The Referee’s Role

Facilitator of Fun and Adventure

The referee should bring to life exciting adventures for the group's enjoyment.

Preparation: Before the game begins, the adventure should be planned and the required maps drawn. Advice on adventure design is found in Adventure Scenarios, Designing a Dungeon, Designing a Wilderness, and Designing a Base Town.

Improvisation: Despite the referee’s preparation, predicting every possible player action is impossible. Players will come up with ideas that the referee has not even considered. Thus, the referee must remain flexible and roll with any unexpected turns the adventure might take!

Procedures: The game’s rules provide guidelines for many common adventuring situations. These exist to aid the referee in running the game. However, the referee should feel free to adapt and add to these procedures during play to keep the game moving.

Balance: The referee must maintain a fun balance of risk and reward.

Neutral Judge

The referee must remain neutral in all things—neither on the side of the players nor against them.

Non-competitive: The game is not a competition, with the players attempting to defeat the referee or vice versa.

Fairness: The game's rules should be applied equally to player characters, monsters, and NPCs.

Arbiter of Rules

The referee must decide when and how to apply the game rules.

Rulings: The rules of the game—including descriptions of magic items, spells, or monsters’ special abilities—do not cover all possible scenarios, so the referee must be ready to apply judgment to resolve any unexpected situations that arise.

Resolving actions: When a player wishes to do something not covered by a standard rule, the referee must consider how to determine the outcome. Sometimes, the situation can be dealt with by deciding what would happen. Sometimes, the referee may require the player to make an ability check (see Ability Checks) or a saving throw (see Saving Throws) to determine what happens. Other times, the referee may judge the likelihood of the action succeeding (e.g., expressed as a percentage or X-in-6 chance), tell the player the chances, and let them decide whether to take the risk.

Disagreements: The players may not always agree with the referee’s application of the game's rules. When this happens, the group should (briefly!) discuss the point of disagreement and come to a decision. In such cases, the referee is always the final arbiter and should ensure the game does not get bogged down in lengthy discussions about the rules.

Randomness: The referee should make judicious use of die rolls, random tables, etc. While these can add fun and unpredictability to the game, overuse of randomness can spoil an adventure by derailing it too much.