It starts innocently enough. "Hey," your friend says, "you seem creative. You should run a D&D game for us." You agree, because how hard can it be? You buy a Player's Handbook. Then a Monster Manual. You spend a weekend reading about goblins and watching videos on how to run combat. Suddenly, it's three years later. You have a dedicated D&D shelf groaning under the weight of rulebooks and adventure modules. You know the precise market price of a pint of ale in five different fictional cities. And you have a folder on your computer labeled "Character Concepts" filled with heroic barbarians, witty rogues, and noble paladins you will never, ever get to play.

Congratulations. You have been afflicted with the Forever DM curse.

The Symptoms of the Curse

Not sure if you've been afflicted? The curse manifests in subtle ways at first, but soon becomes undeniable. Look for these warning signs in your own life:

• You find yourself describing the motivations of a fictional goblin chieftain with more passion and detail than you describe your own relatives.
• You’ve planned a multi-year, epic-level story arc for a campaign that has currently lasted for exactly two sessions.
• When a player asks, "Can I try to do a backflip onto the dragon's head and use my dagger to pry one of its scales off?" you don't say no; you calmly ask for an acrobatics check followed by an athletics check.
• You have a recurring dream where you're just a player, sitting at the table, waiting for the DM to describe the room. You wake up crying tears of pure, unadulterated joy.
• Your search history is a bizarre mix of "medieval tax law," "symptoms of magical plagues," and "how many chickens would it take to defeat a tarrasque?"

The core of the curse is a tragic irony: you are stuck in this role because you are good at it. You love D&D, you love your friends, and you're good at weaving stories and running the game. You're so good, in fact, that no one else in your group wants to take on the responsibility. They're having too much fun in the world you've created. You are the pillar of the group, the master of stories, the weaver of fates... and you really, *really* just want to hit something with a big sword for once without having to roll for the other side, too.

The Cure: The Glorious One-Shot Intervention

Despair not, for there is a cure! You don't need to quit your campaign. You don't need to stage a dramatic intervention. You just need to trick one of your players into running a one-shot adventure.

A one-shot is a self-contained D&D game designed to be started and completed in a single session. It's the perfect low-commitment, high-fun gateway drug to the world of Dungeon Mastering. It allows someone else to take the DM screen for a night, giving them a taste of the power and creativity, while giving you a blessed evening of freedom.

"But my players don't know how to build an encounter!" you cry. "They don't own the Monster Manual! They wouldn't know how to balance the XP!" That, my friend, is where you introduce them to this very website.

The beauty of a tool like the Encounter Generator is that it demolishes the biggest barriers to entry for new DMs. A potential DM doesn't need to own a library of rulebooks or understand complex XP budget calculations. They just need an idea. They can select a party level, a biome, and a difficulty, and get an instant, balanced, and narratively interesting fight to run. They get a setting, a monster objective, and even a battle map size suggestion. It’s DMing with training wheels.