The Dungeons & Dragons 2024 DM Guide Update Is Exactly What It Needs to Be
During a recent conversation about the soon-to-be-released Dungeon Master's Guide, updated for the 2024 reimagining of Dungeons & Dragons, Game Architect Chris Perkins voiced what I genuinely believe is one of the most important ideas for this next era of the game. "If your players are having fun, you are playing D&D correctly," he said with a smile.
I was immediately reminded of the first paragraph of the introduction in the original release of D&D in 1973, in which Gary Gygax wrote, "These rules are guidelines to follow in designing your own fantastic-medieval campaign."
Every time a new version of Dungeons & Dragons is released, the creators are tasked with much more than just building a game. Like the thousands of other games spawned from this 50-year-old cultural institution, the Dungeon Master's Guide and its companion Player's Handbook exist to create a template for you to tell your own stories with friends and family. Over the last 10 years in particular, the tabletop community has seen an explosion of new players eager to gather with friends and tell their own stories. Among those new players is often a single, massively important question that Wizards of the Coast sought to answer with this new book. It's a question I see almost every day across social media or in person at events, and until recently the answer wasn't a simple one.
"How do I start playing this game?"
It's been just over a month since I first opened the 2024 Player's Handbook, and nearly two weeks since I first opened the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide. As a lifelong player of this game, and the "forever DM" of my friend group, big changes like these deserve to be met with scrutiny. I have read both of these books cover to cover more than once now, and have been fortunate enough to play a one-shot with both books ahead of the November release. My test table included a great mix of veteran players and folks who have only really known about this game due to its recent increased cultural relevance. For this one-shot, I did also pull from the 5th Edition book The Practically Complete Guide to Dragons, and found no issues adapting the book to match the updated rules in the 2024 DM Guide.
By far the most important changes to the Dungeon Master's Guide, like the Player's Handbook before it, are in the layout of the book itself. This book has been revised many times since its original release in 1979, and for the first time it starts out by answering the most important questions facing a new DM. What is the DM's role in this game? Should you prepare before your game starts? How do you make sure your players are having fun and feel challenged? The first 19 pages of this book do more to help people who are curious but intimidated by the idea of running a game than any other book with the words "Dungeons & Dragons" on the front ever published, and it's fantastic.
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This detailed explanation on how to get started is immediately followed by the basics of the game, presented in a way that does a great job meeting the moment we are currently in. New D&D players have never had more choices when it comes to examples of others playing this game, streaming online in real time. Whether it's amazing shows such as Rivals of Waterdeep, Dimension 20 or the globally popular Critical Role, these shows all have one important thing in common: None of them are playing 100% by the rules found in the book. To help address that, the DM Guide now has sections dedicated to how you as the DM can guide narrating the story or how you can play with multiple DMs to bring new perspectives to a story alongside the basics of how the game itself is played.
Wizards of the Coast
A lot of pixels have been spent in the last month on the new backgrounds system in Dungeons & Dragons. When you pick up a Player's Handbook, you will find each class now has multiple backgrounds you can choose from that grant your character a different set of abilities and modifiers. The Player's Handbook includes some basic options for customizing a background to suit the character you're creating, and many of the backgrounds provided in the book offer a lot of opportunities to make something genuinely fun to play. That said, there's no such thing as a prebuilt system that's perfect for every use case, so the Dungeon Master's Guide includes thorough instructions on how to build fully custom backgrounds. This whole section of the book, in fact, is about customizing this game to suit you. If you want a unique creature or magic item for your game, this book clearly lays out how you would do that, in one tidy spot.
As much as I appreciate how the first half of this nearly 400-page tome is dedicated to getting new DMs where they need to be to start running their own game, the back half is very clearly to show just how deep the rabbit hole goes. With the details around creating your story out of the way, the book quickly shifts to lore and possibility. In addition to formally acknowledging Critical Role's created world Exandria as a place in which anyone can play a D&D game with these rules, the free city of Greyhawk has received the most detailed breakdown I've ever seen in one place.
Greyhawk has been a game setting for D&D players since 1980, with fascinating details added to it ever since, but in this new guide you're provided with everything you could possibly need to run a full story inside it. Far more than just a map with some story points, you can dive deep into the politics of the city, which factions worship which gods and even the festivals that take place throughout the city depending on the time of year you decide to set the story in. It's enough detail to build a massive campaign, and in doing so sets a threshold for DMs who choose to build a world entirely of their own.
The city of Greyhawk is covered in much detail in the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide. Katerina Ladon
In building this book for a new generation of players, the many play styles of veteran players are still deeply respected. If, for example, you're the kind of DM who believed the dice should tell as much of the story as possible, you'll still find dozens of random tables to help guide that kind of storytelling. If your table is more interested in massive combat set pieces than exploring a new place, the updated rules on bastions does an excellent job of breaking down their benefits and costs of maintenance and operation. And for just about every situation where a tracking document would be helpful, the book provides one you can either make copies of directly or download from D&D Beyond. As someone who has kept multiple messy notebooks with tiny details scratched everywhere, the offer of better organization is a welcomed change.
Without getting bogged down in whether I believe specific rule changes are better in this version of the game than previous versions, the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide has already massively improved the quality of experience for players in its layout alone. In previous versions of the DM Guide I would regularly hedge when sharing it with a new would-be DM and make it clear the book isn't as intimidating as it seems. Not only will I never feel the need to issue the same warning with this new release, I think every D&D player should read this book and I think you'll have a lot of fun doing so.
The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide will be released on Nov. 12 and is available to preorder now at D&D Beyond.
