Dungeons and Dragons Blog

Dungeon Master 4th Edition For Dummies (For Dummies (Sports & Hobbies))

Whether you’ve been a Dungeon Master (DM) before and want to fine-tune your skills or want to get ready and take the plunge, this is the book for you. It gives you the basics on running a great game, info for more advanced dungeon mastering, guidelines for creating adventures, and tips for building a campaign. It shows you how to:

• Handle all the expressions of DMing: moderator, narrator, a cast of thousands (the nonplayer characters or NPCs), player, social director, and creator
• Use published adventures and existing campaign worlds or create adventures and campaign worlds of your own
• Conjure up exciting combat encounters
• Handle the three types of encounters: challenge, roleplaying, and combat
• Create your own adventure: The Dungeon Adventure, The Wilderness Adventure. The Event-Based adventure (including how to use flowcharts and timelines), The Randomly Generated Adventure, and the High-Level adventure
• Create memorable master villains, with nine archetypes ranging from agent provocateur to zealot

To get you off to a fast start, Dungeon Master For Dummies includes:

• A sample dungeon for practice
• Ten ready-to-use encounters and ten challenging traps
• A list of simple adventure premises
• Mapping tips, including common scales, symbols, and conventions, complete with tables

Authors Bill Slavicsek and Richard Baker wrote the hugely popular Dungeons and Dragons For Dummies. Bill has been a game designer since 1986 and leads the D&D creative team at Wizards of the Coast. Richard is a game developer and the author of the fantasy bestseller Condemnation. They give you the scoop on:

• Using a DM binder to keep records such as an adventure log, PCs’ character sheets, NPC logs/character sheets, treasure logs, and more
• Knowing player styles (role players and power games) and common subgroups: hack’n’slasher, wargamer, thinker, impulsive adventurer, explorer, character actor, and watcher
• Recognizing your style: action movie director, storyteller, worldbuilder, puzzlemaker, or connector
• Using miniatures, maps, and other game aids
• Using 21st century technology, such as a Web site or blog, to enhance your game

The book includes a sample adventure, The Necromancer’s Apprentice, that’s the perfect way to foray into DMing. It includes everything you need for a great adventure—except your players. What are you waiting for? There are chambers to be explored, dragons to be slain, maidens to be rescued, gangs of gnoll warriors to be annihilated, worgs to be wiped out, treasures to be discovered, worlds to be conquered….If you’re a Dungeons & Dragons fan, you’ve surely thought of becoming a Dungeon Master. Learning to be a DM isn’t as hard as you might think, especially if you have Dungeon Master 4th Edition For Dummies tucked into your bag of tricks!

From organizing your first D&D game to dealing with difficult players, this book covers everything a DM needs to know. Written for the newest edition of D&D by the experts at Wizards of the Coast, creators of the game, it shows you how to:

• Build challenging encounters, make reasonable rulings, and manage disagreements
• Recognize all the common codes, tables, and spells
• Understand the parts of a D&D adventure and how to create dungeon maps and craft monsters
• Shape storylines and write your own adventures
• Find your style as a DM and develop a game style that plays to your strengths
• Script an encounter, vary the terrain and challenges, and establish rewards (experience points and treasure)
• Decide whether to use published adventures
• Use and follow the official Dungeon Master’s Guide
• Develop a campaign with exciting themes, memorable villains, and plots that keep players entranced

If you’re getting the urge to lead the charge in a D&D game of your own, Dungeon Master 4th Edition For Dummies will introduce you to the DM’s many jobs. With the information you need to start your own game, craft exciting stories, and set up epic adventures, you’ll be on your way!

Look inside scenes from Dungeon Master 4th Edition For Dummies (Click on images to enlarge)

User Ratings and Reviews

2 Stars A comical look at comical book
I’m not a ‘very’ experienced GM; in fact I’m just starting my third campaign. I picked this book up hoping I might find something useful in it. I was gratified to find that by these authors’ standards I must be doing some things right. Then, things just got dumb (oh, that’s right, this is a ‘for dummies’ book.)

Page 35: “When the players arrive, give everyone a chance to get settled and socialize. This is a time-honored tradition. . . .” followed by, “have the host show everyone where to put their coats. . . “.

Oh, come on already! The more I read of this book the more I came to realize I have only one response -

If you have to be coached through such basic concepts as finding a group, telling folks where to put their coats, and feel compelled to remind everyone that you’re the GM (ad nauseum) then you have *no business* trying to run a game. You need to find a GM through your local game store or university and be a player until you get a) the rules of the game, and b) the social rules of a gaming club, whether it’s official or casual.

Gamers tend to be brutal on GM’s, whether intentionally or unintentionally. They screw up our plot lines, kill off the NPC’s we designed to give them vital clues, second-guess us at every turn, rules-rape gleefully, and on a really good day, everyone is laughing so hard you’re afraid for your bladder control. GM’ing is fun as heck but absolutely not for the faint of heart.

Anyone who needs to be told how to host a gaming group has never been in one, and therefore is as wholly unqualified to be a GM as Paris Hilton is to be Treasury Secretary.

I recommend this book as comedy for those of us whose meticulously thought out campaigns have been shredded by our players, and a clue-book for those of you who would someday like to run your own game. But please, please don’t buy this book thinking you are going to learn how to be a GM from it. You can only get that by being a player under one or more competent GMs.

5 Stars A great book for beginner and intermediate DMs
As much as I hated the other book in this set, this one was wonderful. It provided a solid layout of what a DM might run into and what he’d have to handle. It gives detailed examples for not just adventures, but interplayer problems that often crop up as well. I’ve been DMing for years, but I’ve got my copy of this well tagged with sticky notes. Sure I technically have most of the info in my other books, but this one is far easier to referance when players are waiting for an answer. Anyone that wants to run a game would do well to buy this helpful book.

5 Stars It says “for Dummies”, dummies!
Some of the lower scores for this book crack me up! In case you’re not aware, the “for Dummies” line is marketed towards those who are inexperciened, NOT for those who have already mastered the subject. With that idea in mind, I feel this is one of the most valuable books for beginning Dungeon Masters (DMs) ever written.

I’ve been gaming for almost 20 years now, most of which has been Dungeons & Dragons, and I have to say almost all the basic, most essential lessons and tricks I’ve learned over the years are found in these pages. Written by some of the most creative game designers on earth, even us ol’ timers can pick up an idea or two.

Please, for the Amazon price tag give this book a shot. Even if you really are as awesome of a DM as you think you are, it will be satisfying to see there are still people over at Wizards of the Coast who understand what this game is all about.

3 Stars Nice, but the constant ads for WOTC were annoying
I picked this up based on reviews I’ve read about an earlier edition. As a relatively new dungeon master who is about to launch my own 4th Edition campaign I thought this book could be helpful.

To be positive, the book was helpful in a lot of places. However there were a number of places, such as the section where the book discusses creating adventures, where I felt the book could have gone into more detail.

However what turned me off this book was the constant advertising spam the authors inserted for other WOTC D&D products. This annoyed me for three reasons. Firstly, a lot of the promotions were out of context with regards the material being discussed. Secondly, at times they interrupted the flow of the topic the authors were writing about and lastly they pushed the same product over and over again.

All in all the book contains some good advice, but it is overshadowed by a large amount of unnecessary advertising.

3 Stars A big help for a working DM
Although this book is written with the D20 system in mind, it applies to second edition as well. I enjoy all the “dummies” books and this one is no exception. It gives you plenty of tools to keep in your DM arsenal.

Our games are now much more organized, flow better, and has made DMing a much more enjoyable part of the hobby as opposed to a chore you get stuck with.

A great tool for experienced AND new DMs alike. This book would have gained an extra star if a little less time was spent on the social skills to finding games and players. I feel this is space that could have been used more on fantasy cartography, and more inspirations.

Even still, this was a book that improved our gaming greatly.

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