Dungeon Master's Guide, Chapter 1

Finally! FedEx is an absolute pain to deal with. But two days after I was supposed to get my package, it is finally here. And it is a nice little haul, I must say: The Dungeon Master's Guide, the Gazetteer, The Sunless Citadel, Pool of Radiance: Attack on Myth Drannor, Dragon #275, and Dungeon #82. The only thing I'm missing from this month is Living Greyhawk Journal #1, which was prohibitively expensive to get at this time. But I'm looking at an alternate source, and I should have a copy by the end of the month. I hope.

So, we're going to dive into the 3.0 Dungeon Master's Guide. And, to my surprise, the copy I received is, like my Player's Handbook, it's a first printing. Which means I'll need the errata printed off, and there's quite a bit of that. But I'm fine with it; it's a first printing, after all.

So, the DMG is broken down into 8 chapters, so I'll cover one chapter a day until it's done. That should still leave me time to get the rest of the month's stuff taken care of before October arrives. The chapters are:

Chapter 1: Dungeon Mastering
Chapter 2: Characters
Chapter 3: Running the Game
Chapter 4: Adventures
Chapter 5: Campaigns
Chapter 6: World-Building
Chapter 7: Rewards
Chapter 8: Magic Items

There's also an appendix with Quick Reference Tables, and an Index. No special features at the end of the book like the 2000 Survival Kit in the PH, though.

We begin with the one-page Introduction, which starts off with the (not unreasonable) assumption that you have already read the Player's Handbook. It talks up the idea of being the DM and what an important role it is, then breaks down the contents (chapters as listed above). There's a reminder about the rounding and multiplying rules, and a final note about using your DM powers wisely.

The first chapter begins with a brief word about the job requirements for being a DM. Then it breaks them down. Providing adventures can mean creating your own or buying them (or downloading the free ones on the WotC website, which they don't mention here). DMs also sometimes have to teach the game, so it's important that they know the rules very well, at least as well as the players do. Finally, the DM has to run the entire world, and even if it's a canned one (such as the Gazetteer, which I will review later), it's still the DM's world to run, and no two campaigns will be the same even if the DMs use the same materials to run them.

Okay, so what style of play do your players want? Do they want to be murderhobos, or method actors, or somewhere in between? Do they want a serious, epic style of game, or are they looking to recreate Monty Python movies? These are pretty important things to figure out, because you don't want to be running an epic quest where the party is trying to stop a demonic overlord from sucking the world into the Abyss, and the players are too busy slaughtering orc babies and whining about the violence inherent in the system. Those things just don't mix.

A brief discussion on adjudicating the game follows; the basic idea is the core rules trump everything else, so when a player pulls out The Player's Guide to Ultra-Powerful Wizards and insists that he can use the latest spell, feat or magic item, you can say 'nope, not in this campaign' and that is that. This is an important thing for DMs to know; you don't have to include everything in your game, especially if it doesn't fit or it's too overpowered.

I say this while doing a review and building a campaign that is going to use absolutely everything...

Keeping the game moving is also discussed, as well as how to make sessions more memorable. Game balance is next, and it will be interesting to see how it is addressed in the rule books. I myself have seen plenty of discussion on the internet about how high-level wizards are death machines while high-level fighters are just thicker meat shields. I suppose we will see what happens, won't we?

Since one of the first things every group does is house-rule their game, the book discusses how to change the rules without breaking things. It's pretty important to actually know the rules as written before modifying them. The main questions to ask are, 'why is this rule being changed', 'do I understand the original rule that I am changing', and 'will this change just affect one class, race, etc.'. This is all common sense stuff to long-time gamers, but remember, a lot of new players were joining the D&D craze in 2000. So this is good stuff for them. And even the old-timers need to be reminded of how things are supposed to work.

The rest of the chapter is about running a game session. It discusses knowing the rules, the adventure, the players, the characters, and the setting the adventure is run in. You also need to avoid metagaming, which is where players use non-character knowledge in the game. Don't let them do that.

The end of the chapter includes a handy checklist for running a good game session. It includes setting up the game beforehand, as well as discussions with the players about what they plan to do in the following session. Again, this is more suitable for newbies; long-time gamers don't even have to think about how they run their sessions anymore.

So, that's a quick rundown of the first chapter. Tomorrow, I'll get into the chapter on Characters, which will include quite a bit of information for both PCs and NPCs.