D&D 5E Please suggest me some books about DM advices


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Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering is a foundational work. It is short and to the point and indispensable.
I was just going to recommend this, and/or listening to Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff. They have various good episodes that can help with GMing. Both are solid game designers - I was also surprised to just now see about Ken being involved in a shooting. He's okay - and I laughed a bit too much when he said all of his years working on GURPS made it easy for him to identify the gun with which he was shot.
 

Another vote for Worlds Without Number - it’s got some fantastic GM advice and tools
Yeah it's kind of wild, because it's a fairly kill-y OSR game by default (though the full edition includes rules that can easily change that), but the DM advice is extremely good and extremely chill in a way I've literally in an OSR game. Definitely would second it.
 

I was just going to recommend this, and/or listening to Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff. They have various good episodes that can help with GMing. Both are solid game designers - I was also surprised to just now see about Ken being involved in a shooting. He's okay - and I laughed a bit too much when he said all of his years working on GURPS made it easy for him to identify the gun with which he was shot.
Robin D Laws also wrote one of the best and more succinct DM advice sourcebooks ever written - Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering - Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering - and his RPGs consistently had excellent DM advice, which even as a teenager I was able to appreciate (Feng Shui for example).
 

Yeah it's kind of wild, because it's a fairly kill-y OSR game by default (though the full edition includes rules that can easily change that), but the DM advice is extremely good and extremely chill in a way I've literally in an OSR game. Definitely would second it.
It's funny because it really departs from the typical "you're not their friend, players are your enemy and you should make life as difficult as possible for them and always be using random tables" vibe I get from most OSR stuff
 

It's funny because it really departs from the typical "you're not their friend, players are your enemy and you should make life as difficult as possible for them and always be using random tables" vibe I get from most OSR stuff
Kevin Crawford just seems really amazingly on-the-ball about this. The first product I really saw from him was Black Streams, which was a system you could use to "buff" a single PC from an OSR/old-school game so they could solo an adventure if you didn't have the time/desire to get a whole group together. And in that he noted that if you really wanted, you could have two or more PCs like this and whilst it would be overpowered, it would be it's own kind of fun. And he's done a lot of these OSR-ish games at very different power levels, from "easily stabbed peasant" to almost Exalted-ish.

I think to even think like that you already have to have broken out of the mindlessly adversarial approach a lot of early OSR stuff specified. And it's notable that the resolution systems he's designed expect a good-faith approach from both players and DM, rather than an adversarial or competitive one.

WWN is particularly nice because the full edition essentially does what D&D 5E kind of threatened to do but ultimately didn't, and provides real tools for modulating the kind of campaign you want - especially with the further tools in Atlas. With both books you can go from utterly meatgrinder low/no magic play to PCs literally starting as Legates and Heroic characters, where they're more on part with again almost an Exalted character (albeit a Dragonblooded rather than a Solar), and a wide variety of settings in-between.

On top of that he's shown a real talent for solving longstanding D&D issues, a lot of which D&D and D&D-likes/relatives don't even tend to acknowledge - the stand-out one for me is what WWN calls "Execution Attacks", which are one-hit from-stealth kills or KOs, and implemented in a way that's both balanced and achieves the objective of getting that into the game.

(I will say WWN does sometimes share a flaw with D&D 5E that not ever modular system is super-clearly called out, there are a couple that - as with 5E - are inside the text of paragraphs - it seems like the nice call-out textboxes of the '90s are almost a forgotten art!)
 


Hi all!

First of all, notice that this thread is crossposted from reddit. I had one nice response about the Alexandrian blog.

Recentely I had an letdown experience DMing that would have been avoidable if I was a more experienced DM. Nothing serious, but started in me a tought. Till now, I've runned low level adventures, and now my PCs starts having pretty good levels (one campaign 8, other one 10), meaning good spells and good magical items. The good advice of "always keeping under your eyes the PC character sheets" was stated once in the Lazy DM book, and I just forgotten it. I had to learn by experience. Then I considered: the DMG is a good book to design stories and worlds (more or less), and some good additional rules to run the game. But it is not a good book about "designing the game" (yes, there some, but they are not that much complete).
In general, this little hobby of mine even influences my studies a bit. I spend quite a lot of time, but https://edubirdie.com/nursing-paper-writing-service this service helps to keep my grades at a good level.
I'm a fan of Lazy DMs series by Mike Shea, they really help you designing the story less as a predetermined "novel" format (like DMG) and a more iterative way using players agency. And pretty useful tables too. Loving the Monsters Knows series too.

But still, no high level running advice. I don't know if I can explain what I'm looking for. It is something I can put togheter my D&D books that helps someone developing DM skills (togheter with experience, of course) good for all the 20 levels of the game.

Thank you for your replies :)
"Strongholds & Followers" by Matt Colville offers ideas for expanding the world at higher levels, giving PCs stakes and responsibilities beyond adventuring.
 
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Lots of good books from above.

My own advice? Shoot to wrap up the campaign around 10th level. Higher level play in D&D isn't worth it, and characters become one-man armies capable of adventuring alone, only coming together for truly world-shaking events.
 


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