Dungeon Master's Tools - Xanathar's Guide to Everything

Dungeon Master's Tools. As the Dungeon Master, you oversee the game and weave together the story experienced by your players. You're the one who keeps it all going, and this chapter is for you. It gives you new rules options, as well as some refined tools for creating and running adventures and campaigns. It is a supplement to the tools and advice offered in the dungeon master's guide. The chapter opens with optional rules meant to help you run certain parts of the game more smoothly. The chapter then goes into greater depth on several topics-encounter building, random encounters, traps, magic items, and downtime-which largely relate to how you create and stage your adventures. The material in this chapter is meant to make your life easier. Ignore anything you find here that doesn't help you, and don't hesitate to customize the things that you do use. The game's rules exist to serve you and the games you run. As always, make them your own. Simultaneous Effects Most effects in the game happen in succession, following an order set by the rules or the DM. In rare cases, effects can happen at the same time, especially at the start or end of a creature's turn. If two or more things happen at the same time on a character or monster's turn, the person at the game table-whether player or DM-who controls that creature decides the order in which those things happen. For example, if two effects occur at the end of a player character's turn, the player decides which of the two effects happens first. Falling Falling from a great height is a significant risk for adventurers and their foes. The rule given in the player's handbook is simple: at the end of a fall, you take 1d6 bludgeoning damage for every 10 feet you fell, to a maximum of 20d6. You also land prone, unless you somehow avoid taking damage from the fall. Here are two optional rules that expand on that simple rule. Rate of Falling The rule for falling assumes that a creature immediately drops the entire distance when...