Maybe I’m just a sucker, but there’s nothing quite like reading through a fresh Dungeon Master’s Guide to make a fella want to bust out some note paper and start cranking away at a new campaign. The Player’s Handbook and Monster Manual are generally the most useful of the core rulebooks. They have been since AD&D. They’re where you find that particulars of character creation and advancement, the particulars for any skills or spells that may come into play, the hard numbers and color text for the various and sundry bad-guys. The DMG is mostly used to for a couple of rules that players rarely have cause to worry about, and used to be the repository of magic items (no more in 4e; those are in the PHB now). Once you’re in Dungeon Master mode, the DMG isn’t something you have to lean on much.
But getting into Dungeon Master mode is precisely what it is there for. It is chock-full of advice regarding the adjudication of rules, working with players and player characters, devising adventures and settings and non-player characters, all the things that anybody that has played a roleplaying game pretty much already knows. No shocking new revelations here. So what it is that I find so interesting about reading a two-page treatise on building a basic beginning, middle, and end for a D&D adventure? I already know how to do it. I’ve done it dozens of times, with some modest degree of success. It isn’t hard to set a plot hook: the players know when they’re being pointed towards the plotline. It isn’t hard to plot out a map for some musty old tomb and dig up some critters from the Monster Manual for the players’ characters to slaughter.
The real value of actually reading through the Dungeon Master’s Guide is not in its utility as a reference book. That isn’t its core purpose. The DMG is there to affirm and reinforce your existing good habits, point out your bad ones, and remind you of how you should be handling things that aren’t quite right at the gaming table. Did you forget to throw in a couple of gimme encounters during the last campaign? Fights that the players would just breeze through to make them look extra heroic and cool? Were you a little more miserly than you probably should have been, doling out few rewards for too much effort? God knows I was. I’ll have to work on that next time around.
Recently I’ve been in player mode, showing up for game night with character-sheet in hand, ready to follow the plot where it leads me, lend a hand to the other players, and instigate a little trouble here and there. Reading through the DMG has me wanting to put on the DM hat again, though. Gotta find my graph paper…
Seriously, Burrowowl…
You have NO idea how much you are making me want to game again.
I have no clue how many hours of my life have been spent with dice in one hand and soda in the other, but it’s been a hell of a lot. I don’t know how how old you are (though if you played Teenagers from Outer Space, you can’t be that much of a pup) , but I’m old enough to remember buying brand new D&D (not AD&D) modules and being very protective of my level 5 Elf. Not Elf, fighter. Just “elf”.
My son is two. When he’s old enough, his dear old dad will have to leave his old 1st edition stuff out someplace easy to find and see what happens.
Turkish Prawn
One of the great things about D&D as a hobby, of course, is that there’s no need to keep up with it. Find that old banker’s box in your attic, dust off your old Red Box, and you’re good to go. The dirty little secret, just like with college, is that they’re selling us something we already have. You don’t need the books, really. They’re just a nice tool.
My first RPG purchase was actually the Chaosium Elfquest box set, followed shortly by the D&D Red Box from TSR. These were bought with loans against lawn-mowing money from my dad, if memory serves. Good investments; I still have that old 20-sided white d10 in my dice bag. That makes me fairly oldschool, but certainly not as OG as some people I know.
Burrowowl… You are seriously freaking me out here.
ElfQuest
I own all of the original black and white, golden age sized comics (mostly 1st printings), all the color compilations and the roll playing game. Do I qualify as a huge gaming geek yet?
Since we’re rolling down memory lane, how about Battletech, Robotech, Star Frontiers, Traveler, and Albedo? I’ve also have played a fair amount of Shadowrun, Stormbringer and even a bit of Marvel Super Heros.
Wow… You’re really bringing me back with ElfQuest though. I was even a member of the fan club.
Turkish Prawn
No on the Star Frontiers, Albedo, and Stormbringer, but yes on all the others. Marvel Superheroes, with its FASERIP system (rulebooks available online in PDF), is something I miss sometimes. That was the first game were I really started running into my problem with creating character names in a way that mattered to me. You could basically just name your character “Steve” or “Mike” in any sci-fi game. You could string together a couple of gutteral syllables or something fruity and elfie for a fantasy character. But superheroes need cool names, and I’m just not good at coming up with them.
Robotech is a setting I’ve always liked, but had those terrible Palladium rules at their core (also used for TMNT and Other Strangeness and Rifts). Battletech was something that just never saw a lot of use other than a little stint of brewing up homemade mecha and duking it out gladiator-style. Traveler provided a great deal of the underlying causes for my general aversion to space-travelling sci-fi as the setting for a RPG: when you can potentially plot a course to anywhere it’s really easy to get paralyzed by your own freedom. I always preferred Cyberpunk (the R. Talsorian game) to Shadowrun, as I like to keep my Elves and Orcs separate from my machineguns and robots.
The 4E DMG is most definitely the best DMG to date. I’m reading it in prep for switching from 3.5 to 4E and I am reminded about a couple of things I’ve stopped doing that should be picked up again.
Having been a player in 4E for a couple of games outside of my normal group, I think it most definitely plays better than any D&D game before. Teamwork in combat is rewarded. Paying attention to the board when it’s not your turn is rewarded. Being able to reposition opponents and allies…that is one of the single best improvements to the combat system. The downside I see is groups that don’t use grids are basically forced into it now.