4E Dungeon Master’s Guide 2: In-Depth Review

Not so long ago, the 4^th Edition DMGII came out. With the general high quality of 4E splatbooks so far, this looked promising: but for those out there for whom “promising” isn’t enough, this in-depth review should give you everything you need to know about the book, helping with the critical decision of whether or not to actually go out and buy it. If you don’t want to read through all of this, scroll down to the conclusion.

The DMGII is designed to complement the original DMG, fix and clarify a few things, provide more options, and help DMs, both new and old, simply become better at running the game. The vast majority of the book is “soft” theory, with little or no rules or numbers: it’s designed to help, not to tell you how to do your job. The DMGII also has a large section devoted to the Paragon tier, so if you’ve been wanting more on that, this will help. I believe the DMGIII will cover the Epic tier in a similar way.

They rock. I love the 4E artwork. Although there appears to be a picture of a dinosaur looking at what I think is a time machine looking like a giant d20.

The first chapter of the DMGII is entitled “Group Storytelling”, and focuses on helping a DM write a story. It covers everything ranging from dealing with branching storylines, to managing roleplaying hooks; from how to use recurring NPCs, to tip on getting the players involved in cooperative world-building. The whole chapter is riddled with examples showing how all these theoretical ideas could work in practice. There are a few rules section, the most interesting of which is for building a companion character for players. The rules appear to be quite good, and are at just the right point of being good, but not too complicated. A sidebar recommends using these companion rules instead of players playing multiple characters, should you have only a couple of players, and I think that it would work quite well. It’s a bit difficult to write much more on this chapter, but I guarantee you it’s worth reading. I personally have come out of it understanding a whole lot more about how to build a campaign and manage the story.

The second chapter builds upon the DMG to provide even more advice on structuring individual encounters. It starts by going through the various purposes and types of encounters, and expands into how to build encounters for larger and smaller groups, and the use of movement and terrain. All very nice, but the subsections of this chapter are where the real gems are.

There is an interesting section on pages 8-10 of the DMG which describes various types of players, such as actors, explorers, powergamers, and storytellers. It’s interesting enough, but this new section in the DMGII expands that and takes it to amazing levels. With nearly a page on each type of player, the writers have made some absolutely amazing insights into how people play the game: it’s interesting matching up each person in your gaming group with a player type, and seeing how much they agree with the description. Alongside each player type, there are some solid recommendations on encounter design, story and campaign design, and even seating arrangements, to get the most out of all your players and ensure they’re all going to have fun. Honestly, I can’t think of a campaign that I’ve run or played where this chapter wouldn’t have been useful.

The DMGII traps section does everything the DMGI failed to do: it tells you how and why to include them in your game, it tells you how to make your own, and it provides significant advice on the most important thing of all: how to make traps fun. They’ve also thrown in some more sample traps. Perhaps the best bit is “Top Ten Traps To Avoid”… I think Gary Gygax broke all 10 rules… (“Extremely Deadly Traps”, anyone?) If you’ve ever had trouble with traps in 4E, or wanted to know more about how to include traps in your D&D game, this section is an excellent read.

The DMGI Skill Challenges didn’t exactly… work. The DCs were borked, the rules were odd, and many people just through the concept out the window. This DMGII chapter fixes all that. Apart from including the current version of the Skill Challenges rules in all their errata’d glory, the chapter goes into further detail as to how to use them, and actually make Skill Challenges work in a game. It’s probably not something that’ll make you buy the book, but once you have the book, the chapter is a welcome inclusion.

The DMGI had a few bits about this, and some Templates, but the DMGII goes a little further. There are a massive pile of themes and Templates to apply to existing monsters, and, in line with the MM2 changes, provides a short but important explanation on the new rules for making Elites, Solos, and Minions. A lot of the original rules and monsters for all were not written very well; along with the MM2, this chapter fixes most of what was wrong with monsters in 4E D&D.

There’s a fairly large chunk of the DMGII devoted to alternate reward systems. For example, there various powers, abilities, and pseudo-item which you can grant characters. I personally find it a bit pointless, and it all it too strongly heeding to the rigid structure of 4E Magic Items. In addition, there are some new Artifacts, once again using the Concordance system introduced in the DMG for managing how the player’s action change the power of the Artifact. The new Artifacts are quite nice, and well written. There’s an interesting extract from the 1^st Edition DMG showing how that book game sample methods of destroying an artefact… one possible method was being crushed by “the foot of a humble ant”. Better not take that one to the picnic.

Once again, D&D writers attempt to tackle organizations, which was notable tried in the 3.5 PHBII (with far too many rules…). My opinion on all of this is it should be completely up to the DM, and this section doesn’t really help all that: there’s helping, and then there’s stating the obvious. Wow! You can have rival organizations! Who would have thought?

Interestingly, several campaign examples are featured, with decent detail. For each sample campaign, there is a story overview for Heroic, Paragon, and Epic tiers, from which a DM can make a whole game from. Assuming the DM can make sure none of the players have read the DMGII, these campaign stories provide a decent option that is somewhere between a premade module, and a do-it-yourself campaign: indeed, they could serve as a stepping stone for newer DMs trying to leave the realm of premade modules.

Whilst the tier system is all well and good, there has been little to help DMs on how to make adventures to cope for more powerful characters. Presented are a few interesting options, as well as very detailed section on perhaps the most interesting city a D&D writer has ever come up with: Sigil, the City of Doors. Sigil is from the Planescape campaign setting, and is a hub, as such, for the planes. It has been around since 2^nd Edition, and has most recently been described in the DMGII and the Manual of the Planes. The information presented in the DMGII is very detailed, and more than enough to enable a DM to base an entire campaign in Sigil. Since Sigil is a nexus for planar travel, it is also quite simple to introduce it into an existing campaign. I’m against setting-specific information, but I just loved reading through this section: it’s just so cool, and very well written. Finally, there are a few sample encounters given. Whilst the theme of them is in line with Sigil, they could be easily adapted for any game, and include maps and monsters.

Once again, the 4E writers have managed to produce a book which is packed with quality content; be comparison to the frequent debacles of 3^rd Edition, I’m not sure how they keep it up. The 4E DMGII has a host of excellent content, particularly that on writing a story, dealing with different kinds of players, traps, and the section on Sigil. If any of these interest you, then the DMGII is definitely worth grabbing. It’s not the kind of book where you’ll be referencing it every game, but whether you are new or experienced at DMing, this book is fantastic for improving your DMing ability and making your game that much more awesome.

When I read these new 4E books, I get very confused. I’m still in a state of deciding whether I like 3.5 or 4E better. I’ve been playing 3.5 recently and loving it, but I keep finding one amazing thing about 4E: the quality of the books is amazing. The people writing these things are getting really quite good at what they do, and the game is better for it. Even if you play only 3.5, you might consider getting the DMGII: the 3.5 DMGs were lousy, and the general rule-less information and advice in the DMGII is fantastic no matter what system you play.

Similar Posts:

• Monster of the Week: Humans and PC races
• Monster of the Week: Dark Elf
• Horror Roleplaying Part 2: The Setup
• Monster of the Week: Mimic
• Making the Most of Magic