Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide: Roleplaying Game Core Rules, 4th Edition

I had been running a game for about a year when I picked up the 4th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide. I have to say, it improved my game tremendously, and I highly recommend it, especially to relatively new dungeon masters. Here's why. <br /> <br />The book provided the guidance I needed without getting in my way. No assumptions were made about my DMing style, or the style and motivations of my players. Instead, the authors recognized D&D as a flexible game played by very diverse people, and provided advice to make the game work for everyone. <br /> <br />There is a section on the different archetypes of players and what their strengths, needs, and motivations are. I swear in my group I have one of each, and could never quite figure out how to deal with that. The DMG didn't pass judgment and say my power gamer was bad and how to force him to be more like my storyteller, it gave tips on keeping everyone happy but keeping them from stepping on each other's toes. <br /> <br />The encounter design section not only talks about how to make balanced encounters, but also how to make them interesting. There are ideas about terrain, monster roles, and hazards that help a lot. Last night, an encounter I previously would have done as "3 goblins pop out from behind a tree and whack you with swords" turned into a flaming arrow whizzing past them, setting trees behind them on fire and scaring their horses tied to the trees. They look up in time to see another flaming arrow coming from a single but powerful-looking hobgoblin sniper high in another stand of trees, and the arrow promptly sets one of the party members on fire. The melee fighters ended up trying to chop down the tree he was in, which I didn't expect, but I figured it's a large wooden object and quickly flipped to a page in the DMG that told me about how difficult it should be. A lot of advice scattered throughout the book combined to make it a much more interesting encounter than I previously would have done. <br /> <br />There are also sections on improvisation and what to do about actions the rules don't cover. A lot of people have complained about the lack of specific rules for things like craft and trapmaking, but I found I preferred using the general guidelines laid out in the book. There were less rules for me to keep track of, it sped up the game by not having to look up obscure rules all the time, but it was still easy to scale the difficulty as appropriate. <br /> <br />The one thing I dislike about the book is the huge number of mechanical mistakes. Almost all of these have been fixed in an errata which is freely downloadable from the website, but it is still annoying to have to consult the errata when something doesn't seem right. <br />

I realize that there is a WoW (World of Warcraft) game for the tabletop already, but the 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons comes closer to the actual game than any other system out there. <br /> <br />The classes are more individualized, each one having their own succinct spells, maneuvers, and abilities. It's definitely less homogenized than in previous editions. <br /> <br />The Core Rules Books of the 4th addition, including this one, are easy to navigate and understand, even for someone who has never played.