever wrote that was an idiot! This is the first page because I always try to put my newest player on my left.

Pages 6 and 7 are just a combination of all the random DM philosophy stuff I've absorbed into the way I run games. I've become a lot less crunchy since my hex-crawl spike in 2015, and have reincorporated some of my fluffier beliefs from my younger days. (Like the rule of yes). I have also grown as a human being since my youth and have realized that you need to force people to treat each other with dignity and respect or it won't happen. These are now 1 page. I'm trying to add the condition descriptions into the 7th page along with the player-relevant info from page 4. Right now, I'm struggling to fit it all. The DM philosophy crap might just get filed in a notebook to make more room.

The 8th and final page is a price guide to all the PHB gear. No more page flipping. It's on my right, because that's where it wound up!

Yay!