Not that it's required of me, but I like tabbing my books to the important bits for fast reference. I use Post-It brand flags (this exact pack, as a matter of fact) and write on the flags what it is they're marking. Almost six months into my current game, and I've finally gotten around to tabbing my books and gotten done 5 out of my 6 main books (Player's Handbook, Monster Manual, Xanathar's Guide to Everything, Volo's Guide to Monsters, and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes) in a short amount of time, and my last reference, the Dungeon Master's Guide, has taken me the longest. The DMG has also used the most flags as I'm up to 60 and still have 80-some-odd pages to go, but that's neither here nor there. What bothers me most is that there is a lot of good info in the book for DMs, as you would expect, but it's so haphazard, and missing so much that should be in there, it feels like a huge missed opportunity.
I have talked about this before, and I am definitely not alone in my critique of the current edition in general and the DMG in particular. To me and others, this tome should be the guideline to all starting DMs, the expander of knowledge to the journeyman, and the honer of skills to the master. To that end, you would think that the DMG would start off with the small stuff - this is an encounter, the basic unit of all RPGs - but it starts right off with Building Your Gameworld, followed by the Planes, getting around to dungeons (which are made up of encounters), and then finally encounters themselves. Which they immediately screw up and only talk about combat encounters, leaving out exploration and interaction encounters entirely. This isn't new for WotC in this edition - the PHB puts the Options chapter (you know, the stuff that isn't a part of the game until the DM tells you it is) smack between character creation and the actual, not-optional rules, like Combat and Spellcasting.
In the same vein, it does not look good when, instead of tabbing two whole sections, I used one of my flags to lock off those sections. Why? It's the Traps and the Downtime Activities sections, which were so bad that WotC has already replaced them/updated them with passages in XGE (and I at least have gone one farther and given my players the Downtime section of Pathfinder's Ultimate Campaign Guide, because the expanded activities in XGE still don't go far enough), so I don't need to stumble into those sections at all.
Having worked further into the DMG, I found social encounters! They're buried back in Chapter 8, Running the Game, between Exploration and Objects, followed immediately by Combat, so they kinda do have all the D&D encounter types in one (or two) places. Exploration and social encounters are both anemic entries and need some serious improvements. Again, combat gets more love than exploration or social (and is in an even bigger section than the first one), but that has been an issue with D&D (according to some) since before even my ancient bones entered the world. Combat is easy, it's exciting, it really is the focus of the game, and there are other RPGs out there that are made from the ground up to handle exploration or social interactions better. That's still not an excuse as WotC has had plenty of time (near two full decades and 3, almost 4, separate editions of the game) to improve this lack.
If I was in this to make a living off of (sorry, had to go have a 15 minute roll on the floor while clutching my sides, laughing), or even had the time to do more than pop in here and rant every now and then, I'd be tempted to write a DM's Guild release called, oddly enough, Gamemastering for Dummies. Yup, couldn't title it like I titled this article as that violates WotC's IPs/TMs/copywrites/etc (this article is free, so I'm claiming fair use here), and not only that but if I wrote it as deeply as I want, they'd also get me for copying huge swaths of their work. Don't mistake me, the DMG is flawed, but there is a lot of good information in it, I just wish it had been laid out better, focused on rules over flavor bits, and improved many of said rules. Oh well, I definitely won't be writing the treatise out and selling it long form, but that won't stop me posting bits and pieces of it here. Stay tuned.
Having worked further into the DMG, I found social encounters! They're buried back in Chapter 8, Running the Game, between Exploration and Objects, followed immediately by Combat, so they kinda do have all the D&D encounter types in one (or two) places. Exploration and social encounters are both anemic entries and need some serious improvements. Again, combat gets more love than exploration or social (and is in an even bigger section than the first one), but that has been an issue with D&D (according to some) since before even my ancient bones entered the world. Combat is easy, it's exciting, it really is the focus of the game, and there are other RPGs out there that are made from the ground up to handle exploration or social interactions better. That's still not an excuse as WotC has had plenty of time (near two full decades and 3, almost 4, separate editions of the game) to improve this lack.
If I was in this to make a living off of (sorry, had to go have a 15 minute roll on the floor while clutching my sides, laughing), or even had the time to do more than pop in here and rant every now and then, I'd be tempted to write a DM's Guild release called, oddly enough, Gamemastering for Dummies. Yup, couldn't title it like I titled this article as that violates WotC's IPs/TMs/copywrites/etc (this article is free, so I'm claiming fair use here), and not only that but if I wrote it as deeply as I want, they'd also get me for copying huge swaths of their work. Don't mistake me, the DMG is flawed, but there is a lot of good information in it, I just wish it had been laid out better, focused on rules over flavor bits, and improved many of said rules. Oh well, I definitely won't be writing the treatise out and selling it long form, but that won't stop me posting bits and pieces of it here. Stay tuned.
No comments:
Post a Comment