D&D General Have You Actually Read the DM's Guide?

[Voadam]

Are you a clone of myself?
I did everything you did. It took me a while to get into 2nd edition as it was not different enough but I too, took the demi-humans level limitations and apply them to my 1st edition games. We fully migrated to 2ed in 1994 (around)... We tried PF but it was too close to 3ed for us to play it fully. It had the same number bloating problems as 3.xed. 4ed brought a nice change and had great ideas but some of these were poorly presented and combat in high levels were taking forever. And yes, Keep on the Shadowfell came a bit late in the editon's life. It might have helped a lot (or not...).

2nd edition was fantastic, it had the attack and save progressions in the PH similar to Moldvay so you could do a lot more with just the PH. My group pooled money and I preordered heavily discounted PHs out of a comic ad for everyone ($10 each I think) so we adopted them in quickly and continued with our 1e campaign with mostly 2e rules but 1e grugach, drow, and assassin PCs continuing fairly unchanged. The system was backwards compatible enough to mix and match modules and monsters and magic items interchangeably without problems. Fairly similar to the 3.0, d20M, 3.5, PF1 family.

4e relied heavily upon being the new D&D and ditched having any free SRD or intro rules packet type option for a long while to try to monetize everything and drive people to buy the physical books as the only option (eventually dropping 4e PDFs then all WotC PDF sales for years). I was happy with Pathfinder and the metric ton of d20 stuff I had so I was not screaming out for a new game/edition. Having a ton of older edition and current Pathfinder stuff plus SRDs for Pathfinder, and not having the free 4e base, it was years before I got into 4e. In contrast I had adopted 3.5 fairly quickly with the SRD and had bought many 3.5 books from the beginning of its cycle and then the same with Pathfinder. I eventually got into 4e when I joined a new group and really liked it but the hits kept coming with them switching the online service one month after I joined from purchasing a great set of stuff to own with monthly new stuff updates added to change to paying for temporary access only with no ownership. When my group decided everybody but me did not like the 4e system we went to Pathfinder 1e for years and I cancelled my 4e online service.

 

[Marc_C]

I read all the DMGs cover to cover. It is even more important to read the DMG for the 5e. Many of the rules people assume don't exist in 5e are in fact in the DM Workshop section.

 

[Eubani]

I read all the DMGs cover to cover. It is even more important to read the DMG for the 5e. Many of the rules people assume don't exist in 5e are in fact in the DM Workshop section.

It's not that existence of these rules is unknown, it's that many are not satisfied with them. For example many believe that advantage is far too much of a blunt tool to use for flanking and that the combination of extra rules are a half hearted and poorly designed stand in for the so call "Tactical Module" talked about in earlier days. We were told about how modular the system was going to be and what we got was the DMG with some half assed tack on bits.

 

[Marc_C]

It's not that existence of these rules is unknown, it's that many are not satisfied with them. For example many believe that advantage is far too much of a blunt tool to use for flanking and that the combination of extra rules are a half hearted and poorly designed stand in for the so call "Tactical Module" talked about in earlier days. We were told about how modular the system was going to be and what we got was the DMG with some half assed tack on bits.

I maintain that many DMs (and players) have not read the 5e DMG and think it is missing those rules since they are not in the PHB.

What you are talking about is different. Being unsatisfied with how things turned out doesn't mean the rules don't exist.

You should really let it go. It's been seven years plus the playtest period.

 

[Eubani]

I maintain that many DMs (and players) have not read the 5e DMG and think it is missing those rules since they are not in the PHB.

What you are talking about is different. Being unsatisfied with how things turned out doesn't mean the rules don't exist.

You should really let it go. It's been seven years plus the playtest period.

You have provided nothing that backs up your claim that the DMG doesn't get read, and have ignored the large number of threads discussing the issues with the optional rules found within that so called unread tome. I feel that XYZ is an empty statement.

 

[Orius]

I mostly DM and the 4e DMG is the only one I've never read in any way. I've read everything in the 2e and 3.0 DMGs at some point, and I have enough familiarity with the 1e and 5e DMGs to find what I'm looking for most of the time.

The 1e DMG has a lot of good material, but it's badly organized and some of the material is dated. Dated in the sense that it is an early work, and later DMGs have more experience to draw upon. It's not bad advice for the time, and in most cases, layer editions offer better advice because people found better ways of doing things. I've never bothered looking at the combat rules because I have no interest in using 1e's combat rules, and I don't usually bother with the magic items because that stuff was nearly all cut and pasted right into 2e anyway.

2e has the weakest guide of all. It's more commentary on the rules in the PHB than actual advice or rules for the DM. There's a good number of places where the book tells a DM that he's got the freedom to run the game at his discretion, but then gives no real advice on how to do that. It's a really bad DMG for a new DM, and I entered the game at the same time that 2e was all that was really available.

3e has a good balance of rules and advice for a DM. It's not as useful as the 1e guide, but it's still a solid DMG. At least that's the case for the 3.0 DMG, the 3.5 dropped some useful bits like the NPC tables to add material that was in other 3.0 books, and in my case I found it a useless addition when I had those books already.

5e is another DMG with good balance between rules and advice. I think it does a decent job of teaching new DMs how to run the game while still being useful for more experienced DMs. There's material in there that's useful enough for a non-5e DM as well. I haven't really looked closely at the magic items though since once again, they're mostly the same magic items that appear in every edition of the game.

 

[Maxperson]

I may have read the 1e DMG cover to cover, but it was so long ago that I can't remember. Since then I tend to skip over most of the world building stuff, since I know how to design a setting, having done several when I was younger. I also know how to run a good game, so I only spot hit the suggestions. The rules stuff is what I primarily read and learn.