Dungeons and Dragons Players Share Their Favorite DnD Experiences Crafted by Clever Dungeon Masters With Epic Campaigns

Author image for Eleonora Bader
Eleonora Bader
May 30, 2024 11:30 AM EDT

Dungeon Masters can make or break your game. It all depends on their campaign, how they lead it, and what their relationship is like with the players.

As a Dungeon Master, the weight of the world — well, my campaign world — rests on my shoulders. It's not about rolling dice and slaying monsters (though don't worry, we do that too). My role is to craft a delicious experience, a story that my players get to actively participate in and furthermore, enjoy. A bad experience can leave them feeling bored, frustrated, disengaged, you name it. Imagine pouring your heart and soul into a character, only to have them sidelined by a nonsensical plot twist or a chaotic table dispute. Yikes, no thank you.

Now, let's talk epic DnD campaigns. These aren't just a string of grueling monster hunts; they're sprawling narratives with heart-pounding stakes, unexpected spicy twists, and interesting characters the players grow to love (or loathe!). They're journeys of self-discovery, both for the players and their characters. Also, they showcase the collaborative storytelling magic that can only happen around a table, fueled by dice rolls and driven by our collective imaginations that run wild. It's more than a game; it's an experience we create together. So, with that being said, check out the wholesome thread below where Dungeons and Dragons players share their favorite DnD experiences, all thanks to a great DM.

Then, DnD memes that are a critical hit of humor for players competing for Dungeon Master.

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  • 01
    What made your favorite DM great? 5th Edition Everyone has had a favorite D&D experience so far and I'd absolutely love to hear some stories of greatness!
    via u/kolorbear1
  • 02
    Captkarate42 · 10 hr. ago My favorite DM ran a homebrew sort of sandbox campaign and let us have whatever sort of adventure we wanted to, and the fact that he had this entire homebrew world with rich and interesting things to do pretty much anywhere that we went was amazing. I have no idea how he came up with all of it. He was running three campaigns in the same world and we'd have NYE Mashups where we'd get all three parties
    via u/Captkarate42
  • 03
    together to combat some kind of world ending threat, and he'd spend most of the year building things toward that threat in each of the campaigns. It was amazing to come together as like a twelve person party once a year to have a huge full day session. Our particular group had inhabited a string of islands off the coast of the mainland of his homebrew continent, and by the end of the campaign, we'd basically taken over a small port
    via u/Captkarate42
  • 04
    town full of criminals and pirates, and we'd even captured a military w rship and crewed it with a bunch of underlings and goblins. Each of the crew members had their own personalities, and the goblins were excessively excited about firing the cannons. If nobody was watching, they'd just do it randomly at nothing out into the ocean, or at an inopportune moment while passing another ship, which would invariably get us into fights here or there. We found ancient temples to explore on the other isl
    via u/Captkarate42
  • 05
    Deviant George .9 hr. ago I lo e the idea of running multiple games in the same works and bringing you together for the mega-session!!!! That's so f **ng cool! Your DM is amazing! And the goblin cannon boys is too freaking funny lol
    via u/Deviant_George
  • 06
    Red Gevhere . 7 hr. ago I did something similar in my last world (even the islands, pirates, and ships aspects, which is crazy!), but I had groups that had opposing missions and were directly messing with each others goals. The first time they crossed paths lead to a very bdy PVP encounter. Both parties lost characters!
    via u/Red_Gevhere
  • 07
    serError36 11 hr. ago My favorite dm was brutal. He made us track weight, diligent arrow counts. Player do th was near certain without proper planning. Traps... oh man.. the frigging traps. Made every level, or piece of usable loot, so sweet. Also kept everyone on edge and engaged constantly. This was 3e btw
    via u/serError36
  • 08
    votet 11 hr. ago Every single time I read something like this describing a brutally difficult game in a positive light, it ends with "Oh yeah, 2e/3e btw" Imao
    via u/votet
  • 09
    Chance-Present6851 12 hr. ago Sorcerer My DM just follows the rules like all DMs and doesn't allow a lot of unlogicall things, but what I think is really neat is that sometimes he will allow such things when the player has come up with a really creative solution for something. It might be pretty basic but i had an other DM who mostly wouldn't allow unlogical things to happen. So I really like that he does that.
    via u/Chance-Present6851
  • 10
    Feraldr 9 hr. ago Had a DM who played like this in order to encourage more creativity from players. We played in a D&D weekly night at a game-shop and most people were strangers which tends to be a barrier to getting them invested in a story. His solution was to straight up tell people that he would reward creativity over anything else. If you could at least kind of make something plausible, he'd work with it if it was creative. That was the first campaign I played where I was excited to flush o
    via u/Feraldr
  • 11
    galactic-disk 11 hr. ago DM Oh man, my DM is so cool! He puts so much thought and creativity into his encounter design, so all of our fights have unique challenges we need to overcome. My favorite encounter EVER was a puzzle dungeon he made for a little feywild excursion we did: there were rooms where we had to just figure out the puzzle, but also plenty of combat where we could change the things we were fighting by interacting with the room. He also has this absolute gift for immersion: he'll s
    via u/galactic-disk
  • 12
    Horror_Ad_5893 · 10 hr. ago I'm really curious about what you mean by "changing the things we were fighting by interacting with the room." That sounds very cool!
    via u/Horror_Ad_5893
  • 13
    galactic-disk 10 hr. ago DM So the dungeon was season-themed, and he made each season a damage type (summer was fire, spring was slashing, winter was cold, and fall was... piercing? maybe? Something like that), and we could change what season the room was in by doing that kind of damage to a giant tree in the center of each room. The last room phase 1 was a dragon, and we changed its color based on what season the room was in. So our bladesinger could cast absorb elements for fire damage, and th
    via u/galactic-disk
  • 14
    In phase 2, elementals also spawned in at the top of every round based on the season, and changing the room's season while they were spawning dismissed them. So I as a druid spent most of my turns changing the damage type, while our bladesinger and monk food-processed the elementals I couldn't catch.
    via u/galactic-disk
  • 15
    ResponsibleRope1003 10 hr. ago You never forget your first... He was very patient with my newbie ignorance and didn't make me feel bad about dumb questions. That let me learn the game in a relaxed way. Plus he's great at world building and the immersion really helped me with my role playing. Lastly his enthusiasm for playing was infectious. Honestly could not have asked for a better DM to introduce me to the game.
    via u/ResponsibleRope1003
  • 16
    southshorerefugee . 10 hr. ago That he adapted as we got older. My DM, myself and my best friends that I play with are all in our 30s with jobs and wives and or kids. We play 2.5 hours every Tuesday night remotely through Discord and Fantasy Grounds and he makes the most out of those 2.5 hours. We can't have 5 hour RP sessions like we did in college, so he's learned to make his campaigns very efficient.
    via u/southshorerefugee
  • 17
    OtistheCan 10 hr. ago It's so hard to narrow it down to just one DM, so I'll take a favorite aspect from each of them (using pseudonyms for each one) 1. The Ancient was excellent with how he handled settings. He really brought Eberron to life in a way that made me fall in love with the setting, that made it feel like a real, living world. I'm still not entirely sure how he did it, but da, *t it worked.
    via u/OtistheCan
  • 18
    2. The Lich King was INCREDIBLE at giving his scenarios tangible consequences, both good and bad, as well as fittingly ramping up the scale of the adventure as we leveled up. I joined that campaign while the party was at 9th level, but hearing about their adventures before then seemed pretty appropriate for their levels. We ended that campaign at 16th level, and we really felt like it was a battle for the fate of the world with everyone invested in the outcome. As for the consequences, he was re
    via u/OtistheCan
  • 19
    3. The Pied Piper didn't get to run a lot, but even the smallest of NPCs were memorable. It wasn't that they were all eccentric, they just all had very identifiable and clear personalities and presentations. It made keeping track of them much easier. 4. The Planeswalker really leaned into whatever the players were doing, and he always made sure to let us have little moments between our characters. His campaigns were super weird, so these little moments where our characters could just shoot the s
    via u/OtistheCan
  • 20
    5. The Judge unfortunately had to deal with a lot of player shenanigans, but he really did a good job building encounters that actually could challenge our characters despite us having almost infinite health and infinite spells at level 10 (3.5 was a wild game).
    via u/OtistheCan
  • 21
    ForensicTex 10 hr. ago My DM is amazing! He kept our party in the underdark for a full calendar year! A fɩ ....ng year we were in the underdark. 3 months of that we were in a pocket dimension maze/labyrinth in the underdark. Brutal. The he way he described sunlight and fresh air and sunlight when we surfaced i literally cried at the end.
    via u/ForensicTex
  • 22
    Darcyen 10 hr. ago What mad my favorite DM great is something I took into my games when I started dming. My favorite dm prioritized rules as fun over rules as written and rules as intended. He also allowed us to use our imagination allot instead of making the game rigid. Another thing was his games were never dm vs players. He was the game master and storyteller not a force moving against us. It's unfortunate that I don't here about dms like this anymore
    via u/Darcyen
  • 23
    Throrface 12 hr. ago edited 10 hr. ago DM My favourite DM is a DM I've seen in streamed campaigns and what made them great is how they handled situations when their group was split, and also how well they could come up with extremely cool character moments.
    via u/Throrface
  • 24
    Andrew 42 11 hr. ago My favorite DM was really good at rolling with things. My favorite games with him were the ones with more emergent stories. He usually ran some module or another when we played D&D, but he usually ran some that had a simpler narrative with some tables he could use to roll up content, but he'd listen to what the players were doing and what we were talking about and he'd keep rolling all of it up together.
    via u/Andrew_42
  • 25
    There would be lots of moments where one player would say "Hey it's funny this thing happened because my character actually has yada yada in his backstory." Then the DM without breaking stride would drop in "Hey actually that sounds like [insert trope or story]. That actually happened sometimes in [historical reference] which is what those stories/tropes were based on." Then after a few quick exchanges some fun little observation about a situation would get transformed into a memorable character
    via u/Andrew_42
  • 26
    My two favorite campaigns I played with this DM were actually in Castles and Crusades (a derivative of 2ed D&D) which was basically just a roughly structured series of RNG tables in the shape of old ruins with a boss at the end. And the second one was in Burning Wheel which is a more player-driven narrative system (but plays extremely different than D&D).
    via u/Andrew_42
  • 27
    He was really good at feeling out how players felt about their characters, what kind of mechanics different people found rewarding, and he'd clear mechanical and narrative junk that was getting in the way of that, and build up mechanical and narrative hurdles that reinforced that. (It usually involved lots of "I actually rolled this on the RNG table, but that didn't make sense for that to show up, so I just used the stat block but made it your father's ''ler instead of a deth knight.")
    via u/Andrew_42
  • 28
    DimensionWalkerSarru · 9 hr. ago My current DM. She is wonderful, has a world that she cares about and has put effort in. she will allow a lot of things to happen even if she did not have plans for it, but she is quick to come up with plans. i took a ride on a beholder when it died and got pulled to its home plain, she did not expect me to actually take her up on that, but by next session she was ready for it and we all kept having a great time. She recently had me and one other do a test run of
    via u/DimensionWalkerSarru
  • 29
    I guess what i like so much is her dedication to her world and her creativity with it. really helps me enjoy the setting and deal with the party members that have less than favourable personalities. :)
    via u/DimensionWalkerSarru

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