D&D 5E Regarding DMG, Starter Set and Essentials kit: Are they good for the starting DMs?

[bedir than]

The D&D learning to play stuff is on YouTube, with directions to check there in the modern Starter Set


There's also this other Learning to Play series with less specificity towards the Starter Set



Both are fine to good

 

[pointofyou]

A quick search tells me those videos probably are about 500 words each. They must have chosen those words exceedingly carefully because that doesn't seem anywhere near adequate.

 

[Stormonu]

My experience is most people start out as players, and become DMs later. I think there is some of that ideology in the starter sets that someone whose had previous DMing experience will run the game, they just may need a refresher. If a group picks up the starter set with no prior frame of reference they can still muddle through it (plenty of people have done it in the past and still do today), and will generally get better as time goes on. I think the sets do a pretty good job of covering the most pertinent situations that will come up, and the rest is learned with experience. The starter set should get you started, the DMG is the complete reference once you're ready to move past the basics.

A case where someone has no previous D&D experience, no video/social media access and chooses to pick up the DMG to learn, I'd highly discourage it. It's just not going to end well and I don't think the DMG should be written with that utter novice situation.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

The D&D learning to play stuff is on YouTube, with directions to check there in the modern Starter Set


There's also this other Learning to Play series with less specificity towards the Starter Set



Both are fine to good

First video alternate title: What is D&D?

Second Video alternate title: How to Play D&D (i.e. the play loop from p6 of the PHB)

1. The Setup = The DM describes the environment.
2. The Decision = The players describe what they want to do.
3. The Result = The DM narrates the results of the adventurers' actions.

The both do a solid job, IMO. Quite adequate for what they were trying to accomplish, in any case.

 

[pointofyou]

My experience is most people start out as players, and become DMs later. I think there is some of that ideology in the starter sets that someone whose had previous DMing experience will run the game, they just may need a refresher. If a group picks up the starter set with no prior frame of reference they can still muddle through it (plenty of people have done it in the past and still do today), and will generally get better as time goes on. I think the sets do a pretty good job of covering the most pertinent situations that will come up, and the rest is learned with experience. The starter set should get you started, the DMG is the complete reference once you're ready to move past the basics.

A case where someone has no previous D&D experience, no video/social media access and chooses to pick up the DMG to learn, I'd highly discourage it. It's just not going to end well and I don't think the DMG should be written with that utter novice situation.

I muddled through DMing when I was new to the hobby. I do not dispute the value of experience but I think it'd be a good thing if the books didn't make muddling through mandatory.

If there is any TRPG someone is going to purchase with no prior history with or knowledge of the category it's D&D. I think it'd be a good thing if the books were helpful to such a someone.

 

[Malmuria]

Let's say you want to learn a language. In order of increasing usefulness, you can
1. Buy a grammar book and dictionary and read them
2. Buy a text book and work through the examples, and/or use an app
3. Take a course that combines a text book with live in person interaction
4. Move to a foreign country and muddle your way through

In my experience, the last one leads to many awkward and frustrating situations, but has the best results, and fairly quickly. If you move to a place where you truly cannot get by in your native language, you learn to communicate quickly. Meanwhile, all of your everyday interactions, from whats on TV to what you hear on the streets, force you to engage with that language. But if you can't immerse yourself in the language, you're better off learning through and with others and with the aid of materials (a textbook, etc) that are specifically designed for teaching.

Good textbooks will teach the elements of a topic step by step with clear exercises for practice. There might be a limited glossary in the back, but fundamentally they are for incremental teaching and not reference. Good reference books, on the other hand, will organize materials for those already familiar with the language who might need to look up a grammar rule or a word.

So to bring this analogy around, when it comes to DMing the best way is to just start a weekly game, mess up, and try again. Second best might be playing with people who are experienced or new but interested in learning, so you can learn together. Third would be a text specifically designed for instruction (starter set). Last would be trying to learn only from the reference books (core 3 books).

 

[Benjamin Olson]

I started DMing with the original 5e Starter Set and the PHB, having only ever played actual tabletop briefly once decades earlier (though I had played Neverwinter Nights 2, so there was a fair amount of general D&D game concept and lore familiarity). It was all I needed.

Since I had the PHB and a set of dice the only material in the original Starter Set relevant to me was the adventure, but it was still worth it (I think I paid $16 on Amazon, which per dollar made it easily my best D&D purchase outside the PHB). Basically what makes the original Starter Set, Essentials Kit, and presumably the new Starter Set (which I haven't seen yet) work is that they have manageable easy to run adventures written with a little handholding for new DMs, and all the things you would need to cross-reference the DMG or Monster Manual for in short appendices in the back. They are also simple modules with lots of loosly connected things going on, such that you can expand, change, or improvise with minimal consequences, rather than having every change break a dozen other things in a typical overly intricate and sprawling WotC adventure (which I think also suffer from being too vast for the authors to keep the details straight, much less the DMs). I wish all the 5e adventures were written like these.

Note that while I ran a game having never properly played 5e, and only sort of played 3.X, doing so did require sitting down and reading most of the PHB, as well as a lot of stress and mistakes that wouldn't of been as pronounced if I had played a bit of 5e first, ideally with someone helping me learn the rules. But if you don't have 5e gaming opportunities in your life, or find the prospect of reading a book and running a game less intimidating than going to find a game to join, it is a perfectly viable option.

I bought the DMG early as well but bounced off of it, and never used it in that first campaign except to add some extra magical items. That's not exactly an indictment of it's quality so much as a the fact that I had just read the PHB mostly cover to cover, and had an adventure to prep, and something had to give. The DMG is not particularly well suited to a brand new DM (or at least poorly organized for them). It lost 2016 me when it began with worldbuilding, a very interesting and compelling subject of very little relevance to someone trying to prep a Lost Mines of Phandelver campaign to run in a few days and still struggling to keep all the base game rules straight.

Generally I feel like the DMG suffers from organizational problems. It covers worldbuilding and adventure design before running adventures. Now this makes all the broad conceptual sense in the world, but even I, the guy who chose to DM before playing, came to the book for help running a prewritten adventure. How many people are ever going to open the DMG for the first time with the plan to create a campaign setting and adventure from scratch and follow through on that?

 

[Oofta]

Something else to consider is that some people just are never going to enjoy being a DM or be any good at it. Doesn't matter what resources you provide, it's just not going to be their groove. There's nothing we can do about that.

So if someone picks up a starter set and decides to not continue DMing we have no way of knowing if it was lack of resources or lack of interest/capability/dedication. With the number of resources available, I'm betting that the vast majority of times it's the latter. The only real way to learn to DM is to do it. Very few people are naturals at DMing, most of us just stuck with it and got better over time.

 

[gorice]

Let's say you want to learn a language. In order of increasing usefulness, you can
1. Buy a grammar book and dictionary and read them
2. Buy a text book and work through the examples, and/or use an app
3. Take a course that combines a text book with live in person interaction
4. Move to a foreign country and muddle your way through

In my experience, the last one leads to many awkward and frustrating situations, but has the best results, and fairly quickly. If you move to a place where you truly cannot get by in your native language, you learn to communicate quickly. Meanwhile, all of your everyday interactions, from whats on TV to what you hear on the streets, force you to engage with that language. But if you can't immerse yourself in the language, you're better off learning through and with others and with the aid of materials (a textbook, etc) that are specifically designed for teaching.

Good textbooks will teach the elements of a topic step by step with clear exercises for practice. There might be a limited glossary in the back, but fundamentally they are for incremental teaching and not reference. Good reference books, on the other hand, will organize materials for those already familiar with the language who might need to look up a grammar rule or a word.

So to bring this analogy around, when it comes to DMing the best way is to just start a weekly game, mess up, and try again. Second best might be playing with people who are experienced or new but interested in learning, so you can learn together. Third would be a text specifically designed for instruction (starter set). Last would be trying to learn only from the reference books (core 3 books).

This is a useful but problematic analogy. If you do language immersion, you are learning the language as it is spoken by a community of speakers. Generally, the worst thing that can happen is that you learn an unfashionable dialect and people make fun of you.

If you learn to DM by doing, the 'community of speakers' is your own table. We see this problem all the time, including in threads like these: everyone is speaking 'D&D', but no-one can understand each other. We're all mostly speaking gibberish and reinventing the wheel. This problem is probably insoluble, but a responsible approach to teaching would try and establish some kind of baseline.

One interesting point in which the analogy works is that, in my experience and many other people's, immersion learning tends to plateau after a while. Those much-maligned grammars and dictionaries are important learning tools that remain useful to advanced speakers.

 

[MockingBird]

In my experience, when I started out, I had only heard about this infamous game (late 2e era, mid 90s). I got the black box starter that came with the audio cd. That's all I had to go by. YouTube didn't exist. I finally got the PHB and DMG. I studied those books at the expense of my grades. I had no idea, other than the audio cd how to DM. I just kept at it. There were things that I didn't know until way later (xp for gold). I see it as waaaaay easier to learn how to DM and generally play the game these days regardless of how helpful the 5e DMG is. Even still IMO the 5e DMG is light years ahead of the 2e DMG. I dabbled in 3e (too worried about girls during that time). With 4e I may have looked over the DMG a handful of times. Out of all the editions I've played and DM'd I have found the 5e DMG the most helpful and the one I've read through the most. I think new people will be fine with what's available.