D&D’s new Dungeon Master’s Guide is a huge upgrade for newbies

The original 5th edition Dungeon Master’s Guide (2014) came to market during a delicate period for its publisher, Wizards of the Coast. Dungeons & Dragons’ 4th edition had been struggling to grow its audience for years, leading many to wonder if the seminal tabletop role-playing game could retain its dwindling relevance in the marketplace. As it turns out, 5th edition was indeed a hit, and D&D is now bigger than ever before in its more than 50-year history. That’s thanks in part to a solid mechanical foundation, but also to a bustling actual play community that continually raises the bar for performance and storytelling.

Now Wizards is making yet another attempt at revitalizing the D&D brand with a revised, updated, and expanded 5th edition Dungeon Master’s Guide (2024). I’m happy to say that it feels like exactly what the game and its fandom needs in this moment. It would have been easy for developers merely to chase the community, codifying the way that the modern game is played and the culture that surrounds it. And yes, they’ve done that to a very large extent. But the book also moves the game forward in important ways, adding new and exciting tweaks to an already winning formula. DMG feels equal parts essential and inspiring, making it a tremendous way to kick off the next half-century of D&D.

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The positive changes and additions to the DMG (2014) are clear from the get-go. Rather than 70 pages of rigorous world-building and cosmology, DMG (2024) now kicks off with some gentle hand-holding — including a lengthy section on comfort and safety at the table. To borrow a phrase from the late Carl Sagan, rather than creating a world from scratch it instead focuses on baking that apple pie to perfection. It’s barely 20 pages long, but every slice is delicious. 

Of course, this is also where the book’s efforts at curation kick in as well. The project’s lead art director, Kate Irwin, along with Wizards’ head of art, Josh Herman, have refreshed the look and feel of the DMG with dozens of carefully placed new pieces. They show off the incredible diversity of the experiences on offer from past adventures, inspiring readers to learn more about the game’s rich history without leading them too far toward any one setting. Bold, full-page paintings brimming with Easter eggs and in-jokes, carefully depicted martial and magical items, incredibly useful general-purpose cartography in the back — it all works hand in hand with the layout and graphic design to visually frame each element, creating a useful and memorable framework that is an absolute joy to page through.

It’s not all just pretty pictures, though. Where DMG (2024) truly excels compared to its predecessor is in how it arms Dungeon Masters with the tools and the inspiration to build a world and a campaign of their own. The middle chapters in the book — chapter 3, “DM’s Toolbox”; chapter 4, “Creating Adventures”; and chapter 5, “Creating Campaigns” — are more logically ordered and clearly laid out than the previous iteration. Thanks to that organization, as well as the density of the random tables included within each chapter, DMG (2024) becomes far more useful for DMs on a session-to-session basis. It’s suddenly transformed into a resource that can bail you out in a pinch with a clever puzzle or a nosy non-player character, rather than merely an encyclopedia of rules that gets pulled off the shelf every now and then for the group’s rules lawyer.

But the book’s usefulness doesn’t stop there. The DMG (2024) is 60 pages longer than the 2014 version, although some of those pages are quite a bit more useful than others.

On the useful side is the book-within-the-book on Greyhawk, one of D&D’s very first fictional settings dating back to the 1970s. The nearly 30-page section can easily function as a step-by-step model for DMs interested in creating a world of their own from scratch. Taken alongside the 15 pages of generic maps and the double-sided color poster tear-out map, this section is a scaffold just strong enough for players to hang their first campaign on. It’s an excellent addition to the guide, and a feature that will serve newcomers well for years to come.

On the less useful side, however, is the section on bastions. These are thematic, player-owned fortresses that can be optionally added to your game beginning at level five. While I admire the desire to give players more ownership and agency in the world they’re creating together at the table, I’m not sure fantasy real estate is the best way to go about that. The section itself is incredibly dull, and feels the most out of step with the rest of the book with regard to voice and intent. It’s a cross between an optional ruleset and an early design document for a D&D-themed version of The Sims 4, making it more of a distraction than a nuisance, and one that can easily be ignored. 

And that, of course, brings me to the digital aspects of the DMG (2024). Just like the Player’s Handbook (2024), all of this material is currently available as a revocable license via D&D Beyond. Consumers can get it either as a one-time purchase or as part of a subscription, and here it’s the subscription that’s clearly the better deal. Why pay a premium for just the book when you can have monthly access to the entire D&D online library for a much more modest fee?

However, much of the digital platform’s added value — specifically the Maps function and the encounter builder — is still in beta, so I strongly recommend picking up the physical book instead. Things like digital character sheets and a hyperlinked spellbook are nice and all, but in today’s rapidly evolving digital world, you can’t beat the permanence of an actual physical object.

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Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide (2024) is available at local game shops and online. The book was reviewed using retail product provided by Wizards of the Coast. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.

source https://www.polygon.com/review/477470/dungeon-masters-guide-2024