[RPG]: AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, reviewed by Lev Lafayette (1/2)

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/12/12836.phtml

Lev Lafayette's Summary:

One of the worst organised roleplaying manuals ever produced, the haphazard distribution of rules and information is not saved by an comprehensive table of contents and index. The game system suffers significantly from the lack of a systematic perspective, and hefty emphasis is placed on what should be, at least according to the game, is relatively marginal activities. Some Moments of good substance are often more appropriately in other rulebooks. Reasonable advice for the neophyte DM.

Go to the full review for more information.

[Lev Lafayette]

The sentence "Indeed, the same principle could have also been applied for the movement of all creatures in all environs; humans swimming through water, charging horses and so forth - it certainly would have made a very fine inclusion in the Monster Manual" should have gone a couple of sentences beforehand i.e., it refers to the maneuverability classes.

[Bloodcat]

While I know your review is gonna lead to more rage I again really cannot disagree.
Once I tried to actually run AD&D 1st ed, and about 30 pages into this book and I simply decided it just was NOT gonna happen. (I ended up using Basic D&D which switched over to Castles & Crusades.)

This book is just filled with stuff I wanted NOTHING to do with.

But something I mentioned in the MM thread might be worth bringing up here.

Any chance of reviewing Holmes Basic D&D? It was pretty much designed to teach AD&D and seems like it would be appropriate to be in your D&D review series.

Its wierd. AD&D was the big dog, yet looking on its rules shows how bad it was. Yet Basic D&D (Mentzer and Moldvay/Cook) were really really good excepting the utter lack of a skills system and having some of the D&D systems' general wonkiness.

Were most people really playing Basic all along?

[Wood]

Blimey. Lev, you're doomed.

[Brandi]

Teeny tiny nitpick:

The Head of Vecna is not in the AD&D DMG (the iconic Eye and Hand are), though it does make a humorous cameo in the 2nd edition module Die Vecna Die!.

[robertsconley]

The order of chapters in the DMG was meant to mirror the Player's Handbook with the DM only stuff placed afterward (namely the list of stuff and the appendixs)

Open the two side by side and you will see what I mean.

Some sections (like combat) are greatly expanded from the player version and some (like characters) are greatly shrunk.

[Bochi]

Originally Posted by Bloodcat

While I know your review is gonna lead to more rage I again really cannot disagree...

Were most people really playing Basic all along?

No rage here. I'm not going to revisit the "how to review old games" argument I beat into the ground with a +5 club on the MM thread. I'll leave that to someone who still wants their turn.

I wasn't playing Basic all along but I was modifying AD&D 1e from the start, for example, the initiative system which is hard to understand and poorly granulated. Gygax himself used a d10 instead of a d6 and handled multiple attacks by saying you had to have enough initiative to put two segments between the attacks, one if you were on speed. He says on a Dragonloft thread that it's more intuitive to use a d10 to match the 10 segment round.

I think Lev makes a fair fist of reviewing the DMG here although we would differ on the emphasis he gives to some areas over others. And some of what he hates I liked. Nothing new there, then!

The crap organisation of the book is surely due to its attempt to be a commentary on the Player's Handbook, so stuff is ordered according to the section of the PHB which it elaborates. That probably seemed logical at the time and its legacy continues with the current DMG 3.5. Alas it does get very messy.

The other thing is that the DMG always looked to me like a set of articles from Dragon that had been stitched together. Gygax says in the introduction that he sifted through 100s of pages of material and suggestions. If it had been produced more overtly as a "compendium" of interesting (and not-so-interesting) "stuff" then that might have helped. The frontispiece does describe it as a "Compilation" but not much is made of this. Instead the editing tries to portray this patchwork quilt of rules suggestions as an organic whole, and it just isn't. So I won't argue with Lev's damning of the style, though my eyes suffer far more from the horrible underscoring and tinted backgrounds on the modern 3ed core books than they did from the small but plainly printed font of the old DMG.

It is worth noting that the DMG appeared some time after the MM and PHB and was further delayed because an early printing was recalled, so it was very scarce in 1979. As a result many people got it nearly three years after the MM came out and 18 months or more after the PHB came out.

In the meantime, people like me who were playing a hybrid of D&D with the wider range of AD&D MM monsters and then using the AD&D PHB for the wider range of spells and character possibilities were still having to produce homebrew rules to cover the stuff not yet published in the DMG. For example, my first games used AD&D characters but D&D combat rules.

The Dragon magazine was the main source for new rules material in advance of the DMG being published. So by the time the DMG came out we were used to working out house rules, borrowing other people's house rules and scouring The Dragon for examples of how Gygax and his charmed circle were doing things. In that context the DMG was a wonderful thing, I adored it, I read it continuously, marvelled at its obscurity and quirkiness, rolled up endless random dungeons and treasure hoards when the gaming group was doing real life, and NPC characters that still appear in games I run today. I am happy to concede that if you came cold to the game and could see the alternatives, that it must have been daunting and annoying. If you were gaming as the system was coming out then you were assimilating it piecemeal and if you liked it at all, you wanted more. If you didn't like this month's ration of "more" you wrote your own house rule. I am wondering if this is familiar to other old grognards whose games pre-date the DMG?

No, we weren't playing Basic all along but we were most likely playing "House" D&D throughout the early transitional period. There are problems with AD&D you have to make go away but if you do that you have something that's much more flexible and fun than people imagine it will be from reading the books.

[Old Geezer]

Did anybody actually pick up AD&D and just try to play it?

I was playing Brown Box Original D&D and looked on AD&D as "a bunch of stuff to look through and pluck out the bits I like."

[Lars Dangly]

In my experience, what people really wanted was AD&D spell lists, items, monsters and classes with basic D&D rules and organization.

The Monster Manual and Players Handbook are basically just compendia of this sort of meat-and-potatoes information and are mostly well organized. So, they were necessary and widely-appreciated books.

The DMG is your source of info on items, but is mostly filled with rules and suggestions few people were interested in (or, often, could even understand). The one real trick is you needed the DMG to play the game because it contained the to-hit and save tables!

Anyway, I love my old AD&D hardcovers, but this one was a truly terrible book. This was obvious even back in the old days when it was first publshed.

[d(sqrt(-1))]

Originally Posted by Lars Dangly

The DMG is your source of info on items, but is mostly filled with rules and suggestions few people were interested in (or, often, could even understand). The one real trick is you needed the DMG to play the game because it contained the to-hit and save tables!

I remember that White Dwarf actually published those tables some time before the DMG came out. Don't know how they managed that one...

Mark