I Read Games reviews are me reading games when I have nothing better to do, like read a module or write or play a game. I don’t seriously believe that I can judge a game without playing it, usually a lot, so I don’t take these very seriously. But I can talk about its choices and whether or not it gets me excited about bringing it to the table.

I just rode my kids to the playground and now have what feels like heatstroke, so while they watch Paw Patrol I’m lying on the bed and reading the Dungeon Master’s Guide (2025). Disclaimer: I’m not being paid for this, obviously. If I was I’d have published this a month ago with all the famous people and news sites.

I read The Player’s Handbook (2024) here. If you didn’t read that, and don’t want to, this is why I’m interested in reading D&D2024: I want to know how it responds to the surprising twists and turns the hobby has taken in the least decade. I want to know if they’ve made it more approachable. I want to know about new directions they’re taking it on. I want to know if they are considering the impact of actual play, lockdowns, and the resurgence of digital play, have had on how we play RPGs? I wrote a list after reading the PHB2024, of what I was hoping to see in the DMG2024 or D&D 2024 more generally. What I’m looking for in this book is a robust system for generating balanced combats, streamlined ways to run mobs and large scale battles, support for more interesting approaches to bosses than “oh my gosh more hit points!”, support for running factions, a deeper dive into dispositions, and procedural support for exploration and dungeon crawling. Let’s see if this 380 page tome ticks any of my boxes.

The first page is a sales pitch for why you’d want to be a Dungeon Master. They use the word “fun” 8 times in the first page, just in case you’re wondering who was complaining the most about D&D2014. The “fun” DM must be an actor, director, improviser, referee, storyteller, teacher and world builder. The next two pages are an inventory of what you need, which puts basically all the responsibility for providing it all — even note paper for the players — on the DM. I don’t love that D&D2024 continues to perpetuate this DM-as-dancing-monkey cultural movement in its very first pages: Both you’re an entertainer but also you’re the only responsible person in the room! Everyone’s fun is your responsibility! It leads to the kind of toxicity exemplified in the tweet below, that this book literally spends time trying to discourage later on and and that these authors spent time discouraging in the PHB2024.

I don’t hate the tips here, though: Don’t be afraid of mistakes, embrace the chaos, communicate well: This is all solid advice, that to be honest shouldn’t be exclusive to DMs. Next up, it follows that up with a page of prep advice, and while I provide better advice in Advanced Fantasy Dungeons, I think this is the best I’ve ever seen in an official product, even going so far as to talk about how much to prepare per hour of expected play, and what to prioritise depending on how much time you have to prep. It definitely expects prepared story to be imposed on the players though: The is no room for emergent narrative here. The core tenets I wrote about here are not on the writers’ radar (should they be? I’m not sure, but D&D2024 is less close to them than D&D2014 was, and intentionally in my opinion). It finishes the section with an example of play in the same format — which I think is excellent — as the PHB2024.

We then talk about playstyle and DM style, how to use rulings fairly, delegation of tasks. It includes a safety checklist! In the core rule book! A serviceable one! I think it’s really interesting how the attitudes to safety here are quite basic, again, relying on what I’d consider outdated methods or ones that are best for playing with strangers, rather than, say, the hospitality-based perspectives that Sean McCoy has more recently raised the profile of in the Mothership Warden’s Operations Manual. There are five pages devoted to safety, not explicitly but to me obviously they focus on the context of playing with strangers online; it’s very interesting to see an increased focus on this, as clearly a response to changing attitudes to play, in lockstep with the discouragement of adversarial play in the PHB2014. Most interestingly and finally it has a section on how to critically view an AP in order to learn from them as a DM, and how to tell what’s a reasonable expectation of yourself as a DM and what’s not; the fact that it’s acknowledging both that these people that the DMG2024 is holding on a pedestal aren’t feasible standards to live up to, but also are the primary way people learn and model, reveals the challenge of designing for the D&D2024 audience.

The “Running the Game” section starts with a taxonomy of players that seems inspired by the best of the DMGs, the 4th Edition DMG2. I love this kind of taxonomy, because it helps clarify that different players have different needs and desires. I don’t love that it suggests that the DMs responsibility is to satisfy these needs though; we’re all adults here, and we should advocate kindly for ourselves. There’s solid advice about how to narrate here as well, as well as generally helpful advice on when to avoid and how to use checks well. This is all concrete, moment to moment advice on how to play the game. There’s some great mixed success advice in here, and if you take the recommendations at face value, it effectively says that a fail by 5+ is a hard fail, by 1–2 is a mixed success, and a success by 5+ is a strong success. This is a fun change, I think, and should be baked right in, in my opinion, although with more thought: Basically, whole I’m a little disappointed they didn’t do away with easy and very easy DCs, especially given these categories were removed in other places, it would make sense if, taking this advice, all the modifiers were scaled down such that likelihood of success was similar and likelihood of various degrees of failure were balanced. Perhaps that’s too core of a change for a ½ edition though. There’s also some straight up basic improvisational advice here, which is great to see. There’s fun advice here about how to engage players without high Charisma scores in social play, as well. Attitude (more commonly called disposition), disappointingly, is scaled back from 2014 rather than beefed up, and I think more support for the pillar of social interaction rather than less would be a bolder and more interesting choice; this reflects a trend away from the optional subsystems in the DMG2014 that I’ll talk about more later. What we do get is a travel procedure, along with tracking sheets! I think more could’ve been learnt from innovations in the space, but something here at all is a huge step forward. There’s nothing on dungeons at all, though, which speaks I think to a recognition that dungeon crawling as a mode of play has receded in the 5th edition consciousness, and scenic dungeons punctuated by planned combat encounters are the new expectation. The combat section is largely unchanged from DND2024, with some additional advice on keeping combat moving which is largely sound. Parts of the death advice feels straight out of the Principia Apocrypha, in a good way, and others feels so incredibly Matt Mercer fingerprinted its almost silly. There’s a page on doors and nothing in it is better than the half page in Errant. There is some neat world building away in corners, like the fact that kraken and tarrasques are considered gods now — love this, they should be, this took too long. The fact that the NPC advice avoids the standard advice of “goals” says a lot to me about the role they’re expected to play in the house campaign style. It’s a mixed bag, and it the way it’s presented feels off, somehow: Not with the misguided confidence that DMG2014 present its optional subsystems with, but rather a bunch of interesting and good ideas and world building thrown together in a blender with no emphasis or thought on the impact. It really feels like they just stuck in whatever the consultants did as options, without labelling them options. It tells that this input wasn’t written before the PHB2024, as there’s potential for these to be core in a very interesting way, that isn’t followed through.

The Creating Adventures section is mixed. I like the Tier-distributed adventure hooks. Yes, I know they’re not mind blowing innovations, but we’re playing elfgames: This is what we need to keep playing week in week out. Advice on Gygaxian Naturalism sneaks in, hook examples abound, there are a load of example objectives that are, for the most part, interesting. There’s good advice on pacing, rests and random encounters here too. On the other hand, the dungeon design section is so vague as to be completely pointless, despite their being a glossary filled with maps that you can fill with your own keys! There are five mini adventures included in the DMG2024. These are minimal — exemplars of the kinds of notes you’d write for a home game — not full modules. But gosh, it’s something. This section is just so very close to being excellent, but it pales in comparison to the much more concrete and meaningful support you get in the PF2:GM Core for building adventures. Disappointing, given it’s right there, and you can see the influences elsewhere in the PHB2024.

Honestly, the Creating Campaigns section is one of the most interesting sections in the book. The campaign journal is a little anemic, but its presence here goes a long way to starting DMs on the right track for running campaigns. In the context of a campaign, they have a “fully developed” NPC template which is honestly just pretty good. Not what I’d choose, but no notes, except that they shouldn’t double up on how to describe NPCs without more clarity — it comes across as if the sections were developed in isolation and nobody actually read the whole book. They throw some old content in here — it’s all rubbish in my opinion — and spend too much time on selling their published settings — Exandria and a few Magic: The Gathering planes make it into the list. There’s otherwise a fair bit of interesting advice, but again, most of it feels like it was written in isolation, where just attributing (or being aware of, possibly) Ray Otus or Sly Flourish or any of the other people who’ve done work in this area would’ve resulted in a much better version of the same book.

There’s a thirty page primer on Oerth and the city of Greyhawk, and about the same on the Planes. I’m of two minds here: I’m not sure how many people will chose to run Greyhawk based on this, but it’s probably just enough for it to be worth it. It probably would’ve been worth dropping coin to pay for Exandria, though, if getting people cracking is your goal. The time spent on this and on cosmology is in such stark contrast to the elegance of the PHB2024, it’s honestly disappointing. Harkening back to the worst parts of D&D2014, right here in the opening salvos of D&D2024.

The treasure section — sigh, ok. I have to read this, don’t I. May Fizban have mercy on my soul. My thoughts: There’s an ingots section? That’s new and funny. A gold ingot is 5x2x¾inches in size, who knew? The trade goods section is good, but not weird enough for a fantasy world; really this should all be folded in with art goods and gemstones, as it’s really a “what’s treasure that isn’t piles of coins” section. Interestingly, in another concession of the movement away from gold for XP and dungeon crawling as a primary mode of play, the infamous individual and hoard treasure tables are gone, replaced by rules for awarding items at level based on wishlists, which is yet another throwback to 4th edition, although it feels weird not baked into the level progression in the PHB if they’re going to lean in that direction. I also wonder, in the absence of treasure tables for monsters, if this will appear in the Monster Manual appendices or in the stat blocks there. There is a randomiser at the end by rarity, but overall treasure organisation gets a huge change. They spend a fair chunk of time on customisation, which is generally pretty good both in terms of advice and content, although it could be more confident. There’s something to the idea of giving the player characters what they want, but making sure they get associated drawbacks that appeals to me, but I’m not convinced that’s actually what they’re aiming for here, as if it were surely they’d spell it out. I’m surprised they put this much effort into this section, to be honest, even though the magic item lists (while they claim to be different) appear to lifted whole cloth; I don’t care enough to do a side by side. I’m sure someone will do so and find gold or at least views.

There’s 20 pages on bastions, the new (ish) take on domains. Building bases comes up enough in 5th edition I could see it being valuable. The actual bastion rules are pretty neat, and basically are level-specific base-building rules, overall pretty simple, and which give you specific perks —especially crafting, which it turns out is all transferred out into this ruleset. That mightn’t be everyone’s favourite decision — it disincentivises epic quests to find that single reagent to forge that magic ring. But it’s neat. I don’t feel strongly about it either way, but it seems like smart design to keep an ancillary system simple and to make it provide specific benefits that are also largely ancillary. However, this is all player facing, so really should be in the Player’s Handbook. None of these are DM options in the slightest. I’m not sure if this is an oversight, or an admission to the fact that the PHB2024 was already massive, or a plot to sell more DMG2024s, but it was a bad decision, further evidenced by the fact that it’s relegated to the end of the book for no clear reason. Clearly even they knew it wasn’t supposed to be here.

Interesting, though, to look at what’s been dropped since the DMG2014: Namely, all of the damned optional rules and subsystems. This book isn’t aimed at rules hackers or people who want to twist the rules of the game anymore. No, the rules are set in stone, only the DM’s interpretations are flexible. But no guides exist for things like high-lethality playor low magic, ability options or creating new character options, or changing how rests work. So much NPC design guidance has been scrapped. The random dungeon generator has been replaced with an appendix of dungeon maps. Missing is the detailed random adventure generators, too, although I’m not sure anyone used those. Monster lists have gone, deferred I assume to the Monster Manual. There’s a lore glossary now, which is interesting, and guides the DM through obscure D&D lore like Venger and Warduke, but more interesting is what it replaces: Appendix N, or as it was last called, Dungeon Master Inspiration. No longer does Dungeons and Dragons use the wider world of fantasy as its reference: It stands alone, auto-cannibalising rather than steeping itself in the broader fantasy literature and media. A fascinating, if not predictable, progression in the corporatisation of D&D. More surprising, though, is that they don’t appear to feature (although I don’t have a deep knowledge of either) characters from Baldur’s Gate 3 or Honor Among Thieves, but rather they focus on the depths of D&D’s written history. I honestly don’t know what to make of that — Minsc and Boo both make (independent) appearances, which means it wasn’t a case of “video games are off limits”, so this honestly just feels masturbatory and dismissive of the generation that are currently excited about D&D, and just generally ill-advised to me: The audience you’re aiming this book at aren’t middle aged nerds, you should be leaning into the new Hollywood and videogame demographics. Altogether, though, these new omissions and their replacements do tell a story: That it’s aiming at people who are happy with the core D&D rules, but need support with the basics of running, scheduling, maintaining a campaign. New Dungeon Masters. It wants them tied deeply into the D&D cosmology so that they don’t, for example, follow their favourite actual plays to Daggerheart or whatever MCDM will call their RPG. It stinks of D&D Beyond compatibility, focusing its advice not on rules customisation — because that breaks the proprietary software — but on the interpersonal and world building rules. It stinks of divorcing itself further from the history of D&D, and, despite how D&D2014 embraced the OSR movement, choosing to cast that entirely aside, and forge ahead based on the popularity and advice of actual and celebrity players.

Obviously, that’s not what I want to see. But if we come back to my list of hopes and dreams, we see that only few of them make the cut, largely because I want a low-prep, DIY style version of this, and D&D2024 is explicitly attempting to move away from that, even where it improves upon its younger self. There’s no inventory options, no online tools for prep (but there are a bunch of prep sheets included that I’m sure will see quick conversion by the community), no dungeon crawling. Disposition is weakened rather than strengthened. Factions get a single paragraph and the examples in Greyhawk are plainly uninteresting. There’s minimal advice on making boss fights more dynamic, although I must say that the standard combat encounter advice here is far stronger than D&D2014 and transfers of course to bosses. I’d just love to see nested hit points or staged bosses built into the DMG. The encounter math is simpler, they’ve scrapped CR altogether, low level encounters are removed, and high level encounters are worth more. People smarter than I have broken this down in detail, but, I’ll have to wait until the Monster Manual is out to see how this really pans out. My gut feeling: We needed more advice around mixed high/low level encounters, so that we can design boss encounters with tons of minions with confidence, and that’s lacking here and perhaps compromised further as high level monsters were always squishy in D&D2014. We do get a spread covering mobs, which I think is better elucidated than in the earlier edition, but hasn’t developed into something simpler — I’d default to swarm stat blocks over these rules — and there’s nothing for larger scale combat at all. There is a minimal procedure for travel, which is an improvement, but not enough of an improvement in my opinion, and no equivalent for dungeon crawling. Finally, it’s too early to say whether the modules will improve, but the example adventures here have a brevity that official modules have been begging for, for ten years.

Coming around to art, layout, and information design. In terms of art, the cartoonish, fourth-wall breaking asides of the PHB2024 are gone here, with a more traditional, one dimensional, digital paint art style. The design and composition of a few of these are admittedly stellar — the art of a gorilla pursuing terrorised adventurers through a portal made of tentacles is perhaps my favourite piece of art in a number of editions — but overall they lack the interest and humour of the PHB2024, and they’re obscure and self-referential, aimed at people like me who’ve been playing since the 80s or 90s, rather than at fans of Exandria or BG3. The notable additions are Venger and Warduke, characters from the animated TV show and the toyline, that haven’t to my knowledge actually featured in the games, ever. These are weird, alienating choices to me. So many choices here seem explicitly intended to move on from the very same grognards D&D2014 attempted to bring back into the fold, except for this specific, very weird art and worldbuilding choice. The layout keeps a few innovations — the annotated examples of play — but mostly ignores them. Information design here is largely non-existent, too: Worse than the DMG2014, which at least had some overarching organisational structure. There are so many ways to arrange this information, and I can’t believe they didn’t even choose one. As is, it’s a hodgepodge.

The renewed focus in the first half of the book on advice, really feels like a recognition that the bar for DMing has changed in the past 10 years, for better and for worse. It embraces a bunch of the best DMing advice that’s come out, and I strongly suspect that a lot of the impact of “consultants” like Mercer, Kretchmer and Woll on this edition is these advice sections. By contrast, the second half is basically setting information, if you include treasure in that category. It seems a product confused as to who its audience is but I think it comes down on the side of inexperienced DMs moreso than the previous DMG2014. My niece recently started playing 5th edition. If she wanted to run it, would I buy her this? Not a chance. The intentionality of the PHB2024 is missing here. While this is better than the DMG2014 for new DMs, it’s still not up to scratch for a 2024 product; it shows how isolated Wizards of the Coast is from the larger hobby. Despite going some of the way, the DMG2024 doesn’t go far enough to support the DM in their role. I fear nevertheless these bread crumbs will be enough to impress the masses starved of good advice. We need more support for prep than this, more for wilderness travel and more for dungeons, more for factions. We need clearer structures for NPCs, not split over multiple chapters. We need to eliminate the thriving ecosystem for DM advice, because it should all be here, or what’s the point of this book? It appears there has been a ton of learning from what kind of DMs have been huge successes publicly in what they’re working into this section on the one hand; but on the other hand a ton of unadulterated duplication from the DMG2014. The organisational redesign appears intended to obstruct identifying what has changed more than be intentional in any way. What’s worse, there’s a strange obsession with resurrecting old properties here, missing the opportunity to take advantage of the huge properties actually popular in recent years.

Despite the changes, the DMG2024 feels like an afterthought to me compared to the significant overhaul the PHB2024 received, and that’s doubly disappointing when — for me at least — the lack of support for DMs was a not insignificant part of what drove me away from 5th edition in the first place. This lack of support feels like an active rejection of time poor people like me from this corner of the hobby, people who loved it when they were time rich but now have demanding jobs or children or health concerns. It’s super disappointing to me that so many of the things I’d hoped to appear here were not, or even had their presence reduced rather than enhanced. Furthermore, it feels to me like so much of this was written in absolute ignorance of a thriving section of the community who have solved so many of the issues that this book fails to adequately address. To me, the fact that so many solutions to the problems left here are available for free on the internet, makes their omissions far less forgivable. Yet again, Dungeon Masters feel the afterthought to Wizards of the Coast, unimportant stooges there to provide a service to the real money-makers — the players, or perhaps even just the audience. I’d love to have felt more catered to by a new edition, but alas, it wasn’t to be, and instead what I got was the same book, gutted of support for hacking, with bonus advice from some celebrity DMs, and a new ruleset intended for players rather than DMs. There’s some interesting stuff thrown in here too, but there’s far more chaff than wheat, for me.

Despite my hopes, D&D2024 isn’t for me and wasn’t intended for me or those like me. The problem is, with its strange choices and uninformed perspective, I can’t say it’s a strong sell for the audience it appears to be for: Young, new DMs drawn in by APs, Baldur’s Gate 3 and Honor Among Thieves. I can’t recommend this one, and it’s left me sour for the rest of the line. I wouldn’t wait for a review of the Monster Manual from me, unless it’s genuinely a surprise, but perhaps when the starter set or the first module for this new edition is released, I’ll take another look to see if the adventuring changes take root officially.

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