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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 4263890" data-attributes="member: 59082">Let me get this straight. I understand that the new DMG is intended for inexperienced Dungeon Masters. From a relatively cursory glance, it seems like anyone with a moderate amount of experience doesn't need it, or 90%+ of it. To put it another way, the utility of the DMG is conversely relative to an individual DM's degree of experience. Which gets me wondering: For the relatively experienced DM, is there any point to owning the DMG beyond completism? (That is, beyond having another pretty book on the shelf, with the occasional refresher course in running encounters?). I'm not exactly the master of all DMs and have always preferred the "when in doubt, wing it approach" so that a certain level of rules specificity is simply never used in games that I have run. On the other hand, I haven't DMed regularly in more than a decade and, if I decide to get a group together, might enjoy a primer. But a 224-page primer? Part of the problem seems that the DMG is no longer necessary to play Dungeons & Dragons (or am I missing something? I'm open to being ignorant here as I've only looked at the table of contents and briefly scanned the book itself). So why make it a core rulebook? And why charge the same cost as the PHB, which is now THE core rulebook? Personally I kind of miss the jumbled eccentricity of the 1e DMG--not because I want 4e to be 1e (far from it!) but because it was fun to read.Looking at the table of contents, it seems that the first 147 pages is all about how to run a game. Do we really need 147 pages? After that you get a nice overview of the new D&D cosmology, followed by the only relatively useful "DM's toolbox", then the obligatory sample settings.So two-thirds of the book is advice for new DMs (more, if you count the sample settings). I don't mean to gripe--and I hope the tone of this post comes across accurately as more bemused musing than irritation--but I'm honestly wondering if I'm missing something. The DMG just seems overly weighted towards newbies; why not, say, shorten the first two-thirds and extend the relatively disappointing DM's toolbox to include guidelines on creating classes, races, magic items, etc? Or why not simply extend the DM's toolbox so that the book is closer to the PHB's 320 pages? I suppose all that and more will come out in DMG 2...so if the intent is for DMG 1 to be geared almost entirely towards inexperienced DMs, I can honor that, but it leaves most of waiting for next year for the Good Stuff, and it makes the first DMG seem like a lot of filler and exposition to get the real deal.Who knows, when I have the books in my hands I might sing a different tune.</blockquote>

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