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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5630823" data-attributes="member: 82106">Not heretical at all. Now you know why many of us old time D&Ders think 4e is darn good! Read the 1e PHB sometime as well. In a way it is a great book, and in a way it will make your eyes roll, lol. (and of course if you were to read the original 1974 'beige box' D&D your head would probably actually explode).There are a lot of little parts of the 1e DMG that are really useful. I still use it as a reference source for oddball things. It had a lot of great lists and some useful little niche subsystems. Mostly what it lacked was a sort of 'unity', it was a lot of little articles on this and that. Gary was more of a detail guy and less of a big picture guy, at least in writing style. The tone of the game OTOH is quite consistent. I really haven't run into any other writers quite like him. I seem to remember the 2e DMG/PHB as rather bland in tone compared to the style of 1e. It was a better organized book and the rules were more comprehensible than 1e, but the actual writing just never grabbed me at all. It didn't help that the physical quality of the books was to put it politely utter garbage. My 1st printing 1e DMG and PHB are still in fine shape and could survive another 10 years of heavy use. The 2e books spines broke on maybe the 4th day. So maybe that colored my opinion of 2e a bit.Perhaps. I'm not sure. I remember being thrilled to get the 1e DMG at that age. Honestly I didn't stop to take the time to actually READ it, lol. At least not right away. In some ways the 'snippet' style that it used was good because you could find the little paragraph article on just what you wanted and each one was highly focused. The 4e DMG OTOH (and honestly all post-Gygax RPG material I read) seems vastly more verbose, but more plain readable. I think I'm so far from being a beginner I can't even measure things on that scale anymore. Oh, I think there is some crunch in there that does certainly belong. Monster design guidelines and such. The crunchy crunch. There definitely should be a book that explains things in an educational way, and it should be the first one that a potential DM gets hold of, so 'DMG' is probably the best name for it. I think DMG2 feels a bit like a hybrid between the old 1e DMG and the 4e DMG. Lots of pretty focused little articles, but focused and organized more in the 4e style.</blockquote>

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