Intro
You know what time it is. You can smell it.
That scent on the air. Flowers blooming. The sound of plastic wrap being peeled back from freshly dry-cleaned Hawaiian shirts. And most importantly, the stink — the horrendous stink you have let pile up for far too long.
That’s right. Spring cleaning.
And I’m not just talking about your actual living space, though let’s be honest, there’s probably a half-eaten bag of Cheetos under your DM screen that’s been there since Christmas. You might want to address that, bud.
I’m talking about giving your D&D game the deep clean it desperately needs.
I get it. We all get into ruts. We all make questionable decisions at 2 a.m. while prepping. Sure, a tarrasque would make a perfect random encounter for my level three party. Ooh — I’ll add laser beams. It’ll be really cool.
We have all been there. I’ve been running games for years and I still look at my own notes thinking what absolute idiot wrote that.
Oh. It’s me. I’m the idiot. Cool.
So here are ten spring cleaning tasks every DM needs to tackle. Some are painful — like confronting the fact that your 47-page backstory for the tavern keeper might be a tad excessive. Others are liberating, like finally admitting that campaign you’ve rescheduled twelve times isn’t happening.
Let’s get our houses in order.
1. Kick the problem player to the curb
I don’t care that you’ve been friends since middle school. Jerry sucks, and he keeps trying to turn every session into his own personal weird-hour show. Everyone is over it.
Yes, the conversation is going to be awkward. You know what’s more awkward? Another four-hour session where Jerry narrates, in detail nobody asked for, how his bard seduces the tavern staff, while everyone else stares at their character sheets praying for a random encounter — any random encounter — to deliver them from this.
One uncomfortable ten-minute conversation, or another six months of that. Your call.
2. Clean out your dice
You do not need ninety sets sitting next to you when you play.
Focus on the game in front of you, not the little click-clacks at your elbow. Pick two sets you actually love and use those for a while. If you genuinely need to rotate them out occasionally so the jingling keys in front of you hold your attention — fine. You addict. You gross little dice goblin, collecting every shiny you find.
You disgust me.
And do you want to know why? Because you’re me. I’m talking to myself here. Little click-clack math rocks have taken over my life, and I’m running out of places to hide them from my wife, who believes I already have enough dice.
There is, of course, no such thing. But we must show restraint.
3. Prune your world
If you run a homebrew setting, go back to the places you created when the campaign started. What’s changed since? Probably a lot. Update them.
Your players will go somewhere looking for information and find something wildly out of date. So open the Google Doc, or Legend Keeper, or World Anvil, and start writing.
Remember the tavern owner who was secretly working for the big bad? The one your players killed six months ago? Maybe update the tavern’s entry to mention his mysterious disappearance, rather than listing him as currently employed and definitely not suspicious.
4. Evaluate the story
Do you really need to carry all fifteen unfinished plot threads to the end?
Is there a way to consolidate some of them without changing much? Less is more, most of the time. That prophecy about the seven stars aligning could probably merge with the ancient dwarven runes subplot and lose nothing.
And honestly — nobody remembers the missing shipment of magical beans from three sessions ago except you.
Let it go.
5. Push a balance patch
I know what you did last summer. You gave the barbarian a +7 greatsword.
You what?
He’s having fun, sure. It might also be a little overpowered. If you homebrew magic items, it’s worth periodically reflecting on their power level and pushing out an actual change log. Your level six fighter should not be one-shotting an ancient dragon.
"But it seemed balanced when I was writing it at 3 a.m."
Not a valid excuse. We all make bad decisions at 3 a.m. Be grateful yours was homebrewing a magic item.
Maybe that sword that automatically kills anything on a roll of 15 or higher wasn’t your finest hour as a game designer. That’s fine. The difference between people who always suck and people who sometimes suck is that the second group goes back and says "yeah, I need to change that."
(If the underlying problem is that your party has outgrown everything you throw at them, that’s a different fix — it’s usually about resources, not bigger numbers.)
6. Cancel the campaign that’s already over
You heard me. It’s time to officially call it on the campaign that’s been postponed for seventeen sessions.
"But everybody said they’re free next week."
It’s not happening, bud. Rebecca’s going to get surprise concert tickets. Bryce has a baby shower. And you’re going to realise the prep you put off last time is still not done, and you still need to build fifteen rooms of that mega-dungeon.
Just send the message. "Hey everyone, I think we should officially call it on our Curse of Strahd campaign, and maybe start fresh when schedules line up."
Do you feel that? That’s the winds of change. That’s a monstrous weight coming off your shoulders. You’re welcome.
One caveat before you pull the trigger, though: make sure the campaign is actually dead and not just drifting. Those look similar from the inside and they need completely different treatment — a drifting campaign can usually be reset rather than buried.
7. Organise the digital hoard
We’re going to hold a mirror up to the monster.
Open your file browser. Right now. Go to your D&D folder.
What do you see?
Yeah. It’s disgusting. Three hundred and forty-seven randomly named PDFs. Character sheets from 2018. Maps you downloaded and never used. It’s a disaster zone.
Unless it isn’t — if you keep on top of this year-round, genuinely, good on you. Proud of you.
For everyone else: build a logical folder structure and delete the duplicates. Maybe then you’ll find that perfect jungle temple map when you need it, rather than three weeks after the session.
And no. Don’t give me "I know where everything is in my chaos." That is not an organisational system, no matter how often you tell yourself it is.
8. Prune the DMPC
Your dungeon master player character needs to go. Simple as that.
I know the one. That extremely cool level 20 elf wizard who keeps turning up to bail out the party and somehow knows everything about the world. The one with the tragic backstory you’ve been dying to tell, that nobody has asked about in twenty-seven sessions. The one with all the perfect magic items.
Yeah. Your players told me about him.
Cut him loose, or demote him to occasional NPC. Your players want to be the heroes — not the sidekicks in your character’s story.
I know it’s hard. You have to kill your darlings. Take that elf wizard down to the river, hold him under, and let him drift away, never to be seen again.
I’m serious.
9. Refresh your description muscles
Go through your notes and highlight every place, NPC and item you’ve described as tall, old, or mysterious.
Now rewrite them with something actually evocative.
The tavern isn’t "cozy." It smells like cinnamon and woodsmoke, and the uneven floorboards creak under every footstep.
See? I’m already there.
Your players deserve better than "uh, you find yourselves in the forest. It is quite… forestry. There’s a lot of shrubbery, also. Um. It’s a temperate forest. You can tell because of the way that it is."
For the seventeenth time.
10. Confront the miniature situation
Take a long, hard look at that shelf of unpainted miniatures. Or shelves, for some of you heathens.
Be honest. Are you really going to paint two hundred goblins? Do you genuinely need seventeen different dragon miniatures when your party is still level three?
Set some realistic painting goals. Sell off the ones you’ll never use. Or at minimum, organise them so you can find what you need without dumping six boxes on the floor ten minutes before the session starts.
"But they were on sale."
That is not a justification for owning forty-seven mind flayers.
Closing Thoughts
Ten ways to give your game the spring cleaning it desperately needs.
Is it going to be easy? No. Is kicking Jerry out going to make for an awkward conversation? Absolutely. Is organising those minis going to force you to confront some hard truths about your hobby spending? You betcha.
But your game will be better for it. Your players will thank you — maybe not out loud, but they will. And those moments where everyone’s leaning forward, fully engaged in a tightly plotted story, rolling dice from a reasonable collection, in a well-described tavern that doesn’t have seventeen unnecessary subplots bolted to it? That’s when it’s worth it.
Remember: the goal isn’t perfection. We’re all messy DMs in one way or another. The goal is progress. Don’t try to tackle all ten. Pick the one or two that actually stung a bit when you read them. Baby steps.
And if nothing else — clean out the dice bag. I found some unidentifiable crumbs in mine last week and have no memory of what they were or where they came from, which is concerning.
I’m not perfect either.
So: what spring cleaning does your game need? Drop a comment on the video. Especially if you just realised you might be the Jerry of your group. Sometimes self-awareness is what saves your seat at the table.