20 Questions About The DMG

What Are The Things I'm Looking For, And Why?

We all have certain things we do or don't like as DMs. We all have things that we take for granted. Some would go so far as to call them biases. I think that's a good way to put it and it's healthy to call them biases. That way, we can acknowledge how we like to play D&D may not be how everybody likes to play D&D.

I started playing D&D at my local game store. That means playing with whoever is around, not necessarily because our play styles are compatible. My preferred style of play was not very compatible with some DMs at the local game store. I've talked about some of the racism and homophobia in the past, but that's not what I am referring to here. I'm thinking more of my first time trying to make an in character speech to an NPC to prevent a fight and then being told to roll Persuasion. When I heard that, I felt like I had just tried something courageous and was quite deflated to be told that none of what I said really mattered, I could just have asked to roll a Persuasion check.

The WotC design team also has their biases. Jeremy Crawford has said at times that he likes to think of magic items as a bonus. However, all the groups I have DMed for like magic items, and nearly all of them are frustrated with the relative lack of magic items in full length WotC adventure books. The 2024 Player's Handbook offers suggestions for how many magic items a character should start with for starting a higher level game, but they are only appropriate for a low magic item game. The DM I've talked to most about the 2024 PHB—the one who inspired me to write this post about how we all have to check our biases‚ looked at this table and said "how did they survive to get to this level?" In our games, a character would need more to survive.

Then again, in our games, a typical fight in a WotC dungeon room is more likely to do 0 damage than any amount of damage after level 6, even when players only have moderate magic items.

This all leads me to pose 20 questions about the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide. Having read various previews, at most a couple of these questions are answered in those previews.

The Basic Job Of DMing

These questions focus on “what do we do as a DM?” I know there will be discussion of how to build an adventure and from there, how to try to string multiple adventures together in a campaign. Those sections would be critical for a review of the book. But since we know those exist, I don’t have to ask “do these sections exist?”

The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide will almost certainly be better than the 2014 edition because of these inclusions. The question is how much better.

1) Will We See A Range Of Perspectives On DMing In The DMG?

Like I said, every DM has a different set of strengths and weaknesses. The best way to balance that is to acknowledge it and get a diverse team. I mean this both in terms of diverse backgrounds and diverse styles of DMing. I think there are some attempts at diversity. Having a neurodivergent consultant is an excellent idea!

However, the reliance on celebrity streamer consultants worries me. A professional actor running a game with professional actors as players for a viewing audience is fundamentally different than you running a game for your friends or me running a game in my local game store. Any kind of conversation produced for a viewing audience is different!¹

Your game is probably more like mine than Matt Mercer's. So why don't we have veterans of game store and convention DMing—who have the broadest range of experiences imaginable—as consultants?

We can also think of different styles of D&D games. Does the DMG validate both a melodrama game or a game where the party will try to romance most of the villains and a dungeon crawl (Chris Perkins' favorite) and a monster of the week? Will we see an optimizer's point of view?

I'm also going to set aside how, to the best of my knowledge, no one of my gender (nonbinary but masculine presenting) has ever been published in a WotC book.

2) Is This Text Going To Be An Effective Teaching Tool?

When I taught at UCLA, most professors and teaching assistants expected students to do the reading before class. After all, it's UCLA, the hardest public university to get into! However, I'd say around 20 percent of my students did the reading before class unless there was the chance of a quiz. As you might imagine, this frustrated most instructors. Eventually I asked some students what's up and they said, "we do the reading after class, once the professor lectures and gives us a framework to help us understand the reading."

That's not what professors want to hear, but it is reasonable. It's also why I am a bit dubious of all the talk of the new DMG being “for the new DM.” I think targeting new DMs is an admirable goal, but I doubt many people are actually going to pay $50 or more for a book before they start DMing. That’s a big up front commitment! This could also be my experience as a teacher and DM talking. I wouldn't have considered buying a text like the 2024 DMG (based on how it is described) until after I had DMed 5-10 games.

3) Will The New DMG Say It's Normal To Fail As A DM?

I feel like setting expectations is critical, particularly for a generation who may have gotten in to TTRPGs by watching streamed games before playing ourselves. Many streamers are professional actors, which means they have professional training for how to improvise to handle mistakes in the moment that people who are not trained actors don’t have.

I watched a few streaming games before I started playing. But I never wanted to be that style of DM/GM. I knew my background gave a different set of skills to build off of.

I think the DMG is making a wise decision trying to start with how to DM a one shot, not a full campaign. But I have found it also helps new DMs to explain how things will often go wrong and that's OK. I've made mistakes DMing adventures I wrote, putting part of a sequel in the original adventure! It's fine. We can work with players to get to the same understanding.

4) Will The 2024 DMG Cover How To Manage People?

If you look online, the most popular kind of DMing discussion is probably "how do I manage my players?" or "how do I deal with my DM?" Along with the authorial aspects of designing a one shot or a campaign setting, which have been in the previews, will there be a forthright discussion of how to handle the issues that eventually come up? Will the DMG offer useful tools to help DMs understand ourselves, our players, and what types of people we are more or less likely to be compatible with?

To give a specific example, I'm on the low side of DM narration and get frustrated when a DM talks for longer than 30 seconds at a time. This is fairly common for people who started play in Los Angeles game stores; it’s one of the more egalitarian environments for how long each person at the table gets to talk. One time I got a review for being “low energy” as a convention DM because someone wanted to be an energetic master of ceremonies that dominated the presence at the table. DMing for different groups across the world in inline events and talking to a wide range of DMs has helped me learn that there are varying cultural expectations for what the DM should be like. When players’ vision of the DM role doesn’t match the DM’s vision, we need to talk about it.

5) Where Is The Discussion Of Session Zero?

I have not heard an answer to this in preview videos or reviews. Maybe I missed it, but if so it wasn't an emphasis in the videos. I heard more about Greyhawk.

If this discussion exists, will it include preferred story tones, how much a campaign will focus on combat vs. other things, along with avoiding sensitive topics?

I’ve worked with the D&D Organized Play divisions of a number of leading conventions (San Diego Comic-Con, PAX Unplugged among them) create their Codes of Conduct, an advance version of a Session Zero that players acknowledge certain baselines of good behavior at a convention table.

These Codes of Conduct are necessary because sometimes they get violated, particularly (but not always) by older men looking for the old boys club. I once DMed for a player who wanted to try to flirt for information the party needed as soon as I described the location had a female NPC. I was grossed out and making this character up, so I improvised she was a lesbian and clearly not interested in romance with his male character. At the end, he asked if he could “Roll Persuasion to turn a no into a yes.” I stopped the game to say no. I think he'd been playing with the old boys club for a long time and no one told him no before.²

With my convention experience, I never would have published something like the Influence rule in the 2024 Player’s Handbook without guidance to not be a jerk and a reference to Session Zero. That’s part of why I double down for the 2024 DMG.

Throughout my playtest feedback, I said how I don't like to use charms at my table after dealing with sexual harassment by a DM. Jeremy Crawford said in one playtest video that "the charmed condition is not mind control," even though for many monsters and adventure story tropes it is mind control. I ran for my X-card.

It's clear that I couldn't play D&D with Mr. Crawford without a Session Zero about charms. Come to think about it, almost every fey related subclass in the 2024 Player's Handbook gets charm person as a bonus spell. I think I need a Session Zero to go over charms before playing with anyone on the design team.

6) Can We Get A Discussion Of How To Foster Social Interaction Scenes Without Dice?

I mentioned my first experience trying to resolve a situation peacefully, being expected to talk the ghost down in character, then being told to roll for Persuasion. However, I didn't mention the two reasons why I hate rolling dice as the only want to resolve social interaction scenes in this post.

When it came time to talk to that ghost, as a player I didn't really want to talk that much in character. I had only been playing for two months and hadn't done anything like that before. But I was playing a multiclass warlock / bard, so the rest of the party threw me on stage. I was incredibly nervous. Being told "roll Persuasion" instead of "good job, you succeed" felt incredibly invalidating to me as a person trying something that was incredibly hard for me.

Rolling dice for social interaction scenes should always be an option for players who will feel distress having to act out the scene, as I did. At the same time, people who can act out the scene and do so effectively shouldn't have to roll dice. That way, everyone can be involved in the scene even if they are playing a barbarian instead of a bard.

Second, some players think that they can get away with far too much by rolling for Persuasion. It may be the player who thinks an average roll of 20 or higher is an "I win" button regardless of what they are asking for. It doesn’t work this way at the tables I’ve played at!

By presenting social interaction scenes in the Player's Handbook as dice heavy and the Influence action, with no discussion of safety tools or session zero, WotC did a real disservice to new players. Will they start to clean up the damage in the DMG?

Game Design Assumptions

Time for an awkward confession: I haven't owned a copy of the Dungeon Master's Guide in around 30 years. As a teenager, I bought lots of TTRPG books but never had a chance to play for lots of reasons. I don't have remorse or anything; I would have been a real problem player at 10-13 years old!

One of those books I owned was the 2nd Edition DMG. I don't remember much from it, but one of the things I do remember is an acknowledgement that different DMs will want to run different styles of games. This was most pronounced when it games to magic items. That DMG offered the reader several contrasting styles with a few soft jokes but no judgment.

My biggest concern about the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide is that they will go much further in establishing a normative standard for all tables. The table about how many magic items a character should start with at level 11 or 20, treating all campaigns like their low magic item campaign, is an ominous sign. Designers allowing Divine Intervention to raise dead as an action with no material component cost is an even more ominous sign, as many DMs make diamonds intentionally scarce to make death more threatening. I was shocked to see this stance used in promotional material, taking away one of the bigger things a DM can do to make their campaign unique in terms of game rules. How else may they constrain DMs?

7) Will The DMG Acknowledge That 6-8 Encounters Per Day Isn't The Only Way To Play?

This is certainly one standard. It's great for a dungeon crawl game where you want players to carefully manage resources through a bunch of rooms in a dungeon. However, many have moved away from it over the last 10 years. Games with more story or that want a smaller number of more intense fights may only have 2 or 3 encounters per day.

8) All Evidence So Far Is WotC's design Team Likes A Low Magic Item Game. Will They Acknowledge This?

Many DMs like a lower magic item game. It easier to run. Items can give players power that overwhelms the DMs. It's a perfectly reasonable way to play. However, in 5th Edition WotC books have tended to take the position that having few magic items is the only way to play. Vecna: Eve Of Ruin barely gave magic items. A book like the DMG has to be for all styles of play and can't be implicitly or explicitly judgmental towards folks like me who like more magic items.

9) Can I Get Some Rules On Overland Travel?

Several of my players have realized that all features for overland travel were removed from the 2024 Player's Handbook. As I start to prepare Descent Into Avernus, I have to make up everything about travel in Avernus. What kinds of checks should be made to find the rare edible food in Avernus? How long should it take to get from point A to point B in Avernus' magically shifting terrain?

In many WotC books, overland travel is just Survival checks. I want more. When I DMed Icewind Dale, my party had a ranger, druid, and scout rogue. Because the scout rogue had Expertise in Survival, they were often the best at it. I don't want the rogue to be better than the ranger here, which is why I want more detailed and nuanced rules than "just have the party make survival checks."

10) Do Designers Assume Everyone Uses A DM Screen?

This bias is evident in how Jeremy Crawford describes the monster Recharge mechanic. The very mechanic is biased towards DMs rolling behind a screen, as recharging on a 5 or 6 can be very swingy and incinerate your party with dragon's breath.

I don’t use a DM screen. Many of the DMs I have played with do not. This needs to be treated as a valid play style.

Power At The Table

Based on preview videos, one of the things that the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide wants to do is help newer DMs learn how to write their own adventures and campaigns for their groups. This is certainly an admirable and wise goal. However, the biggest problems I have had as a player was with DMs who focused too much on their sole vision as a DM, mostly because they were very controlling. They wanted to feel like they could kill or shut down any PC at any time if we veered too much from their desired story tone or plot. (There was never a session zero.) That’s why I focus on issues of power at teh table more than most.

11) Can This DMG Help DMs Understand That We Aren't Always Right?

There's a philosophy out there that it's the DM's table, so whatever the DM says goes. But look back at something I said in question 3: DMs are fallible. We can make mistakes. The DM isn’t always right. Then Look at question 4: the DM has to be able to manage people. If a DM is always insisting on doing things their way and starts to alienate their players or seems unfair, their players will leave. As I mentioned once on a previous post, I left the table when it became obvious that a DM was rigging die rolls behind a screen because they didn't like my character being a minor jerk.

Old school convention organizers may call DMs "judges" at times. I don’t like the term much, but it does convey something important. The DM is supposed to be a fair arbitrator of what is going on at our tables.

In my last session, I had the archwizard boss of the campaign cast maddening darkness on most of the party. This is a spell that does 8d8 psychic damage at the start of a character's turn if they are in the area. The 2024 Player's Handbook changed spells like this so they do damage immediately (see moonbeam). We all like the change. I felt maddening darkness probably should have been revised in our campaign to do the same thing. No spell like this had come up before, so changing things on the fly might have felt arbitrary. We didn't fully talk about it until the next player walked out and unloaded his wand of magic missiles. Then I complained that I should have unilatrally changes the rule. Players agreed "yeah, damage from maddening darkness should have happened immediately."

When the DM talks to players instead of being arbitrary, it works much better in the long term.

This isn’t the biggest mistake I made over the last couple of months. For my last campaign arc, the party’s nemesis took over Waterdeep. I gave them a clear way into the city, but from then on I expected them to start improvising ways to get information and a plan of action. All of my players were at least a little lost and several were completely lost, since we hadn’t done anything like this before and it was a particularly bad fit for some. We had established years ago that players preferred to choose between paths then be put on a path for a while but I forgot, so I had to put them back on a more linear path instead of yell or ge angry or something.

12) Will The DMG Address How Many Players Hate Stuns And Counterspells?

Over the last few years, there's been a definite trend towards players pushing back on monster abilities that could take away their turns. Meanwhile, WotC is giving more and more monsters counterspell or their own bespoke version of it that can't be countered. They are also giving more monsters stuns. It feels like this is their solution to underwhelming boss fights, as I wrote about before. Will the DMG address how many players hate this playstyle?

In a related bonus question, will the DMG talk about how to deal with the player who always wants to stun, counterspell, or otherwise take away the DM's turn, denying the DM's fun? Neither is good for the long term happiness of a table.

13) Can The DMG Help DMs Accept Players With Powerful Characters?

My first campaign ended at level 13 when the DM frustratingly shrugged her shoulders and said "I don't know how to challenge you." Player characters get more powerful at every level and lots of campaigns end when the DM feels overwhelmed.

I feel like some of this is a technical lesson. If this was a class, I'd call it a sophomores and juniors level class. There are certain things you need to tell level 11-20 adventure writers like players have greater access to flying or teleporting and could bypass overland travel with the wind walk spell. There are also some combat tricks to consider, like not relying on monster attack rolls in every fight unless that monster can always get to where they want to go, because many characters can have their AC climb faster than monster attack roll modifiers.

However, more of it is a philosophical lesson I feel should be taught early on. Many D&D communities treat "power gamers" as something negative. In my experience, the optimizers have been far more accepting of me as a queer person at the table and outside of it. They may disproportionately be straight white guys and many aren’t as progressive as I am, but tolerance is tolerance.

At conventions, I've played and DMed for people who brought problematic regressive attitudes to the table. However, all of my worst experiences were with DMs who publicly espoused progressive beliefs about inclusion but felt personally threatened by my somewhat optimized characters. When they couldn't use game mechanics to exercise power by killing my character they acted out with incidents of in game racism when I DMed for them, then homophobia and threatened sexual assault of my character when DMing for me. All of their public values about inclusion were secondary to their need to control the table.

There certainly are some problematic optimizers who only care about showing off what they can do and don't care about anyone else's good time (see the prior question). Playing with them is often miserable. Sadly, this caricature hides how many optimizers are among the most collaborative players, because high power games requires the most conversation between DM and players to ensure challenges are still appropriate.

To give another example, I am DMing a charity event for Extra Life next weekend. When I first DMed this adventure 5 years ago when it was brand new, combats at levels 11-16 were underwhelming and needed to be beefed up. Characters have gotten much more powerful since then. I’m happy to put in the time to prepare beefier encounters, but not if players use tricks with a few ill conceived spells like conjure minor elementals or the trick to cast spirit guardians and run past monsters multiple times per round. So I’m going to tell my players not to use these strategies or I will just phone in the combats.

All DMs can learn from this spirit of collaboration.

14) Can We Get Clear Rules For Illusions?

I don't use illusions that often as a DM. When I do, I like to heavy script them, including what it takes for the party to detect and/or break the illusion, before the session starts. In the heat of the moment, there's a temptation to bend the interpretation of illusions to the DM's benefit and against the party. Players often have similar incentives.

In my second month of playing D&D, the elf wizard thought of a trick where he would cast silent image to create a box he could shoot through with his longbow, but the monsters would think it is just a box. They'd have to spend an action investigating the illusion, while he could shoot a longbow at advantage. The DM said OK to this for several weeks in a row, as more of the party got in the box, before finally saying enough is enough. I felt like it was incredibly cheesy and refused to participate, even though I was playing the next squishiest character.

Since this was my first experience with illusions in D&D, it was a formative experience. I expected the touted 2024 Player's Handbook illusion rules clarification to say no to stunts like this. They didn't clarify much of anything. This same issue came up in one of my home games a couple of weeks ago when a player had his Eldritch Knight replace an attack with casting minor illusion to create a crate or barrel or something over his head as a kind of cover. The three DMs at the table gave three separate opinions on how we'd handle it.

The 2024 Player’s Handbook was full of cases where they took away DM discretion from the 2014 Player’s Handbook. Why are illusions an exception, when they needed the most guidance about how to use them fairly?

Bastions

We playtested the bastion system a bit and have some questions as a group.

15) Are Bastions Going to Foster Collaboration Between The DM And Players?

This is one of my group's biggest concerns. They wanted to bastion to be something where they could take the lead, but not something to do while I was out on a sick day. Instead of building a bastion in the middle of nowhere, my group took over Phandelin as a bastion. This required back and forth with me as the DM roleplaying the locals. They also wanted some immersion in terms of available resources to build things and make deals with fire elementals to run the forge instead of materials and NPCs spontaneously appearing.

Good games are all about collaboration between the DM and players. The idea of the bastion as completely up to the players doesn’t exactly foster collaboration.

16) How Can The DM Threaten The Bastion?

My players expect their bastion to be threatened because they want that fantasy of holding off invaders. This wasn't possible under playtest bastion rules.

17) Will Bastions Treat All Classes Equally?

Let's say a group has two paladins, a fighter, a wizard, a bard, and two druids. Will the fighter and paladins get as much from the bastion as the wizard?

Other Parts Of The Book

18) Is The Lore Section Going To Include Lore Written By People Who Aren't Straight White Men?

WotC has had a real "go back to the classics" vibe the last few years instead of letting a new, more diverse generation of players create new ideas. There have been revivals of Dragonlance and Spelljammer and Planescape, but often in ways that make those settings feel more standardized and less weird. Campaigns to canonize certain work often protect older generations while stifling newer ones. I think my question is a good standard for this concern.

19) Will Someone Finally Get Me Care About Greyhawk?

Nostalgia does nothing for me here. I don't care if it was Gary Gygax's campaign world or that some famous figures have come from that world. It feels like every mention of Greyhawk has focused on those two appeals alone. Why should I run a campaign in that setting instead of the Forgotten Realms or something of my own?

( I tend to run in the Forgotten Realms, but with residents of the area where the campaign takes place behaving in a different way in response to the events of the campaign. For example, since Auril blocked other deities from affecting Icewind Dale during that campaign, I made most residents atheists who were mad at the gods they thought abandoned them.

20) How Much Will Changes To Magic Items Disrupt Campaigns That Otherwise Want to Transition Rule Sets?

I know some changes have been leaked by influencers who got advance copies of the book. I think this process is cynical and insulting when someone builds their YouTube channel by making bad faith critiques of WotC business practices then gets rewarded with preview copies of the new books by becoming a "big time" influencer.

That being said, I haven’t heard of changes that could have a massive influence yet.

1. The book Talk At Work, about how people in various professions like legal hearings, doctor-patient interaction, and like mass media interviews, was one of the better books I read my first year of graduate school

2. This was at GenCon 2020 online, DMing for Baldman Games. Months earlier, when first preparing to DM for Baldman Games for Origins Online, I pressed BMG founder David Christ for his Code of Conduct. He asked why I care so much, because “things like that don’t happen here.” I didn’t feel safe reporting this player to BMG management. Last I heard, Baldman Games still has major issues with diversity and inclusion at upper levels.