Building Fun, Not Worlds, With the New 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide
Organization and clear focus turn the much-maligned Dungeon Master’s Guide into a useful tool for beginners.
The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide fixes many of the flaws of its predecessors, while also making some significant realignments to Dungeons & Dragons’ 5th edition. A toolbox for DMs, Wizards of the Coast reorganized the new rulebook to make it new-user friendly and also fix some flaws of its 2014 predecessor. While the marketing draws attention to the new mechanics and flashy magic items, the actual strength of this book is its coherent organization. This might seem like damning with faint praise, but the previous version of the book failed largely because of its lack of focus. The Dungeon Master’s Guide becomes a legitimate resource for new dungeon masters by methodically explaining how to run a game of Dungeons & Dragons, but veterans might feel this book treads on too much familiar ground.
Historically, the Dungeon Master’s Guide has provided players with the tools they need to successfully manage a D&D campaign. As its name suggests, the Dungeon Master’s Guide is less of a rulebook and more of a collection of suggestions and tips on how to build dungeons, combat encounters, and everything else you’d expect to see in a D&D session. The 2014 iteration of the Dungeon Master’s Guide was a dud even while containing much of this vital information. The book buried important tools and concepts in random chapters and focused on the wrong parts of being a DM. More importantly, the 2014 version failed to onboard the influx of new DMs that jumped into Dungeons & Dragons during its biggest period of growth ever. Players looked to other resources (such as actual plays) to learn how to run a game, rather than the actual resource meant to aid them in adventure and campaign prep. If the Matt Mercer effect is real, it’s because of the failings of the 2014 Dungeon Master’s Guide.
