Dungeons & Dragons has reached more people than ever before with its fifth edition. With the reissue they are doing, their intention is to become even more accessible, but without making the system simpler. On the contrary. If the new Player’s Handbook stands out for anything, it is for being an excellent revision that makes everything deeper, but thanks to a better structure of the information and its presentation, it is more accessible than ever. Something in which the Dungeon Master’s Guide not only follows its steps but doubles its efforts.
If there is one thing that has been emphasized in this book, it is that this new version of the Dungeon Master’s Guide is all about the efforts it makes to explain the role of the master. Long before delving into any kind of advice or rule, it spends many pages specifying the master’s role and their commitment to their players. All of this is accompanied by what will be the general tone of this book: examples of absolutely everything discussed to make it easy to understand what is being talked about at any given moment. This makes the task much more manageable.
Thanks to this, this version of the Dungeon Master’s Guide feels much more focused than any previous one. There is much more emphasis on the tips, on how to run the game and build the stories, with more pages dedicated to it. Promising a simpler experience for those venturing into this experience for the first time.
Among the additions, the two most interesting aspects are something new and something old. The old are the tables. They are still here, but now they seem to have a greater emphasis on specific aspects and less on vagueness, making them more useful. In the new, we have the tracking pages that we already saw in the Player’s Handbook, which make the games simpler, and a new mechanic that will delight many groups: the Bastions. Buildings where the group can live and will have to manage, which will also offer them particular advantages while they are there.
In the absence of having the complete book in our hands, as we have only been able to see a small sample of it, it seems that Wizards of the Coast continues to seek to create a much more refined version of the game. One where various very different approaches are possible, more focused on rules or interpretation, leaving much more room for players, precisely by making everything more accessible and less rigid. This will be key in this book, as it conveys all this to the masters in the clearest way possible. But from what we have seen and what we have been told, it seems that this is exactly what they have achieved.
