Which Edition of D&D (or OSR Ruleset) Has the Best GMing Advice?

[overgeeked]

This is the short version. There's just too many great resources out there.

AD&D. Dungeon Master's Design Kit.

2E. Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide. Creative Campaigning.

OSR/NSR. Worlds Without Number for all your hexcrawl design needs.

Index Card RPG has one of the best GM advice sections of any RPG out there today. It's worth the cover price alone.

Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG has several amazing bits and bobs, the best of which are Quests & Journeys along with the Judge admonitions. It's maybe 10 pages of text in the 504-page book. It's worth borrowing and reading if you're not going to actually play DCC.

Black Hack. Black Sword Hack. Tome of Adventure Design. How to Write Adventure Modules that Don't Suck. Random Esoteric Creature Generator. Into the Odd. Knave. Maze Rats. Cairn.

Misc. The Game Master's Book of Proactive Roleplaying is one of the best GM advice books I've read in years. Simple idea, flip the script on players and turn them from reactive to proactive. Well worth the cover price.

The Ultimate RPG Game Master's Worldbuilding Guide. Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master.

Templates. Stuff you can look at as an example to make great stuff. Waking of Willowby Hall. Dark of Hot Springs Island. The Stygian Library.

Links. Absolute beast of a random world/continent generator: Azgaar's. Fantastic random realm, city, village, dungeon, glade generator: Procgen Arcana. Collected hexcrawl resources.

 

[Theory of Games]

AD&D 1e DMG.

It set the standard for DM/GM expertise. Few GM guides begin by telling the GM that outside organized play, the rules are what you make them. You can run AD&D RAW but why when you can change anything?

I also liked how new DMs are told how to stand up to bullying Rules Lawyers. I dealt with that and Gary's advice was priceless.

Showing how to design dungeons then fill them traps and monsters. A monster catalog. A vault of magic items and treasure. Rules for almost everything and the rest DMs could make rulings for.

No single GM guide has ever come close to what that book offered.

 

[Reynard]

AD&D 1e DMG.

It set the standard for DM/GM expertise. Few GM guides begin by telling the GM that outside organized play, the rules are what you make them. You can run AD&D RAW but why when you can change anything?

I also liked how new DMs are told how to stand up to bullying Rules Lawyers. I dealt with that and Gary's advice was priceless.

Showing how to design dungeons then fill them traps and monsters. A monster catalog. A vault of magic items and treasure. Rules for almost everything and the rest DMs could make rulings for.

No single GM guide has ever come close to what that book offered.

This is pretty easily debunked as rose colored glasses. There is a lot of interesting things in the AD&D DMG, some of which I use to this day, but it is absolutely not "newb friendly." That's just nonsense.

 

[Jelly Bean]

I value the advice in the AD&D 1e DMG and more recently in the Shadowdark RPG by Kelsey Dionne.

 

[Theory of Games]

This is pretty easily debunked as rose colored glasses. There is a lot of interesting things in the AD&D DMG, some of which I use to this day, but it is absolutely not "newb friendly." That's just nonsense.

Name a GM advice book that covers as much ground as the AD&D 1e DMG. Every GM guide since only takes from Gygax

 

[Alby87]

Never runned it, but read a couple of time, Basic from BECMI seems an awesome way to start people without experience (no pun intended) to play D&D.

For 5th edition, I think that the "missing" book from the core books is "So you wanna be a gamemaster". It's that good, I think that merging that book and the real DMG would make a perfect DMG for the actual game. I'm secretely rooting for the new DMG to take inspiration from Alexandrian's book to make it new DM friendly.

Also, the Lazy DM series. They are less focues on how to run the game, but more focused on how to run a story campaign. Good stuff in there too!

 

[Mannahnin]

Name a GM advice book that covers as much ground as the AD&D 1e DMG. Every GM guide since only takes from Gygax

Most of which assumes that you've already read and are experienced with OD&D and have a lot of contextual knowledge. Including fundamental things like treasure placement.*

It's chock full of as much terrible advice (screw over thieves at every opportunity, rather than explaining how to run them and make them fun and viable despite their terrible skill percentages and saves) as it is with good stuff (monster lair orders of battle). Some of the rules are downright unplayable, seemingly unplaytested, and bad for your game (like the player performance grades in the training rules, or the unarmed combat rules), or EXTREMELY difficult to parse and impossible to play wholly as written (the initiative system).

I love it and find it very inspirational, but it is a dumpster fire for newbie DMs to try to learn from.

(*To expand on that, the treasure placement advice in the 1E DMG is often a bit polemical and stingy, directly contradicting his own practices in modules and leaving out important explicit instructions from OD&D. If you've read OD&D and ALSO have the historical contextual knowledge that in AD&D he was reacting to stuff like Jim Ward's game, or the Dungeons & Beavers folks at Caltech with 100th level characters, his comments make more sense. Without that knowledge, his advice often goes overboard and overcorrects.)

 

[Lord Shark]

Most of which assumes that you've already read and are experienced with OD&D and have a lot of contextual knowledge. Including fundamental things like treasure placement.

It's chock full of as much terrible advice (screw over thieves at every opportunity, rather than explaining how to run them and make them fun and viable despite their terrible skill percentages and saves) as it is with good stuff (monster lair orders of battle). Some of the rules are downright unplayable, seemingly unplaytested, and bad for your game (like the player performance grades in the training rules, or the unarmed combat rules), or EXTREMELY difficult to parse and impossible to play wholly as written (the initiative system).

I love it and find it very inspirational, but it is a dumpster fire for newbie DMs to try to learn from.

Don't forget the bit about dealing with problematic players by having them get attacked by invisible ethereal mummies or hit by lightning bolts out of nowhere.

 

[Theory of Games]

Don't forget the bit about dealing with problematic players by having them get attacked by invisible ethereal mummies or hit by lightning bolts out of nowhere.

If you had the players I had, you would see those tactics as a perk not a flaw.

Most of which assumes that you've already read and are experienced with OD&D and have a lot of contextual knowledge. Including fundamental things like treasure placement.*

It's chock full of as much terrible advice (screw over thieves at every opportunity, rather than explaining how to run them and make them fun and viable despite their terrible skill percentages and saves) as it is with good stuff (monster lair orders of battle). Some of the rules are downright unplayable, seemingly unplaytested, and bad for your game (like the player performance grades in the training rules, or the unarmed combat rules), or EXTREMELY difficult to parse and impossible to play wholly as written (the initiative system).

I love it and find it very inspirational, but it is a dumpster fire for newbie DMs to try to learn from.

(*To expand on that, the treasure placement advice in the 1E DMG is often a bit polemical and stingy, directly contradicting his own practices in modules and leaving out important explicit instructions from OD&D. If you've read OD&D and ALSO have the historical contextual knowledge that in AD&D he was reacting to stuff like Jim Ward's game, or the Dungeons & Beavers folks at Caltech with 100th level characters, his comments make more sense. Without that knowledge, his advice often goes overboard and overcorrects.)

I didn't mention the 1e DMG is holy writ or scientific law. I thought early on the formatting was nightmarish. Everything is everywhere. And yeah there's parts that read like "Angry Uncle Gary". Those were the most amusing parts, for me. If I tried to take it all too serious, I'd run into a paragraph of Gary suggesting DMs intimidate the players by threatening to kill their PCs.

But the quantity of information they dumped in that book has no rival as a singular tome of advice on running Dungeons & Dragons.

 

[Reynard]

But the quantity of information they dumped in that book has no rival as a singular tome of advice on running Dungeons & Dragons.

Quantity by itself is not an inherently good thing.