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

Ah, 4E. D&D's forgotten edition. It's okay, WOTC. We all make mistakes. There, there.Look, I don't think anyone's coming to this page accidentally. It's a hard one to stumble onto unintentionally. You know what 4E is. You also likely know why it didn't do so hot. And, to be honest, those criticisms are fair - I don't think there's a good reason to ever try running a 4E campaign in 2024, other than perhaps to sate a healthy sense of morbid curiosity. 5E is great for beginners, has a strong community, and has a million products to the point where it's chief limitation is the creativity of the DM and the boldness of the players. 3E, Pathfinder, and the likes provide for a more complex and nuanced environment. There's a million other games out there for anything in between... and those games are probably more fun for your players than 4E.But these books are fun to look through! They're great to look through, and seed inspiration from! If you're creative, then you know that the best creativity is just finding that something that no one else has ever seen before - and trust, no one save the Matt Coville fans touch the 4E stuff. Just embrace that these are probably best for fun reads and less for fun games.

While 4e is the much-maligned edition of D&D, the Dungeon Master's Guide is, by far, one of the best actually guides to facilitating ttrpgs in general. It covers a lot of what the 5e DMG just flat doesn't, and gives guidance to creating a world and a story worth telling.

Like most of 4E, the new Dungeon Master's Guide is sleek, easy to use and gets right to the point with useful advice. Others have already listed what the book is actually about, so I will highlight just one point: encounter design. The guidelines for encounter design have been vastly improved and a combination of monsters can be selected or a new monster made on the scale of minutes, with very little bookkeeping that gave me nightmares before. That fact alone makes using the book a joy and, of course, many DMs old and new will find its advice useful in general.The amount of actual fun and playing that the DMG provides has been increased greatly, while preparation time has been vastly reduced. It is a welcome change.Of course, you will hear plenty of negative comments from the edition war(riors). I am appalled at those, since one edition of the game doesn't prevent anyone who likes it to play the previous editions. Ultimately, it should be about fun and not egos - and remember that when 3rd edition came out about a decade ago, there were plenty of hate mails about how it was no longer the 2E D&D peopel knew, even though it revitalized and greatly improved the game. All I can say is that every game has its praises, but also its time and place.

This review is copied and pasted across all of the 4th edition products I purchased as it relates to the system as a whole. The individual books are all decently made, and have reasonable (though far from perfect) editing.For those who grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons (as I did) this 4th edition of the game is not what we are used to. This does not mean it is a poor game, by any means. It does, however, mean that what you are buying is a "modern" interpretation of the classic game. It feels much more like a video game than a pen and paper role playing game.In the end, this is not a bad product line, but it is a better one for younger gamers than for those of us who are older and who were heavily exposed to earlier editions.

I come from 1e.At that time, the DUNGEON MASTER'S GUIDE had all the rules. The PLAYER'S HANDBOOK had the options for your class and the benefits/penalties of your race, but the division was clear-cut.Somewhere along the way, though, that distinction got blurred. Now, the PLAYER'S HANDBOOK has all the rules, especially the all-important rules of combat, while the DM's GUIDE has mostly advice for guiding your campaign, dealing with players, and designing encounter areas. The DM's GUIDE does have some rules, but only a few pages worth: combat rules for flying, rules for determining exhaustion, rules for mounted combat, etc.Thus the first time I read this I was disappointed and a little angry. If you are going to DM soon, you don't need this book at all: simply focus on the "Combat" section from the PLAYER'S HANDBOOK. Hence initially I got nothing out of this.It was only after DMing for about a year that I finally went back to this and read it again. I got a lot of useful advice out of it. So I suggest that you don't bother touching this until you've been DMing for at least a few months: otherwise you're going to get little out of it.

I bought a boat load of dungeons and dragons rule books all at the same time. My motivation was not to test play each and every addition. I needed them as a research resource for a campaign world that my team is developing. I can tell you after having read every book from every addition there are not huge differences in 3 and 3.5 five unless you are purest. Most of the artwork is recycled. Version four is where the big differences come into play. All that being said let me state that having been a player for more than thirty five years the quality of the books has remained consistent. I am not a fan of breaking up books into multiple volumes to make more money so buy carefully. If you are a real D&D fan and you are considering a purchase, go for it.

I found everything I need to know and more with reading this book cover to cover. I have a very vast a creative retinue of players who have joined my campaign and I am so lucky as a new Dungeon Master to have a great compilation of friends to help create and navigate together the worlds of DnD. I have already started creating my own adventure with worlds with in worlds. It is going to be epic. Could not have done that with out the help of this guide. 5 stars.