The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide is Chris Perkins' Last Book as Product Lead

Chris Perkins has said that the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide is the last official D&D product he'll be working on as a product lead. Yesterday, a number of sites (including EN World!) posted previews and reviews of the upcoming 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide. Interestingly, Polygon's coverage of the 2024 DMG contained an extra quote from Chris Perkins, stating that the book was his last as a product lead.

“Although I made substantial contributions to the Monster Manual (2025) and the next D&D starter set, the Dungeon Master’s Guide (2024) is the last official D&D book in which I’m credited as a product lead,” Perkins said to Polygon. “Knowing that, I tried to stuff as much of my DM brain into [...] that book as would fit. Whether that’s a gift to the community or not, I’ll let the users decide.”

Perkins is currently a Game Architect for Dungeons & Dragons and helps manage the design team for the game. He's also served as a lead story designer for several campaign-focused adventures. He's also been a long-time face of Dungeons & Dragons, appearing at conventions, Actual Play shows, and marketing videos as an authority on the game and its past, present, and future.

EN World has reached out to Wizards of the Coast for additional context about Perkins' comment and his role with the company. We'll note that Perkins is a part of the marketing cycle for the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide, so he doesn't appear to have left the company.

 

[Azzy]

would be interested in getting that

Same here.

 

[Zardnaar]

If you guys are referring to Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft, Chris Perkins is not the Project Lead, Art Director, or listed as any of the Writers. His sole credit, as far as I can tell, is in the Rules Development section. I’m not sure if that qualifies as “being the instigator of the mishandling of Ravenloft in 5E.”

I wasn't blaming him for that just an example of 5E mediocre product.

I don't blame him even when his name is listed as it's one if several and we don't know the corporate dynamics and behind the scenes stuff.

Crawford woukd probably be the more obvious one as ultimately buck stops there.

 

[Scribe]

is that shift not on him though?

I doubt it, more a marketing and art direction thing to me. Its clear 5.5 is the Gen Z edition.

 

[Endymion Hawk]

Same here.

Lol okay, so I originally saved that column my cut/pasting it to a word doc, which lost a lot of the graphic design but preserved the writing in raw text. A year or two ago I found a collection purported to be the whole thing split across the original 4e style (which I believe is the 'collection' most commonly floated about) and the 5e blog style, since the back half of his articles were preserved in that searchable. Since I have the word doc, I cross referenced MY copy and this pdf, and I'm 99% sure this is complete. It's possible there's one or two articles missing, since the pdf has a couple articles I missed in my original cut and paste.

Hopefully this doesn't just stick a giant pdf pop-out window in my post, and if it does, help!!!

Edit: Yup. God I'm sorry, I'm new here.

 

[Endymion Hawk]

I was lucky enough to save his DM experience column archive before the great purge, just as I was beginning my own DM career with 5e. His articles served as an early inspiration to me. Since then I've integrated a lot more OSR theory than is his style, but several of his insights, particularly on campaign structure, are still my guiding stars.

To elaborate briefly, his campaign at the time was structured such that there were three story arcs running simultaneously, each with a unique villain and genre; a war story against a mind flayer thrall nation, a political story about a crisis of succession in the dominant dragonborn empire, and a conspiracy/looming threat story about a necrotic cloud across the globe as Vecna and his cultists try to usurp the Raven Queen's position as a unified God of Death, Undeath, and Secrets.

By setting up a toybox of villains and factions relating between those three arcs and tying his PCs into them, he could improvise campaign events in real time, structure episodes around specific characters to highlight their relationships with the arcs, and ALWAYS have campaign pressure as needed because the players need to deal with three distinct threats with their own ebbs and flows. Each arc provides its own types of gameplay, encounters, and tone, so when players need or want a break from one they can naturally switch as they want.

This blew baby-me's mind, and I've used this structural technique for four campaigns at this point; a Strahd game (though that one has the central villain), a Dark Sun hexcrawl game, a megadungeon, and my current Saltmarsh/BloodBorne/Darkest Dungeon riff. It's absolutely fantastic advice, flexible between campaign styles, and keeps players VERY engaged.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

I doubt it, more a marketing and art direction thing to me. Its clear 5.5 is the Gen Z edition.

What do you mean the Gen Z edition?

 

[Scribe]

What do you mean the Gen Z edition?

Exactly that. Its marketed towards the Gen Z demographic, in terms of art style and tone. 5e is the Millennial edition.

 

[Oofta]

Exactly that. Its marketed towards the Gen Z demographic, in terms of art style and tone. 5e is the Millennial edition.

Is it really a surprise that the primary target is new buyers? Who are they supposed to market it to? Old geezers like me who are set in their ways and probably decided whether or not to buy the books before they were even published?

Doesn't automatically mean people who have, shall we say, experience with previous editions will find nothing useful here. It's just that they're always going to target the next generation of customers, not the ones they already have or have lost. That's just not how it works.

 

[Scribe]

Is it really a surprise that the primary target is new buyers?

I'm not surprised at all, since I made the statement.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

Exactly that. Its marketed towards the Gen Z demographic, in terms of art style and tone. 5e is the Millennial edition.

I don't think folks understand Gen as much as they think they do.

Makes me wonder what an edition marketed towards Gen Alpha would look like?