Read This Book Next! Dungeons & Dragons: Dungeon Master’s Guide (2024)
And the “New D&D” double volcano-asteroid summer comes to a close with the release of the 2024 revision of the 5th Edition D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide.
Let me start with the single best thing in this book. It’s on page 19, at the end of the first chapter (“The Basics”). It’s a subsection titled “Players Exploiting the Rules.” It’s half a page of blunt talk that the rules are not a simulation, they assume good-faith interpretations by everyone, they don’t exist as a vehicle to bully the other players, and if a player is being an asshole tell them to stop. Other games, including previous iterations of this one, have danced around this topic, but I can not remember a rule book so clearly stating “don’t let your players be dicks.” I should add that this comes after a section called “Respect for the Players” that spends a page or two finding every possible way to phrase “If you are going to be a DM, do not be an asshole.” It’s incredible, not because it’s some hugely insightful or ground-shaking series of observations, but because they just say it.
(There are a couple people I played with in college—no, no one you know—that I am tempted to find for the first time in 20+ years just so I can mail them a copy of these sections.)
Let me back up a tad.
A running theme through my “New D&D” reviews this year has been: where were people supposed to learn how to play this game? At one point I posited that the key enabling technology that led to the current D&D-like boom was twitch, which finally let people watch other people play even if they didn’t already know someone.
Like I talked about last time, TTRPGs have this huge mass of what amounts to oral traditions that no one really wrote down. Everyone learned from their friend’s weird older brother, or that one uncle, or the guy in the dorms, or whatever. And this goes double for actually running the game—again, one of the reasons 10’ square-by-square dungeon crawls were so common was that was the only style of play the Red Box actually taught you how to run.
As much as “new player acquisition” was a big part of D&D’s mandate, that’s something it’s struggled with outside the era of the Red Box; text actually answering the question “okay, but literally what do I do now that everyone is at my kitchen table,” has been thin on the ground.
D&D tended to shunt this kind of stuff off into auxiliary products, leaving the Core Books as reference material. The classic example here is the Red Box, but as another example, if you go back and look at the 3.0 books, theres no discussion on what “this is” or how to play it at all. That’s because 3e came out alongside the “D&D Adventure Game” box set which was a Basic-eque starter set that was supposed to teach you how to play that no one bought and no one remembers. (The complete failure of that set is one of the more justifiable reasons why 3.5 happened, those revised books had a lot of Adventure Game material forklifted over.) 4E pivoted late to the Essentials thing, the 2014 5e had three different Starter Boxes over the last decade (with a new one coming, I assume?)
And this has always been a little bit of a crazy approach, like: really? I can’t just learn the game from this very expensive thick hardcover I bought in a bookstore? I gotta go somewhere else and buy a box with another book in it? What?
By contrast, the 2024 rules, for the first time in 50 years, really seems to have embraced “what if the core rule books actually tought you how to play.”
Like the 2024 PHB, the first 20 pages or so are a wonder. It starts with an incredibly clean summary of what a DM actually does, with tips on how to prep and run a session, what you need to bring, how do it. It’s got an example of play like the one in the PHB with a sidebar of text explaining what’s going on, except this time it’s explaining that the DM casually asked for what order the characters were in as they were walking towards the cave before they needed to know it so they could drop the surprise attack with more drama.
It’s got a section on “DM play style” which is something almost no one ever talks about. It’s got a really great section on limits and safety tools, and setting expectations, complete with a worksheet to define hard and soft limits as a group.
Then that rolls into another 30 pages of Running The Game. Not advanced rules, just page after page of “here’s how to actually run this.” My favorite example: in the section on running combat, there’s a whole chunk on what to actually do to track monster hit points on scratch paper. There’s a discussion on whether to start with the monster’s full HP and subtract, or start and zero and add damage until you get to the HP max. (I’m solidly an add damage guy, because I can do mental addition faster than subtraction.) I literally can’t ever remember another RPG book directly talking to the person running the game about scratch paper tracking techniques. This is the kind of stuff I’m talking about where we learned to play the game; this was all stuff you learned from watching another DM or just figured out on your own. This whole book is like someone finally wrote down the Oral Torah and I am here for it.
For once, maybe for the first time, the D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide is actually a Guide for Dungeon Masters.
Like the PHB, you could sheer the first 30-50 pages off the front of this book and repackage them as a pretty great “Read This Book Next!” softcover for a new Red Box. From that point, the book shifts into a crunchier reference work, but still with the focus on “how to actually do this.” Lots of nuts-and-bolts stuff, “here’s how to work with alignment”, “here’s how to hotrod this if you need to”, the usual blue moon rules, but presented as “here’s how to run this if it comes up.”
In the best possible way, this all seems like D&D finally responding to the last decade and change of the industry. Like how Planescape’s Factions were a direct reaction to the Clans in Vampire, so much of this book feels like a response to the “GM Moves” in Apocalypse World. Those moves weren’t hugely innovative in their own right—there were a lot of reactions to PbtA that boiled down to “yeah, that’s how I already run RPGs”, but that was the point, those were things that good GMs were already doing, but someone finally wrote them down so people who didn’t have direct access to a “good GM” could learn them too. The effect on the whole industry was profound; it was like everyone’s ears popped and said “wait, we can just directly tell people how to play?”
For example: the 2024 DMG doesn’t have a section on “worldbuilding”, it has sections on “Creating Adventures” and “Creating Campaign” with “campaign settings” and worldbuilding as a secondary concern to those, and that’s just great. That’s putting the emphasis on the right syllables; this is much more concerned with things like pacing, encounter design, recurring characters, flavor, and then the advice about settings builds out from that, how can you build out a setting to reflect the kind of game you want to run. Fantastic.
However, the theme of this book is “actionable content”, so rather than throw a bunch of advice for settings around and leave you hanging (like the 2014 DMG,) this includes a fully operational example setting, which just happens to be Grayhawk. It’s a remarkably complete gazeteer, nice maps (plural), lots of details. This strikes me as a perfect nostalgia deployment, something that’s cool on its own right that also will make old timers do the Leo DiCaprio pointing meme.
Following that is a remarkably complete gazeteer of cosmology, offering what amounts to a diet Manual of the Planes. It does a really nice job of the whirlwind tour of what’s cool and fun to use from what they now call the “D&D Multiverse”, while making it clear you can still use any or all of this stuff on top of and in addition to anything you make up.
Something else this book does well is take advantage of the fact that there’s already a whole line of compatible 5e books in print, so it can point you to where to learn more. There’s a page or two on things like Spelljamming, or Sigil, or The Radiant Citadel, which is fully useful on it’s own, but then instead of being coy about it, the book just says “if you want to know more, go read $BOOK.” That’s marketing the way its supposed to work.
On a similar note, before it dives into Greyhawk, the DMG has a list of all the other in-print 5e settings with an elevator pitch for why they’re cool. So if you’re new, you can skim and say “wait, armies of dragons?” or “magical cold war you say?” and know where to go next.
(Well, everything in print plus… Dark Sun? Interesting. Everything else in the table is something that got into print for 5e, so the usual stuff like Forgotten Realms, Raveloft, and Planescape, but also the adapted Magic: The Gathering settings, the Critical Role book, etc. Mystara isn’t here, or any of the other long-dorment 2e settings, but somehow Dark Sun made the cut. Between this and the last-second name-change reprieve in the Spelljammer set, there might be something cooking here? sicks_yes.gif)
There’s also the usual treasure tables, magic items, and so on.
Between this and the PHB, the 2024 books are a fully operational stand-alone game in a way previous iterations of the “core rules” haven’t always been.
Okay, having said all that, I am now compelled to tell you about my least favorite thing, which is the cover art. Here, let me link you to the official web page. Slap that open in a new tab, take a gander, I’ll meet you down at the next paragraph.
Pretty cool right? Skeleton army, evil sword guy, big dragon lurking in the back. Cool coloring! Nice use of light effects! But! There, smack in the center, is Venger from the 80s D&D cartoon. My problem isn’t the nostalgia ploy, as such. My problem is that Venger is a terrible design. Even if you limit the comparison to other 80s toy cartoons, Venger is dramatically, orders-of-magnitude worse than Skeletor, Mum-Rah, Megatron, Cobra Commander. Hell, every single He-Man or She-Ra bad guy is a better design than Venger. Step that out further, every single Space Ghost villain is a better design than Venger. D&D is full of cooler looking stuff than that. This cover with Skeletor and his Ram Staff there instead of Venger and his goofy-ass side horn? That would be great. This, though? sigh
He shows up inside the book, too! Like the PHB, each chapter opens with a full-page art piece, and they’re all a reference to some existing D&D thing, a setting or character. And then, start of chapter 2, there’s Venger and his big dumb horn using a crystal ball to spy on Tiamat. And this is really the one I’m complaining about, because all the other full-page spreads are a cool scene, and if you want to know more, there’s a whole book for that. But for this, the follow up is… you can go watch the worst cartoon of the 80s, the DVD of which is currently out of print?
And I hear what you’re saying, it’s a nostalgia play, sure, yeah, but also, it’s 2024; the kids that watched that show are closing in on 50, or thereabouts. The edition that could lean into 80s nostalgia for the purposes of pulling in the kids back in was third, and I know because I was there. “That’s the bad guy from a cartoon your parents barely tolerated” is a weird-ass piece of marketing.
As long as I’m grousing, my other least-favorite thing is towards the end, where they have something called a “Lore Glossary.” On the surface, this is a nice counterpart to the Rules Glossary in the new PHB, but while the Rules Glossary was probably the single best idea in the new books, this Lore Glossary is baffling. It’s a seemingly-random collection of D&D “trivia stuff”; locations, characters, events, scattered across various settings and fiction. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to why things get an entry here; Fizban and Lord Soth get entries but Tanis doesn’t, but Drizzt, Minsc, and Boo do. There’s an entry for The Great Modron March but not Orcus which, okay, spoilers I guess. It’s all details for settings rather than anything broadly applicable; the book was already too long, it didn’t need 10 more pages of teasers for other books. Both Venger and the main characters from the 80s cartoon (as “Heros of the Realm, The”) are in here too. Again, it’s just plain weird they leaned in that hard to the old show. I assume that someone on staff was a huge fan, that or there’s a book coming out next year that’ll make us all go “ohhhh.”
The last thing I have anything negative to say about is the new Bastion System. On it’s own, and having not taken them for a test drive yet, it seems cool? It’s a pretty solid-looking system for having a player or party create and manage their own base of operations, possibly with Hirelings. Ways to upgrade them, bonuses or plot hooks those upgrades get you.
I’m just not sure why they’re in this book? It feels like a pitch for a “Stronghold Builder’s Guidebook” or “Complete Guildhall” got left without a release slot, and they said “let’s put the best 20 pages of this in the DMG.” Everything else in the book is applicable to every game, and then there’s this weird chapter for “and here’s how to do a base-building minigame!” Sure?
Personally, I love hireling/follower/base-building systems in computer games, but stay far away from them on the tabletop. The base management subgame was one of my favorite parts of both BATTLETECH and the first Pillars of Eternity, for example, but I don’t think I’ve ever had the desire to run a tabletop game with something more complex than “Wait, how many GP do you have on your character sheet? Sure, you can buy a house I guess.”
There’s nothing wrong with it, but like the Lore Glossary I wish they’d tried to make the book a little shorter and 10 bucks cheaper instead. (And then gave me the option to buy the blown-out version next summer.) Actually, let me hit that a little harder: this is a $50 384 page hardcover, and that seems like it’s out of reach for the target audience here. I don’t know how much you’d have to cut to get down to 40 bucks, but I bet that would have been a better book.
Finally for everyone keeping score at home (that’s me, I’m keeping score) Skill Challenges are not in this one.
And so, look. This is still 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. There’s a reason they didn’t update the number, even fractionally. If 5e wasn’t your or your group’s jam, there’s nothing in here that’ll change your mind. If 5e was your jam, this is a tooled-up, better version. This book is easily the best official D&D DMG to date. Between this and the ToV GMG, it’s an unexpected embarrassment of riches.
I see a lot of chatter on the web around “is it worth the upgrade?” I mean, these books are fifty bucks a pop retail, there’s nothing in here that’s so earth-shattering that you should consider it if you have to budget around that fact. Like buying a yacht, if you have to look at the price tag, the answer is “no.”
Honestly, though, I don’t think “upgrade” is the right lens. If you want to upgrade, great, Hasbro won’t decline the money. But this is about teeing up the next decade, setting up the kids who are just getting into the hobby now. More so than in a long time, this is a book for a jr high kid to pick up and change their life. I’ve said before that as D&D goes, so goes the rest of the hobby. I think we’re all in good shape.