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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ron" data-source="post: 2008520" data-attributes="member: 1020">The Dungeon Master Guide is the second core book of the new Dungeons & Dragons game line. It follows the traditional Wizards of the Coast's high production standards, although I don't particularly like the 3rd edition graphic design (refer to my Player's Handbook review to a more detailed analysis). The cover shows some improvement from the first core book, although its still of average to good quality, as still retain a little bit of the toy look.Unlike the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master guide provides some useful information to the novice Dungeon Master (DM). There are guidelines to apply classes to some monsters and customise the player?s classes. Prestige classes are introduced to help the DM to further customise his campaign. Although they are not a bad addition to the game, I fear that the main reason for its inclusion in the rules is to provide the publisher a device to provide numerous new supplements with new prestige classes. In fact, since the publishing of this book, Wizards of the Coast have introduced several new ones in Dragon magazine and D&D supplements. A nice addition is the new NPC classes, introduced to better describe non-adventurous NPCs. Finally, a long list example NPCs is provided, one for each level from each class, nothing that any DM could not prepare alone.New rules are introduced to take care of special abilities available to some monsters, as well as the effects of the environment. As in the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master Guide partially assumes the use of miniatures, or at least a grid, to explain some of the effects. Guidelines are also available to determine difficulty classes to skills and handling some complicated magical effects, such as divinations.An adventure tool kit is present, providing guidelines to create dungeons, including random ones. Wilderness adventures are not so fine detailed, although wilderness encounters lists are provided. Finally, rules for randomly generation of tows are introduced. I'm not sure of the value of all this. Random generators actually incentive a lazy DM not to prepare his adventures ahead. I would rather prefer guidelines about creating such adventures. The campaign and world building chapters are better in this regard. Curiously, Greyhawk's pantheon appears as an example, whereas most other examples are campaign independent.The rewards chapter introduces guidelines to distributing experience points among the players. Following a D&D perhaps misguided tradition, there is a great incentive to killing. There are also tables to random generation of treasure. Also following another obnoxious tradition, there is a huge amount of money available as treasure (I guess that inflation is very high in D&D worlds? economies). With minor adjustments, the Dungeon Master Guide ends with the traditional tables for random generation of magic items treasures and their description.The Dungeon Master Guide is a mixed bag of good and poor design choices. It greatly incentives random play, which I cannot recommend. Although I concede that randomness is a D&D tradition, this is one that I think that would be better dropped. Some of the contents, such as the standard NPC tables appears to be space fillers and the prestige classes appears to be more a commercial rather than a design necessity. I also missed guidelines to design monsters and new prestige classes. Still, there is some good advice to novice DMs and the rules regarding the monsters' special abilities are pretty good, although they are partially reprinted in the Monster Manual. Resuming, I'm not sure if the contends of this volume could not be bundled with the other volumes. Much of the new rules regarding monster are partially found in the Monster Manual, many of the tables could be dropped and the magical item list could be expanded in an accessory supplement. The remaining could be resumed in the Player's Handbook, as Wizards of the Coast have done in other d20 games, such as Star Wars and Wheel of Time.</blockquote>

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