Merric Blackman
Australia
Waubra
Victoria
Ramping up my reviewing.
Happily playing games for many, many years.
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This review was written in February 2003
The 3rd edition Dungeon Master's Guide is a hardcover book of attractive appearance; interior art is generally good and of excellent technical accomplishment. The font is attractive and readable, and in all it looks superb.
The Dungeon Master's Guide presents the reader with tips and advice on how to be a Dungeon Master (the referee/judge for a game of Dungeons and Dragons), material for the DM's eyes only such as the effects of magic items, as well as plenty of explanations of game rules, especially those related to combat.
The book fairly much focuses upon dungeon-crawling and running that style of adventure. Although there is some very useful advice for non-dungeon adventures, if you are not a fan of dungeons, then you may find a lot of this book to be not to your taste. However, in my view, Dungeons provide the most basic starting point and setting of most Dungeons & Dragons game, and the amount of space devoted to them in this book is fully justified.
The book gives plenty of advice for creating dungeons; it also gives many tips on running sessions, creating adventures (plots, running NPCs and suchlike), and customising your world. This last is especially important, for such guidelines are useful for the majority of DMs.
Without a doubt, it is a vastly superior product to the 2nd Edition DMG. It is hard to relate it to the 1st edition DMG, but I feel that they are similar products, both especially useful.
The one problem I have with this book is that the formatting and placement of the tables often leaves a lot to be desired. This is a minor quibble, however.
What the book does extremely well is describe magic items (and their creation), creating dungeons, and special effects in combat. Given that for many players, that's about 80% of D&D, this makes the book superb. For "roleplayers" and "storytellers", there are various tips, but this is not the best place to look - I feel that including much for that category of players (which I myself fall squarely into) would be a mistake, as they would detract from the rules focus of the book, and more importantly, are better learnt through experience anyway. Magazines like Dragon are great for this sort of advice if you need it.
All in all, this is a great product. Not quite as stunning as the Player's Handbook, but brilliant all the same. In all incarnations of D&D I've played - 1st edition, 2nd edition, Player's Option, Rules Cyclopedia - this is the best by far. With the revised edition on the horizon, my hopes are that it will fix the few problems that this edition has, whilst keeping the core of being a useful book for the Dungeon Master.
As a note from 2011, the 3.5e Guide improved a lot of things and made a few things worse; the 4e Guide was also pretty stunning - different focus, but great advice on running games.
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John Middleton
United States
Laramie
Wyoming
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Good review, as always. I love your title.
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Ramping up my reviewing.
