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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 4598461" data-attributes="member: 22424">I've never read the 1st Edition DMG, so can't comment on that one.The 2nd Edition DMG was almost completely useless. Were it not for the treasure tables and the magic items chapter, it would have been easy to drop it entirely from the game. It should have included the advice from the "Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide". Now there was a DMG worthy of the name!The 3e DMG is a very solid book, provided you already know how to DM a game. That is, it's not very good for teaching you to run a game, and is over-complicated for newbies. However, it's absolutely packed with useful material - traps, environmental hazards, poisons (bit weak, though), diseases (likewise), and so forth.The 3.5e DMG is much like the 3e version, but adds yet more good material, such as the elemental planes and the Epic level rules. Sadly, the latter are rubbish. Also, the 3.5e DMG is less well organised than the 3e version, IMO.Both the 3e and 3.5e DMGs are hard to read - a big wall of text with something of the textbook about them.However, it was not until DMG2 that 3.x finally got a book providing suitable advice for handling groups, preparing adventures, and other "how to DM" topics. This is a major failing of that edition.The 4e DMG is much easier to read than the 3.x equivalents (and perhaps better than the 2nd Edition one). It also includes extensive "how to DM" material, which is a great improvement. However, the 4e books suffers a great deal in the usefuless scale, IMO. It's very good on generalities, but woefully short on specifics. For example, it includes a handful of traps, but no advice on how to design new traps. It has a brief discussion on environmental hazards, but no actual examples. (If a PC falls into lava, what happens?) And the one massive enhancement of 4e, skill challenges, don't work at all well as written.In an earlier post on another thread, I noted that the 4e DMG might be less useful than the 2nd Edition equivalent, which at least included magic items. In making that assessment, though, I had omitted a couple of key elements of the 4e DMG (as was pointed out to me later).So, in terms of form: 4e > 2e > 3e > 3.5e. (Insert "Campaign Sourcebook" right at the top, with the 3.5e DMG2 immediately after, but note that neither of these is a complete DMG in its own right.)In terms of function: 3.5e > 3e > 4e > 2e. (Because they aren't complete DMGs, the "Campaign Sourcebook" and 3.5e DMG can't really rate on this scale. If added to the corresponding editions DMGs, they boost those significantly, but probably don't actually change the order.)</blockquote>

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