Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide: Roleplaying Game Core Rules, 4th Edition

Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide: Roleplaying Game Core Rules, 4th Edition | Wizards RPG Team | Speeds up preparation and makes for better games

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	Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide: Roleplaying Game Core Rules, 4th Edition Wizards RPG Team Wizards of the Coast, 2008 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 55 reviews view larger image
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im happy

evolution is a good thing, even if it isnt for the immediate best. truth is, for all the whiners out there. dnd has always been a use the rulebooks as a guide system. if you dont like a rule CHANGE IT. wotc people arent going to show up at your house with clubs.

Speeds up preparation and makes for better games

The dungeon master's guide for 4th edition is truly designed with the dungeon master in mind. Gone are the days where the players would need their own DMG for referencing their magic items, item creation feats, prestige classes, and other odds and ends. The DMG now focuses on the how to building encounters, adventures, campaigns, and settings. It starts with an introduction to DMing for new game masters. It runs through the purpose of a dungeon master, expectations that you should have for your group, and how to make the game work for your players. For a new DM, this will help get you off to a good start. For an experienced DM, the section will mostly feel like old hat, but is not without its own insightful tidbits.

The next sections of the book focus on encounters. They talk about combat encounters. They tell you how to build encounters for a given group size and party level. Give you advice and guidelines on how to make encounters that are challenging, interesting, and easy to run. It takes a lot of the guess work out of building encounters, and is a lot more intuitive than the CR system used in the last edition. Let me put it this way, you can throw together a really interesting combat encounter in five minutes that will match well with your party. If you are an improvisational DM, then you know just how awesome that is. After a long discussion on terrain, an oft-overlooked component of combat design, they go into non-combat encounters. Skill challenges are a great concept that gets a lot of development. They formalize what was previously a nebulous concept, using skills to resolve an encounter. They give examples of skill challenges, target DCs by level, advice on building them, and advice on how to improvise along with player ingenuity. They also give some time to traps and puzzles. The puzzles section, in my opinion, was a little bit lacking. They left out entires classes of puzzles, such as spacial puzzles, and focused only on the most esoteric forms that, quite frankly, are very jarring to come across. In the end, though, most of the encounter section gives nothing but useful guidelines and sound advice.

Similar statements can be made on the rest of the book, it's filled with rules of thumb and thoughtful advice. The only really bad thing that I have to say about the book, however, is that it has some blatant advertisement in it. For example, as opposed to saying that you need "something to represent characters and monsters," or even just saying "miniatures," the DMG says that you need "D&D Miniatures." Similarly, references are dropped regularly to other materials like Dungeon Tiles and DnDinsider. Admittedly, these are all nice luxuries for a game, but the product placement seems out of place.

Dungeon Masters should definitely give this book a read through, it will improve your games and make preparation super easy. Don't expect the DMG of generations past, though.

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I was initially unimpressed

I've been roleplaying for years, so a quick skim through of the DMG left me with the impression that there wasn't anything in it for me. A more thorough reading revealed a number of useful rules that, while they could have been elsewhere, make the DMG invaluable.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, page 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

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