Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide: Roleplaying Game Core Rules, 4th Edition
Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide: Roleplaying Game Core Rules, 4th Edition
The second of three core rulebooks for the 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game. The Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game has defined the medieval fantasy genre and the tabletop RPG industry for more than 30 years. In the D&D game, players create characters that band together to explore dungeons, slay monsters, and find treasure. The 4th Edition D&D rules offer the best possible play experience by presenting exciting character options, an elegant and robust rules system, and handy storytelling tools for the Dungeon Master. The Dungeon Masters Guide gives the Dungeon Master helpful tools to build exciting encounters, adventures, and campaigns for the 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game, as well as advice for running great game sessions, ready-to-use traps and non-player characters, and more. In addition, it presents a fully detailed town that can serve as a starting point for any D&D game.
User Ratings and Reviews
4 Stars After some use..
I loved reading the AD&D DMG back in the day, it seemed like it had a lot of very intriguing magical stuff hidden in there and was quite evocative. when it came time to be a DM however, I felt pretty lost. I wish it also came with a copy of this book.
Since I got it I have mostly used it for designing encounters and NPCs but the general advice about being a DM I found to be spot-on and would strongly advise a new DM to give it a read.
1 Stars A near waste of money
I wanted to run at least a small campaign before reviewing this book and I did. It’s almost a complete waste of money. But for beginners this could be a good book, even a great book. But for experienced GMs, maybe 20% of this book is useful to you. Was really disappointed especially when stuff I found in the PHB was always traditionally in the DMG. Not that I have a problem putting it all in one book, it just made me wonder what I spent my money on for the DMG.
1 Stars I don’t want a table top game that feels like a lap top game.
In these hard economic times Hasbro has saved me a lot of money buy making a D&D’s that I have no interest in buying. Thanks Hasbro, I’ve still got tons of 3.5 material to use and Pathfinder comes out with tons of great stuff.
5 Stars Finally, the DMG that’s meant for DMs only
First off, not a review of the 4.0 rules as a whole, which contain elements I mostly like, but a few I don’t.
However, the DMG is the best one that I’ve read so far, starting back since 2nd Edition. I like the fact that they have put most of the core rules in the Player’s Handbook, and left the Dungeon Master’s Guide to discuss how to actually write adventures and generally run the game. Also, and this is good for their business as well, they actually designed the book to instruct *new* DMs how to run adventures even never having played the game. Now, it might actually be a little more feasible for a group of completely new players to pick up these books and start gaming, rather than getting drawn in by experienced friends or family members which, IMHO, has been the de facto experience for the past 20-30 years.
The 3.5 DMG was absolutely horrible, possessing way too many charts, tables and material best suited for players like Prestige classes. I found myself only looking at the DMG for the XP charts and treasure generation, and the occasional glance at random story-ideas for inspiration when I was running a game on short notice.
3.0 and 3.5 also broke from previous editions by introducing the idea of declining XP values for monsters, to reward players for taking on harder opponents and discouraging them from trying to attack larger numbers of weak creatures. Unfortunately, it was a somewhat unwieldy system that made it more difficult to calculate XP and had some wonky side effects- If two players who were one level apart but only a few hundred or a thousand xp apart from each other, going through a long adventure could result in the lower-level one having more XP at the end of the adventure, unless you rewarded XP after each encounter and allowed players to level up on the spot.
4.0 has reverted back to the older system of having flat XP values, and it’s up to the DM to ensure players are facing properly challenging opponents at least part of the time. On a tangent, 3.X’s rules for building fighting encounters tended to lean heavily on having homogenous challenge levels of opponents together. I’ve always favored the Big Bad, flanked by a bodyguard or two, one or two weaker spellcasters and a large group of weaker minions. Although you *could* build encounters like this in 3.X, it would be hard to establish the numerical Encounter Level which would then lead to appropriate treasure generation. I often founding myself having to just chuck the clunky system out the window and making an ad hoc ruling on the actual Encounter Level or even going even further and just creating the treasure myself. Yes, I understand that experienced DMs are free to do things as they want, but the default system should at least work to some extent instead of almost forcing you to deviate from it. Fortunately, 4.0’s DMG tends to view interesting encounters in the same way that I do, and the mechanics make it easy to create an encounter on the fly.
As a disclaimer, I would have rated this 4 Stars, but I found myself in the unfortunate position of seeing too many 1 Star reviews slamming this book not for its content, but for the 4.0 rule-set itself. Of course, those who slam the book because they don’t like its specific content have completely legitimate opinions. So, here are things I *didn’t* like:
1. Like all 4.0 books, the price is just too high. If these books were in the $15-20 range, I’d be buying at least twice as many of them. So, if they charged less, they would probably sell a whole lot more. I’m not sure of the actual variable cost of the book and distribution itself, but even selling the books at $20-$25 would probably result in a doubling of sales, in my opinion.
2. Like the other 4.0 books, the quality of the book itself is not very good, with cheaper magazine-quality paper in the books. Don’t handle the books when sweaty, and definitely don’t spill anything on them.
3. I really don’t like a lot of the art direction of these books either. To me, it does smack of appealing to a younger crowd with overly muscled men wielding ridiculously over-sized weapons. Way too Gears of War or Final Fantasy for me. Page 95 is an example of what I don’t like, and the more photo-realistic 77 is an example of what I do.
4. The book could have used more examples of some adventure ideas, but that’s just a personal gripe. Since it’s so thin, I think newer DMs could have benefited from a few standard adventure ideas without having to buy additional larger modules just yet. Also, an entire chapter or two devoted to having basic ideas for starting adventures or sprucing up adventures you’re writing would have been really helpful. For example, having the list of sample names per race, tiny architecture details, adventuring concepts, etc. all in one place would have been great.
2 Stars WotC’s New Coke
I played D&D through every edition since the beginning: basic, expert, AD&D, 2nd, 3.0, 3.5, and now 4th. I’ve stayed true to the original D&D, never straying to other game developers, never wanting to.
WotC has achieved the impossible, with 4th ed. they have lost yet another loyal player. Its amazing how a company can so misunderstand its core customers. In creating 4th ed. WotC no doubt tried to get some of those lucrative World of War Craft kids on board - heavy on the fighting, light on the role play, but while they will never be able to become a true substitute for online gaming, they’ve managed to lose their core constituents, the role players.
I wont go into detail about what I hate about the new game because many on this page already do this quite well. Let me just say that I and 6 of my fellow gamers went into 4th with an open mind. We all hoped that WotC had listened to player’s feedback about 3.5. We LIKED the game but want SIMPLIFICATIONS to make it MORE PLAYABLE! What we did not ask for is a completely new game focused on miniture, board-gaming with generic, cookie-cutter, super hero characters (let alone emo-races and Puff the magic dragons running around).
Some rules have been streamlined and the daily, encounter and at-will powers are smart changes but overall the game has become even more complex, not less. The powers are as ridiculous as some of the advanced feats in 3rd ed. except now thats ALL anyone concentrates on…thats the core of combat. Its irrelevant if a fighter attacks with a sword, an ax, or a chicken drumstick - all that matters is the funky power he unleashes…Double-Boarhead-Super-Doublefisted-Power-Strike anyone? MY group and I spent hours each game debating each damn square moved like some crazy lawyers debating constitutional law. Every battle, no matter how trivial lasts hours…where is the room to role play. Not to speak of DM-fatigue with the poor guy struggling through pages of combat stats for each individual monster.
This is a game no one wanted, at least not in my crowd. What we have always enjoyed about D&D was that it was a revival of the old tradition of storytelling. Its strength was the flexibility, not being confined to a board or a PC software. The imagination was the limit, at the risk of sounding corny. This is lost in 4th. And honestly, for mindless hack and slay robots, a PC or Xbox game beats D&D anytime. I dont need to get together with my friends for that.
So after some 25 years of playing we have decided as a group to abandon WotC and to move on to Paizo’s Pathfinder which promises to build on the d20, 3.5 D&D rules. I hope Paizo will know how to streamline 3.5 without giving up the essence of a great game. To WotC I can only say, good job -losing faithful cutomers is as difficult as gaining them. You certainly proved that you can do the first.
Filed under: Dungeons and Dragons Book Reviews
