Dungeon Master’s Guide 2024: Some Highs and Lows

As with the Player’s Handbook, there’s an enormous amount of absorbing to do of this text, so today I’m giving you some favorite and least-favorite changes or new ideas offered in the new DMG. This book is immense and picking is going to be a challenge.

At its core, this book is for new DMs. I’m not one of those and it’s been thirty years since I was. But until and unless they plan to release a DMG for people who have done this for a bit (not happening), this DMG needs to work for users other than the newest ones as well.

Ten Good Changes

1. Improvising Damage shows up nice and early in this book, with a lot of practical applications. This is about half of the important content from 4e’s legendary Page 42. (The other half is DC scaling, and pretty trivially easy in 5e.) It also appears in the new DM Screen.
2. Chapter 6 is a much more in-depth treatment of the planes than we’ve gotten in any sourcebook without Manual of the Planes or Planescape in its title. It’s not enough to run no-prep adventures, but it’s a great start for adventures on any plane. There are a few places where they decide to be “funny” that don’t really work—Torchy’s as a tavern in the middle of nowhere that is run by a sentient Flame Tongue (Mace) doesn’t fit in any but the silliest campaigns. Are there enough “ballooning enthusiasts” just hanging out on the Elemental Plane of Fire to keep a tavern running?
   1. Honestly, though, D&D doesn’t need WotC to build in the silly at all. The PCs will be silly enough on their own. Yes, I’m still annoyed about the 2024 Legend Lore, please don’t make me rewrite spell effects on the fly just to preserve a game’s tone.
3. XP Budget per Character replaces XP Thresholds by Character Level, and it leads to the more dangerous encounters that most DMs (including a lot of your favorite Actual Play DMs) were using anyway. The old “Low” danger is gone, and the new “Low” is a little bit better than the old “Medium.” You might still run 2x Deadly or higher encounters, but (given that MM stat blocks are also rescaled) overall the danger level of the game does a better job keeping up with PCs in late Tier 2. There’s also no multiplier for multiple enemies, which was a bear to use and not really in line with the game narratives DMs want to use.
4. There’s so much detail to examine in the Greyhawk setting material in Chapter 5 that there’s truly no way for me to do it justice in this article. It’s answering a few of my other critiques, like “why even bother with Backgrounds”—I really like that some of the locations detailed in the Free City have in-line headers for Character Background ties. For example: “Adventurers with the Criminal or Guard background might have a connection to the Grand Citadel involving a past run-in with the law or past service to the watch.” That’s great stuff.
   1. The emphasis on regional stories, even expressed very briefly, is excellent. I regard it as a huge part of what’s been missing in their presentation of the Realms over the course of 5e. Talking about trend-lines and what kinds of stories you tell here as opposed to there—great, more of this. Basically I’m trying to say that this chapter isn’t even 30 pages, but it leans hard on why the world needs adventurers, and that’s the number-one thing I want out of a setting.
5. The Living History sidebar on page 160 is part of the Greyhawk chapter, but it’s also high-value advice for your games set in absolutely any setting. Every setting “has a long history of ancient empires and more recent wars” for which you should “[h]ighlight significant in-world details by revealing them in the course of your adventures.” The techniques are all great, and I especially appreciate this as advice targeting more experienced, even 50-year-veteran, DMs.
6. The Treasure chapter is excellent overall, expanding on the magic items offered in the 2014 DMG. Quick piece of advice—many of the Common items in particular get a lot more interesting and mysterious when you run them through all of the tables of Magic Item Special Features (pp. 222-223).
   1. The Hammer of Thunderbolts is still one of the most absurdly OP things, though, and I question whether anyone has playtested this, or if they just read it and signed off on it because of time pressure. I had to rewrite it for my campaign so that anyone could have fun. AoE Stuns, several times a day? Instant kills on Giants? Nah, I’m good.
   2. There’s also a new treasure-theme thing going on, where magic items are broken up into Arcana, Armaments, Implements, and Relics. There’s a mention that this will be explained in the Monster Manual, but at a glance it looks like Mage, Warrior, Expert, and Priest gear, respectively. (But those aren’t hard boundaries in any case.)
7. Huge fan of Appendix B: Maps. I would buy this Appendix and get enormous use out of it in Roll20. My players would, in general, not care much at all that it’s a black-and-white drawn map rather than a lush full-color one (they like those too, but does it let the scene happen? is a higher priority). This chapter could handle a lot of my players’ unexpected moves.
8. Chapter 5: Creating Campaigns has good advice for campaign-scale play, arc plotting, targeting characters with encounters, and I particularly like how it drills down on the kinds of conflicts that typify various flavors of fantasy. I don’t really agree with the pacing implied in Character Arcs, but that’s because I like extremely long campaigns—Aurikesh is 156 sessions in and has, I hope, vast stretches of campaign still to come. If characters only moved their personal stories forward once every five levels, well, that’s not really working for us.
9. I like the scaling functions for traps in Chapter 3: DM’s Toolbox. Each trap has an earliest tier at which it appears, usually 1-4, with a baseline damage and save DC, and higher values for later tiers. I can’t emphasize enough how much this needs more guidance on when and how to use traps, though; this tries to cram into one paragraph what the 4e DMG 2 lavished a half-page sidebar on (4e DMG 2, p. 65). Bring back that sidebar with only the lightest of changes (“don’t use traps that don’t give XP” doesn’t communicate a lot in 5e).
10. I am glad there are rules on combat with mobs. I’ll need to see them in use to know how I actually feel about them. They created a situation where you wind up back-forming THAC0 (“Roll Needed”), so that’s hilarious, but I get why they had to do that. The Targets in Area of Effect table seems like it would… not be the easiest to use, and there are common situations where you need to ignore the table and follow the fiction (but I’m glad they mention that!).

Not a Change, But Frequently Overlooked

The optional Success at a Cost rule in Chapter 2 (p. 30) was also in the 2014 DMG, which famously no one has ever read. Maybe, somehow, some people will read this DMG and discover that partial success or success at a cost are literally part of the text of 5e.

Five Changes that Don’t Go Far Enough

1. Chapter 2: Running the Game opens with a discussion of player types (basically lifted, through years of rewriting, from Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering) and continues with Group Size, Multiple DMs, and so on. It’s a pretty good fundamental presentation of several different ways D&D, and TTRPGs in general, can run. I dearly wish that this section had carved out some space for the West Marches campaign model, which is near and dear to my heart since I’ve been using my own variant of it for twelve years now. Now, it’s a niche interest, albeit one that lots of folks discuss online and try out, but a later chapter (Bastions) desperately needs at least the aspect of troupe-style play as available terminology.
   1. This stands out all the more if they’re also going to include things no modern group does, like the extremely old-school party caller role (Party Leader, p23). I have serious doubts about that fitting in with any group that hasn’t been playing since the mid-70s at the latest. If you’re not at least including advice so that party leaders aren’t quarterbacking the whole party (that is, pressuring them into the party leader’s concept of optimal play), you shouldn’t include it in the first place.
2. Creating a Background. Look, the Backgrounds of the 2024 PH are really bad. Ability Score Increase coming from your Background is a hard push to powergame your Background, and it’s a purely unforced error. The PH Backgrounds also capitulate on Backgrounds offering any amount of story, as they did in 2014—because 2014 didn’t get it perfectly right, they just stopped trying. So the DMG comes out and admits that the Background is an empty rules appendage for giving you a little extra stuff. All I want from this is some mention that you can enrich your game by engaging with the story of character backgrounds. Your Background can do a ton of work to tie your character into society and give them assets and responsibilities other than murderhobo, but it takes thought and not treating the Background like a package of stats.
3. “Don’t Repeat Game States” is a piece of advice given in Chapter 2: Running the Game, on how to keep combat moving. Because the book only has one paragraph to explain this idea, it stops at one example, and that example is bad advice. If a character Disengages, don’t have the enemy re-engage them. This is okay advice in the narrow case of wanting to hurry a combat along to its end (though it’s the weakest of the techniques listed here), and otherwise actively bad advice. Monks and Rogues use Disengage-and-Reengage loops as a core part of their gameplay, and you absolutely should not have monsters commit obvious blunders that aren’t in keeping with their goals in the narrative. Another example or some use-case explanation could really help here.
4. Appendix A: Lore Glossary is super strong for just helping new users, or experienced players who have played only one or two published settings, get caught up on who’s who across the D&D multiverse. I dearly wish they’d done more tagging of each entry with its associated settings, though. Looking at you, Ashardalon and Baba Yaga. Some of these entries fall far short of earning their column-inches, though—the Fallbacks, the League of Malevolence, Phandalin (you absolutely do not care about this place until and unless you’re running Lost Mines or Phandelver and Below), and Valor’s Call would all get the chop from me.
   1. Having said all of that, D&D between 2014 and now has seemed so reluctant to engage with having canon that this chapter gets high marks from me overall. I think one of D&D’s strengths and the causes of its lasting market dominance has been the way it creates a shared language of game lore.
5. I love that there are Adventure Examples in Chapter 4: Creating Adventures. The five adventures aren’t all instant hits for me and I think some of them could use one more twist reveal about halfway through, but I love that they’re here as worked examples and starting points. Just one big thing: this book desperately needs to teach skills, tricks, and tips that are specific to running D&D in late Tier 2 and above. This would have been an ideal place for it, but the highest-level adventure is for level 7 characters.
   1. “The Boreal Ball” is my favorite adventure in the book, but also one of the most challenging to run well. It would be further improved by making it the cover for an investigation or heist. The premise mentions schemes and intrigues, but the text under-delivers on that front.
   2. The Adventure Situations by Level section (pp. 107-109) show that they’re not ignoring the need for high-level support. These are pretty good tables, though I do wish that D&D didn’t move away from using Humanoid opponents in the late game. There’s so much good in pitting PCs against their foils, those who most represent the rejection or failure of the PCs’ heroic ethos.

Five Changes I’m Not Sold On

1. The guidance around designing new monsters has been gutted. The 2014 DMG’s guidance was always a loose approximation of the game’s math, but it did us the favor of existing at all, so that DMs and third-party designers could have some basis for their work. That’s just gone. Monster creation is now limited to making tiny modifications to existing stat blocks, as long as you don’t get too creative. This is one of the worst decisions in the book, corroding not only the individual DM’s usage but the training ground for future D&D writers.
2. I am so tired of the D&D cartoon characters showing up as wink-at-the-camera references in everything. Please, stop.
3. I’m sure there are people who need and will use the many, many tracking sheets that the book offers. May you use them in joy. For me, every single one of them is wasted page space. It seems to me that most DMs would not want to print out nine pages of very light prompts to fill out. They’re available as form-fillable, printable PDFs on D&D Beyond, which is a half-step toward a robust campaign-management tool. Until D&DB does offer a fully featured campaign management tool, though, I think these forms are not super appealing as a solution.
4. The one tracking sheet I straight-up think should not exist is the Magic Item Tracker. I detest the idea that there’s something—even something in the DMG—that a player could point to as “proof” that the game has too many or too few magic items. This appears on the page facing the sidebar “Are Magic Items Necessary?”, and that sidebar gives a firm No, but the tracker and guidance for its use, as well as the Magic Items Awarded by Level table, really undermine that.
   1. Magic item supply was a cause of so much friction in 3.x and 4e, where magic items were assumed in the game’s math. One of the things that most strongly sold me on 5e was that magic items could be interesting and special and extra stuff rather than assumed and necessary. I don’t want to give even the faintest of ammunition to “oh the DM is doing it Wrong.” (This feels completely different from receiving feedback that “magic items are fun and I would like to see a few more of them.” It would be fun if You’re doing it wrong.)
5. Oh, this is nitpicky beyond belief but it does bother me. In Gods and Other Powers on p. 74, there’s a description of the lower-order divine ranks of quasi-deities, which includes demigods, titans, and vestiges. The description of demigods and vestiges are fine, and I’m delighted for vestiges to get this much pride-of-place. However. The description of titans is the most specifically wrong that it could be. “Titans are the creation of deities.” C’mon now, if you’re going to include something called titans and make that mean something other than “really heckin’ tall,” you owe it to mythology and tradition to at least make them exist alongside the gods as creatures of the First World or something.

One Chapter That Doesn’t Work at All

Chapter 8, Bastions. It is a mess, top to bottom. Much earlier in the book, on page 19, the text emphasizes that The Game Is Not an Economy, and boy howdy is that true. They didn’t try to make any of the money make sense. I have a lot of unkind words for doing even less than a fig leaf of helping the DM present a believable or immersive world, but Chapter 8 makes that so much worse.

Running a game where PCs have major assets like Bastions is a different style of game than when they’re all rootless wanderers. To the same extent that a Bastion is an asset, it’s also a responsibility, at least if you’re touching on the fantasy of good deeds and community at all. This text does nothing to help you fold Bastions into the narrative, and instead creates something that is unusually resistant to narrative engagement, despite an earlier chapter talking about how much a home base strengthens player engagement.

There are basically three problems that add up to “the whole thing.”

• If you aren’t there in person, your Bastion can only use the Maintain action. You have to be home to use any of the interesting actions—for some reason, your whole Bastion forgets about written communication or the Sending
• Basic Facilities don’t do anything and cost money. Special Facilities do something and can’t be purchased. Why in Heaven’s name wouldn’t you at least want to give the players this exciting way to spend their treasure on the part that does something? It’s one thing to “not have an economy,” and quite another to say loud and proud “we’re happy to give you gold, but not a way to spend it on fun stuff.” Your Special Facilities are gained by gaining levels, and each one has a level prerequisite. You’ve got to be level 13+ to run a pub. There has to be some point at which the mechanics connect to and support the narrative, but… apparently not?
• All of the Events can be safely ignored, with no effect that can last longer than a few turns of continued neglect. The greatest effect it can have on the game is that there’s no point in going back to your Bastion for awhile because the Special Facility you wanted to use isn’t working right now (but it’ll fix itself at no cost to you). There are several cases where the Event poses a decision, but you get a beneficial outcome even from doing nothing. This is less engaging than a Skinner box.

Conclusion

I have a lot of praise and a lot of strongly-worded critique for this book. If you listen to my Edition Wars episodes on previous DMGs, you’ll see that (other than the 4e DMG 2) this is a trend-line through all of them. Overall, this is a great book, but one with which I have some fundamental philosophical differences—specifically around creating a sense of reality in the world and in the players’ experience of the game.

I know we’re never going to get it, but I so dearly wish that the incisive, practical quality of this writing were applied to a 5e DMG 2 that can get into more use cases, like running high-level games, engaging expert players, creating challenging tactics, running romance safely, or complicated social encounters, that kind of thing. When this book is on, it’s genuinely wonderful. It’s a huge book and it still doesn’t cover everything I would want. That’s just a truth of DMing advice, though, and utterly inescapable.

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