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Message: <blockquote data-quote="S'mon" data-source="post: 5687588" data-attributes="member: 463">IME most of your players are going to ruck up with a Player's Handbook 1, and possibly nothing else, so you need one of those, even if you think it's been superseded by Essentials.  Plus it has Rituals and all the basic rules in one place, admittedly pre-errata.  I find that travelling to the D&D Meetup, if I leave it behind it's the one book I always regret not bringing.You may want to get Heroes of the Fallen Lands/Forgotten Kingdoms, alternately wait and see if a player is wanting to use them for their PC.  If not (and IME nearly all players still start with the PHB) you don't really need them.  If your players are complete newbies though then I'd recommend you get a Fallen Lands to take them through chargen.You need a monster book - Monster Vault has better designed monsters than Monster Manual, plus loads of pretty tokens and a decent adventure.  So get that.  Later on you'll likely want to get Monster Manual III in order to have lots of high-level creatures; for Epic level play it's a godsend.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />There are some classic monsters in Monster Manual I & II that don't appear in MV, but unless you're converting a pre-4e adventure and don't have a DDI subscription, I don't think those books are vital.At that point there is surprisingly little you need from other books; you'll almost never use the DM's Guide or DM's Kit at table.  Both are very useful for advice on encounter building and the reward system, though.  The DM's Kit has far more additional useful bits with the counters and a very well received adventure, so I'd say probably get that, even though I don't own it.  DMG is fine though.So my core recommendation would be:Player's Handbook, + maybe Heroes of the Fallen LandsMonster Vault, + probably get Monster Manual III laterDM's Kit, ahead of DMG</blockquote>

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