So I've been DMing DND campaigns for several years now, and it's often interesting the conversations I'll have with players wanting to DM/the observation of discourse around Critical Role vs Dimension 20 and which is the "better" DND experience.
I will preface this by saying I don't actually watch either. I watched all of D20 Mentopolis, but I just couldn't get into any other season. Funnily enough, Mentopolis also doesn't even use DND as its system and I think that might have been part of why I enjoyed it? I'll get into it more later but listening to people having fun just isn't as appealing as being the one having fun. I don't think they're bad at DND or that you shouldn't enjoy it or whatever, I just can't sit through it.
Anyway. I just started a new campaign with some of the students I work with and figured I'd talk through the DM process I've been using and use this as a teaching tool for the broader internet (or as something you can read through if you like hearing DND war stories).
The first thing with DMing: so often I see students that come from Critical Role being like "oh here is all my expansive lore" and try to begin by dumping an encyclopedia on their players. Lore is good. But the joy of learning lore for many people is deep diving into episodes of the TV show/finding the secrets in the video game/watching behind the scenes footage. Not reading an encyclopedia. Have you lore and know your lore, but I would say the vast majority of people I've DMed for have just been overwhelmed at the prospect of needing to read an encyclopedia to be able to play a game, and so just decide they'll never play.
The solution to this is make a (at most) one-page document that functions as a glossary. One paragraph summary of factions that will be immediately relevant (core value, name of leader, geographical location), and then maybe key locations the party will unavoidable be at. Anything else should be learned through play. Then you still get to excitedly share your lore, but they're learning it at the rate they want to.
I played a campaign that to me felt like an encyclopedia opening, so I deliberately just said to my DM "I'm an eight year old orphan from a fairly isolated village, adopted by [another player], my character genuinely does not understand any of this, but as the story goes I will ask questions in-character to get explanations as they are relevant." This also meant that the players at the table who were overwhelmed now had someone who in-character could play catch-up and summarise the relevant lore in a way that was character growth (child learning about politics and the party trying to parent her) rather than pausing the game for exposition. I could play in a way I was comfortable with, but without derailing what the DM wanted to do.
The other thing though is some players play DND because they have this strong idea of a character. Some players really love coming up with a character that fits within the existing world you've made (they love encyclopedia dump DMs). Other players really hate it. They just want to be their Sparkle Dog OC. So although I have a strong sense of my lore, if it isn't in that one-page document or hasn't happened in-game yet, it's not canon.
I'm running a "monster of the week" style campaign where each session is designed to be self-contained due to players and availability being awkward (yay for adult life). The players got a map of the town with key locations, and then came up with their own characters. One of them wanted to be a cleric, and asked me how religion worked in the world. My response was "well what's going to work best for the character you want to play?" Because if I locked in an answer, and then the story ended up going in a direction where religion never came up at all outside of this character, then I could accidentally just ruin this player's experience because I got more attached to my world than to the game we're trying to play together.
And I say "if the story ended up going in a direction", because as a DM you can never be sure of what your players will do. As the DM, you're not (necessarily) making a story. You're making a world in which a story will take place. The other players are going to decide what is and isn't important. You can't tell your players how to have fun.
The other campaign I'm currently running did a "seven people from a small village that's never had any visitors leave to help the first visitor they've had in their living memory, only to learn that their village is cursed and everyone living there has their memory erased of anyone who steps foot outside the village." The idea being they'd help the merchant, the characters would make a wisdom saving throw to suddenly remember someone from their backstory (who they would get to make up), and then they'd return home and find out nobody remembers them and uncover this mystery. Or they could go to a nearby town to research why they're remembering people who they had forgotten about, but ultimately still end up going back to try and break the curse.
Instead they found an arena doing Fights to the Death, decided that these are morally wrong, and have come up with a scheme to become citizens of this nation to legally enter the Death Arena, challenge the head rulemaker to a battle, and legally kill him and take his place and end the Death Games. The amnesia "slowly adding to their backstory" premise has been completely dropped because the player's just don't care. They care about the goblin with a nasally voice that I just made up to make combat more fun (he was commentating on the conflict to help make the combat more engaging than just people rolling dice, the players found him really annoying, and then came up with the scheme).
Since they've decided "The Scraggler is bad", I thought about what the players had seen of this town. Which was very little. So... why not have the Scraggler actually be not just the Referee/Commentator of the Death Arena, but actually just... be a crime gang leader? They haven't seen his stat block yet. They've only seen him commentating. If the story they want to engage with is "Kill the Scraggler", my response is to make the Scraggler an interesting enough character to be killed and have it be narratively satisfying.
DMing isn't like video game narrative design where you can pretty heavily restrict the player's choices. So the ability to be flexible with lore help make a more compelling story overall as player choices now will always be meaningful. And as a DM I really like when players take things I've given them and build off of them. My two-year campaign started with an NPC who was supposed to exposit and then die, except instead he got saved by the cleric with Spare the Dying and the cowardly incompetent mercenary ended up becoming a key recurring NPC who would go on to have an off-screen heroic sacrifice to raise the stakes as the party found out that the noble they sent him off to plead with for help instead killed him, which they figured out later because they had become so attached to the character that when they met the noble and were told "Lambert ran away because the pressure of this war was too much", they were like "No... that's not like him. He is an awful fighter but he always insists on trying to help. What did you do to him?" and learned that this noble was plotting an evil scheme that Lambert was going to warn the party about. I couldn't have come up with that story arc of "incompetent but well-meaning mercenary ends up dying trying to send a message to the party", but he got it because the players gave it to him by constantly bringing him into their journey despite me trying to get rid of him. So his eventual death ended up meaning something instead of it just being an irrelevant plot death to kickstart the story.
The short of this is: if you want to DM but are afraid of the in-depth lore side of things... you actually don't need that. You can DM very capably with just an outline and an idea in your head, and then start locking in the canon as your players start exploring your world.
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