D&D 5E "People complain, but don't actually read the DMG!" Which sections specifically?

[Yora]

I think all DMGs in any edition have been pretty bad books. It's been a good decade since I last read the 3rd edition one, but from my memory, it didn't get any more use than the 5th one. It's the treasure tome.

The only good GM book I've ever seen, that actually teaches dungeon mastering without having to include any additional mechanics, is the one for Star Wars 2nd edition from 1994, I believe.

 

[iserith]

The book is 320 pages, including filler pages and Table of Content, Index, etc.

Read 10 pages every time you go to the bathroom. You'll be done in a month. It really isn't a big investment in time to make sure you're doing everything you can to ensure you understand the game you're playing so much. Assuming you find value in that understanding.

 

[Parmandur]

I just took up the book again to browse through it, and it took me only 20 minutes.
I guess I am not the target audience for this book. Though I also don't complain that the game "does not have rules for this". (Only that the rules for various things are anemic and every halfway decent GM should know better than the writers.)

The big issue I encounter is that when I read a page, I don't feel like I found any rules. Occasionally there are suggestions for alternative rules that you can use to replace rules in the PHB if you want, but nothing that seems like it's an actual mechanic of the default game.

Someone mentioned the assumptions for XP.
The assumptions stated by the book are that party can easily handle eight medium and hard encounters per day. As nearly everyone keeps saying, nobody seems to play that way. I certainly have no clue how I could cram that much combat into one day without the game turning into one giant bloodbath. And even if you follow that, it takes 13 days of such adventuring to get characters to 8th level. Which is frankly just absurd.
Switching to the rule to make short rests a night and long rest a week, it would turn into something like maybe a fight per day, and reaching 8th level in three or four months. Get in some more days without fights and you could maybe stretch it to a year. That still seems really hard to justify as sensible fiction.

From what I can tell, the rules for giving treasure are literally "whatever you feel like seems rewarding for the players."

They are less rules, and more...guidelines.

 

[Voadam]

All of it. What other game do you play that you feel like “how much of the rules can I get away with not reading?” is a question it makes sense to ask? If you want to learn to run a game properly, you read the rule book.

Most every one?

I played lots of sports for years but I have never read a rule book for any of them.

I can't remember reading the rules for chess, checkers, backgammon, or parcheesi.

Most Atari and video games I played when I was young were very intuitive.

Board games like Risk and Succession Wars and such were the same, I played with people who knew the rules and I picked them up. Some I have read the rules when the group I played with were all new to them.

I did read the rules sheet for the card game Munchkin. I can't remember if I ever did for Magic, but if so it was long after I had been playing, I played with people who had gotten into it before me.

Primarily I believe I learned the rules from games by playing with people who already knew the rules, learning from people instead of books.

D&D is an exception for me as I like to read the books.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I just took up the book again to browse through it, and it took me only 20 minutes.
I guess I am not the target audience for this book. Though I also don't complain that the game "does not have rules for this". (Only that the rules for various things are anemic and every halfway decent GM should know better than the writers.)

The big issue I encounter is that when I read a page, I don't feel like I found any rules. Occasionally there are suggestions for alternative rules that you can use to replace rules in the PHB if you want, but nothing that seems like it's an actual mechanic of the default game.

Someone mentioned the assumptions for XP.
The assumptions stated by the book are that party can easily handle eight medium and hard encounters per day. As nearly everyone keeps saying, nobody seems to play that way. I certainly have no clue how I could cram that much combat into one day without the game turning into one giant bloodbath. And even if you follow that, it takes 13 days of such adventuring to get characters to 8th level. Which is frankly just absurd.
Switching to the rule to make short rests a night and long rest a week, it would turn into something like maybe a fight per day, and reaching 8th level in three or four months. Get in some more days without fights and you could maybe stretch it to a year. That still seems really hard to justify as sensible fiction.

From what I can tell, the rules for giving treasure are literally "whatever you feel like seems rewarding for the players."

Well, that's not what they say. There's no easily, and the number of type of encounters are an example of how daily XP works, which itself is presented only as a useful pacing tool. It would seem your skim missed some important assumptions in how the game is structured, or how you can approach it, or what changes might work best -- for example, understanding the above assumptions can help you tune, as the DMG also offers suggestions towards, for a slower advancement rate. I mean, you can keep making this oft refuted point, I guess, but it seems rather unhelpful to insist that the designers have less of an idea about how the game is intended to work than you do because you played a few prior editions.

This is the error of assuming that your table is 1) representative, and b. that the game is the same. I do find it strange that the rapidity of advancement is striking you as odd, as 1e worked pretty darned fast as well if you didn't force long delays for things. I mean, there's an entire section on downtime, revisited an expanded in a later sourcebook as well, that talks about how you can actually burn through treasure and slow time down. If you think 13 days is too short, my question would be why are you putting them back to back if it breaks your immersion?

 

[Swarmkeeper]

Well, I mean just to be sure something isnt being missed: it is very dangerous to rely on prior edition knowledge and assume "90% is already stuff I know."

Oh absolutely. I was just suggesting a "best of" 5e DMG, if you will.

 

[CleverNickName]

I don't read the Optional Rules. To my own detriment, I might add. There's some pretty good stuff in there that I've overlooked for years...like the Spell Point System for magic (which I easily reskinned to be "psionics" for one of my players who wanted to play a sorc--er, I mean, psion).

 

[Malmuria]

I think my issues with the 5e dmg can be epitomized by the section on experience points. Here's a typical problem: a new DM wants to award experience points for the social and exploration pillars of play. "How should I do that?" they ask the internet. Well, there's a section in the DMG all about awarding experience points! Here's what it says on that topic (p. 261)

Noncombat Challenges
You decide whether to award experience to characters for overcoming challenges outside combat. If the adventurers complete a ten e negotiation with a baron, forge a trade agreement with a clan of surly dwarves, or successfully navigate the Chasm of Doom, you might decide that they deserve an XP reward.

As a starting point, use the rules for building combat encounters in chapter 3 to gauge the difficulty of the challenge. Then award the characters XP as if it had been a combat encounter of the same difficulty, but only if the encounter involved a meaningful risk of failure.

Are those sentences of advice helpful? Are they specific to 5e in any way? If our hypothetical new dm just decided to make up a system of how to award non combat xp, what are the chances it would look exactly like this, but be better and more detailed?

Also why did our new dm not find these "rules" to begin with? Let's see where they are located in the book: they are in the chapter "running the game," which for some reason is chapter 8, near the end of the book. The section on awarding xp--a central facet of the DMs role--is located after rules for chases, siege equipment, diseases, poisons, and madness. Those are all not only not essential, but they very well may never come up in most campaigns.

The thing that probably frustrates me most about the dmg (and I realize this is an odd thing to be annoyed about) is the layout. Let's look at the actual page:

WTH is going on here? Instead of just fitting all the "rules" for experience points onto one page, they split it over two pages (the second page is half text and half art). Moreover, the section is actually split by the "madness" tables, which are much more prominent on the page. The 5e DMG is full of layout like this. It's like they just copied and pasted the text into their layout software and called it a day. It might not seem like a big deal, but it really affects the usability of the book, and makes it so that rules and advice (which, imo, is often half-baked to begin with) gets lost on the page.

So it might not be that people are being "lazy" in not reading the dmg. Rather it's a hard book to read and reference, the text is difficult to quickly parse, information is scattered and poorly organized, and pieces of good advice or helpful rules are lost amid all of the anodyne suggestions.
/rant

 

[iserith]

So it might not be that people are being "lazy" in not reading the dmg. Rather it's a hard book to read and reference, the text is difficult to quickly parse, information is scattered and poorly organized, and pieces of good advice or helpful rules are lost amid all of the anodyne suggestions.
/rant

Yep, it's badly organized and, like any holy text, there are some parts that contradict other parts.

Which bolsters the argument to read the whole thing rather than bits and pieces as needed.

 

[Malmuria]

Yep, it's badly organized and, like any holy text, there are some parts that contradict other parts.

Which bolsters the argument to read the whole thing rather than bits and pieces as needed.

You'll get much better mileage out of reading Return of the Lazy Dm, or the Alexandrian, or watching some of the Running the Game videos. Or in checking out some other games

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