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

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.

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.

I've been an absolutely RABID fan of Dungeons and Dragons in all of its incarnations since about 1980. I had all of the 1st edition and 2nd edition books, 3.0 represented a big change for me, but I grew to like it - and then 3.5 really fixed some of the bugs in 3.0 making it one of the most modular systems I'd ever seen.

When the 4th edition of D&D was announced, it seemed premature. When the video of the presentations about 4th edition hit YouTube, I was intrigued - a lot of what I seeing sounded very promising. I began to let myself get excited about the new edition, then I read one of the preview books - and began to get nervous, but I figured, hey, this is just a preview - they'll work out the bugs. After all, version 3.0/3.5 had a few clunky spots, but if you worked through those, BAM, you had an amazingly well oiled machine, right? Then I get the 4th edition rulebooks. Wow, talking about a head shot. We have "new Coke" in game form.

First, I believe it is entirely misguided for WotC to try to turn D&D into a MMO, yet that's effectively what they've done. The various classes are too homogenous, their roles are too rigidly defined, all of the powers and abilities have to work on a square grid. While this certainly "simplifies" and "streamlines" the system, it's effectively thrown the baby out with the bathwater as there's no "system" left. Gone are perennial favorites like the Druid, bard, and monk, and we get the warlord???

Of the three Core rulebooks, the DMG is probably the best. It includes a lot of really good information for new DM's on how to engage players based on their playing style. Unfortunately, it's a part of an edition that has essentially removed the role playing aspect and replaced it almost entirely with "roll playing." With all of the action effectively taking place on a grid - the DM may as well be a decent Core 2 PC programmed to make the rolls.

I sincerely hope that 4th edition is improved as additional supplements are released, but I'm not holding my breath (and I AM holding my dollars until I see evidence of improvement). At this point I see 4th Edition as an interesting game of below average depth and quality. I fear Gary Gygax is rolling over in his grave to see the "Dungeons and Dragons" name on it.

To start with, this is not a review of Fourth Edition, I have been reading through the character and combat system, and I like 4th edition (and I date back to the days of the original Chainmail). That being said, this book is utterly useless if you have played the game before, any version. There are no charts (other than disease and traps). Most of it is advice on how to roleplay, and what to do if someone has a family member that died and missed 2 months of gaming (I kid you not).

All the rules you need for 4th edition are in the players handbook. Heck, the monster manual is pretty worthless to if you are getting the modules, all the stats are in the modules. Magic Items, Combat Rules, all character powers, that is all in the PH.

There are like 10 pages of stupid made up artifacts that you will never use, pages on how to make maps, how to make encounters, and how many bowls of chips you should have at a game session. Honestly, there is NOTHING in this book that is need to play 4th edition, I would recommend only the PH and the first module if you want a feel for the game.

I do like 4th ediion though.. even though it seems like it was built as a video game engine. I have neices and nephews that it is really easy to explain to.

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.