If you'd like to take advantage of live reloading and Sass / Compass CSS compilation you can do so with a little bit of prep work.
Make sure that nodejs is installed. Then in the project root run:
$ npm install
If you don't already have it, install compass (doesn't hurt if you run this command twice):
gem install compass
Now you just need:
$ npm run dev
The base app will now run as it would with the usual manage.py runserver but with live reloading and Sass compilation enabled.
To get live reloading to work you'll probably need to install an appropriate browser extension