D&D’s worst book needs an update, and that’s an opportunity for creators of all skill levels

Currently in my house there are six copies of the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Player’s Handbook – one for me, one for my 13 year old daughter and four for the other kids we play with from time to time. But there is only one copy of the Dungeon Master guide. In fact, after the first reading, that book has hardly been used in the Hall household. That will probably change in 2024, because the DMG gets a dramatic facelift.

D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast has been talking about revised versions of its three core rulebooks for some time now. The length of that promotional period is due in part to the ambitious series of playtests that have already generated nearly 500,000 written responses. Good feedback is hard to come by, and when you get it in volume, it’s hard to take advantage of. Of course, the duration is also because Wizards sort of botched its original announcement and spent much of 2023 clarifying its intent. But the D&D publisher seems genuinely motivated to make the books better – easier for players to find what they’re looking for, with more comprehensive guidance for every skill level. And the book that clearly needs the most work is it DMGa fact made clear earlier this year at a private press event in Seattle.

“I don’t know if you remember,” Rules Architect Chris Perkins said at the time, “but chapter one of that book is about building a campaign, and one of the first things you hear is the difference between a meritocracy and a plutocracy. It’s like, OK. I am a new DM. Is this the most important thing I need to know about my campaign? No. (…) Chapter two is all about the D&D cosmology. Here are the outer faces and the inner faces. And it’s like, Is this the first thing I need to know to be a DM?”

That’s basically the answer my 13-year-old had the week before Gen Con. “I want to be a DM,” she said, and my heart skipped a beat. So I gave her the DMG. I found her drooling in it a few hours later. So when I bumped into game design architect Jeremy Crawford at this year’s Gen Con, I wanted to know: How’s that going? DMG to go? Then it got a little philosophical.

“Why do people DM?” said Crawford. “What makes them stick around as DMs? What can cause burnout? What would thrill them to be DMs longer? These are the most important questions to answer, he said, and those answers should fill the new DMG.

When you open the next version of the 5th edition Dungeon Master guideCrawford said, you can expect it to be much better organized. For example, you learn how to roll dice in chapter one, not chapter eight as it stands now. The book will also be slightly longer than the original. And you can also expect to have to fill in some of that space yourself.

“Worksheets (are) new in the book that us previous Dungeon Master Guides not yet,” said Crawford. “We know that for many DMs, creating a world, creating adventures, creating NPCs and magical items and backstories – it’s a solo game, and we want to make sure that this Dungeon Master guide really supports that experience. That’s why it has worksheets.”

Those worksheets, Crawford said, will be made available for download so players don’t have to write in their books if they don’t want to. That said, I see a lot of people who want that.

I write in my RPG books all the time. It started when I played the 4th edition where I painstakingly updated the core books by hand based on the errata. That practice was carried over into 5th edition, and now my books are all full of highlighted passages, notes, and other caveats. It makes me more efficient to have everything in one place – not on a tablet or my phone, and not scattered among a bunch of different books. I usually just carry my size with me PHB And Tasha’s cauldron of everything for the latest Artificer rules, and I’m good to go.

But that may change for me with the new one DMG. If it’s full of worksheets, well, I’m going to fill those worksheets right there on the page. And when I’m done filling out those worksheets and dragging my new campaign into weekly games with my group, I’ll need another one DMG so that I can start again.

“I don’t need to buy a new book,” I told Crawford. “But I can.” He laughed.

“I actually hadn’t thought of anyone writing directly into the book,” he admitted. “But it’s a nice idea.”

I think it’s much more than a nice idea: I think it’s an opportunity for other creators in the space to make something great.

Photo: Nicole Carpenter/Polygoon

What if creators, instead of boring old fill-in pages, the DMG in something else – something like a souvenir game. Memory games are currently a small niche in the larger role-playing game design space; the experience of playing them can range from solo journaling experiences to group role-playing exercises that eventually become physical works of art. Makers love Jeeyon Shim, Shing Yin Khorand Tim Hutchings have spent years exploring this design space with souvenir games like Memory field guide, Have I been goodAnd Thousand-year-old vampire. What if we got people like that together with expert world builder Avery Alder, creator of The silent year? What if we invited Gabe Hicks and Elise Rezendes, the creators of the soon to be released Session Zero System, to help build our hero party? What if they teamed up with the inspiring craftsmen of Heart of the Deernicorn, publisher of Winter city? What if all these souvenir game enthusiasts showed up at Beadle & Grimm with the intention of creating the most over-the-top, inspiring Dungeon Master guide of all time? And what if the system was agnostic? What if the world you were building could become the fuel for other emerging TTRPGs? Or for fanfiction? Or just for fun to create something new and unique?

From what I’ve seen of the care and commitment of the Wizards of the Coast team, the next version of the Dungeon Master guide should have much more staying power than the old one. It could become as indispensable as the Player’s Handbook is today. But it could also be a paradigm shift for the entire industry. These books that we all carry with us are quickly being replaced by digital versions, and that’s fine. But what if those books could become the artifacts of the worlds we play in together? What if, after years of having fun with your friends at the dinner table, you had something tangible to put back on the shelf as a reminder of your pretend time together? Maybe, just maybe, we can make something worth leaving behind for the generations of tabletop fans to come after us.

“This was my dad’s favorite D&D campaign,” my daughter might say one day. “It’s a whole world we made together. Let’s take it off the shelf. Let’s explore. Let’s play it. Together. Again.”