The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide, the second tome in a trifecta of Dungeons & Dragons rulebook revisions, has a lot on its plate. There's no single path to becoming a successful dungeon master in D&D, and attempting to round up all the essentials in one volume requires a delicate balancing act. It's an art that D&D has struggled to perfect in the past, and despite featuring plenty of valuable and interesting information, the 2014 Dungeon Master's Guide couldn't quite arrange it in a way that made it intuitive for those learning the game.

Fortunately, the 2024 Player's Handbook already showed a deft hand at sprucing up the current state of D&D, and the new Dungeon Master's Guide brims with the same potential. From annotated examples of play to more extensive resources detailing D&D characters and places, a lot of useful new material has made its way in, and most of what was already there is now presented in a more accessible manner. It might be impossible to make a Dungeon Master's Guide that would fully satisfy every DM, but this one feels a lot closer than the last.

Screen Rant interviewed Chris Perkins and James Wyatt, the designers in charge of the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide, to discuss what the book changes and the process of guiding it toward completion.

Changes & Cuts In The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide

Nothing Removed Was Considered A Loss

Screen Rant: The 2014 Dungeon Master's Guide had some great material in it, but it was more or less the black sheep of the core rulebook lineup at the time. Were there any unique challenges in bringing this one up to speed?

Chris Perkins: One of the most fun challenges was how we were going to reorganize the book to surface information better. Because, to your point, one of the number one things I discovered over the past 10 years is, someone coming up to me asking why the DMG doesn't cover a topic, and I'd say, but it does. It's right here. But they didn't know that. They couldn't find it. And so, when we were rebuilding the outline for the DMG, we were very careful to try to organize it in a way where it does make the information easier to find, where it feels like an invaluable tool, and it's surfacing the things that are most important.

And I think that one of the struggles that the 2014 book had is it did have a lot of stuff in it, and it was sort of burying some of the more fundamental concepts. And so I think we've addressed that this time around.

In deciding what to prioritize in the book, were there any particular darlings that you had to kill?

James Wyatt: I don't think any darlings died. A lot of wayward mutants fell by the wayside. The 2014 DMG had a whole section that was sort of experimental rules, more like what we would publish in a sourcebook or try out in Unearthed Arcana and then discard. Nobody ever used those rules. Why were they eating up valuable pages in a section on running the game, rather than telling you how to run the game?

Chris Perkins: Or if not nobody, at least relatively few DMs were using that material. And so, when we're talking about the core Dungeon Master's Guide, to James's point, everything in there better be cracking on topic and directed at DMs who are either new or who are looking for ways as experienced DMs to make their games more interesting. And so things that are more fringe are probably best left to a different resource.

And so we were just more focused this time around in making sure that everything that we're putting in here is tried and true advice, or it's potentially necessary to run our adventures and our campaigns as well as your own homebrew material.

One interesting exclusion, a phrase that doesn't appear this time, is the Adventuring Day, correct?

Chris Perkins: Yes. And is there a question you'd like to ask attached to that? Shall we just jump into an answer on that?

We can jump into it, but I think it also goes hand in hand with — there's a shift in the approach to the encounter balance table and the math and the multipliers involved in that as well.

Chris Perkins: Yeah. Well, I can speak to the Adventuring Day, and then I'll let James speak to the encounter building going on. So, what we've discovered is that the Adventuring Day as a concept was kind of bogus. That in a great, great many campaigns, it was just not true. It was not how actual games were running. And so, sticking with the idea that we're presenting tried and true advice and things that actually work at the table, we abandoned the idea of the adventuring day and instead focused our attention on making sure that when you are building any encounter, once you've decided how difficult you want it to be, that the math is actually helping you deliver that encounter.

James Wyatt: Yeah. So the revised table of encounter difficulty is meant to be simpler to use. It's a very simple XP budget that you calculate and spend without multipliers for the numbers of creatures involved, because it turned out that that doesn't have as big an impact as we thought it did 10 years ago. And the numbers get significantly higher at higher levels. That's not because characters are more powerful now, it's because the math was off 10 years ago, and we fixed it.

It was hard for DMs to provide a challenging encounter to characters above 10th level, because the math was off in the monsters themselves, and the math was off on that encounter table. So in the Monster Manual, we'll see the monsters at higher challenge rating also amped up a little bit, and that encounter table will give you encounters that provide the challenge we say they do.

To the point of monsters, the creature creation section in this book is one that's a lot smaller than in the 2014 manual. Can DMs expect anything more on that front in the future?

Chris Perkins: It is absolutely within the realm of possibility that as we do future rules expansions, that we will offer DMs more creative tools for building things for their own campaigns.

Here in the Dungeon Master's Guide, going back to the idea that this is sort of the DM's start or the DM's handy toolkit, we wanted to give the DM creature-building that was quick, that was easy, and that wouldn't cause them to create a monster that was off-CR and potentially wreck their encounter. Which was actually a danger with how the 2014 guidance was put into place.

And so we did scale it down and basically said, hey, you know what? There is a big book of stat blocks called the Monster Manual, and there's over like 500 of them now. You can take one of those and kind of reskin it in this way to create a monster that your players will think is new.

James Wyatt: Yeah, along the theme of printing only advice that is tried and true, tested, and, and approved for use at your table, the best way to create a monster is by reskinning an old one. Start from one that we have tested carefully using math that is too complicated to print in a book. And, and reflavor it, tweak it a little bit in ways that aren't going to impact its challenge.

Making The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide New

More Than Just A Rework

What did the process of consulting with Dungeon Masters like Matt Mercer and Deborah Ann Woll look like on this book?

Chris Perkins: Oh, that's a really good question. So it was — it was very straightforward. As we were finishing up chapters of the book that focused on DM advice, we sent those chapters, we bundled them up and sent them to our consultants with a list of questions. So as they're reading through the material, they would just keep these questions in mind as they're sort of digesting the advice and thinking about whether or not it's good or not.

And so it was questions like is there a better way to say this, or is this too complicated, or does this ring true to you? And so they read the advice that we were compiling, and they sent us back detailed notes. And they said, this is great, but this part here makes no sense to me, or this is actually bad advice if you're a neurodivergent DM. And so we took that advice, and then we implemented changes based on that.

James Wyatt: I compiled everything from our consultants, from our staff in-house people who read the book, and from our inclusion reviewers all into a spreadsheet, and checked things off as I made changes going through.

There's been a lot of fanfare about a new section on doors, which is a seemingly very uninteresting subject that's so very relevant in D&D. Are there any other mundane concepts that needed to earn a spot this time around?

Chris Perkins: I'm glad you mentioned doors. It's been a bugaboo of mine over the past 10 years that every time we print an adventure, the adventure has to tell you basically how doors work in the dungeon. And I wanted to have something in the book that basically codified this material. And you think doors, why doors? Well, it turns out player characters encounter more doors than anything else. Practically more than kobolds, more than goblins, more than torches, they have to deal with doors. And so having a section in the book about that seems super, super important.

Now are there any other sections in there that seem important?

James Wyatt: So a stupid little thing, but it's on my to-do list to talk with our editors about, is the beginning of every single adventure we publish tells you what boxed text is. Now the DMG tells you what boxed text is, so I don't think we need to do that in adventures anymore. Although that is a conversation we're going to have with the editing team to make sure of that.

A big new system is Bastions, a way for players to manage and benefit from a home base. How have those changed since they first appeared in Unearthed Arcana playtesting?

Chris Perkins: That's a great question too. So, the Unearthed Arcana process was super valuable this time around because what we learned was that those interacting with the system liked it overall. They liked the range of activities that the special facilities of a Bastion provided. They were really happy with the benefits that characters could get using the system. And they were also very happy with the ease of implementation.

One of the things we ended up stripping out was something called Bastion Points, which was basically a mechanism that you could accumulate. What people were bouncing off of was the resource tracking. It's just another number that they have to keep track of. And even when we were putting it out, we ourselves had doubts whether that would be necessary or not. And so, based on the we got in Unearthed Arcana, we took it out. And it simplified things and I don't think anybody was going to miss it terribly. Plus, we had other, we had other mechanisms to deliver what that was essentially providing. What bastion points were spent on were basically magic items. And now in the bastions, you have other ways to get those benefits.

James Wyatt: I was going to say the flip side is that the Bastion system now is integrated with the crafting system that appears in the Player's Handbook and the Dungeon Master's Guide, so that you can use your Bastion facilities to help you craft mundane and magical items.

D&D Has Changed A Lot, But Some Things Stay The Same

Different Worlds Colliding Across The Years

The Greyhawk setting included in this book is something that means a lot to many D&D players, and something that will be completely new to some others. How did you approach representing that world in the span of 29 pages?

James Wyatt: Is that what it is?

I believe so.

Chris Perkins: Yep. It is 29 pages. So it is the 50th anniversary of D&D. So as we were deciding what campaign setting we were going to put in the books — we knew we were going to have one. It was very important for the purpose of showing rather than telling DMs what a campaign setting is. We decided to go back to the original first published campaign setting ever, because in that original form, it was very skeletal, and we wanted something similar. We wanted a campaign setting which felt like a DM could pick it up and run with it, customize it, make it their own. We also wanted a setting that felt like it incorporated everything that's in Dungeons & Dragons. It didn't exclude anything. And so that's another reason we glommed on to it.

Now, one of the things, and a lot of folks may not this, or maybe they weren't even alive when this was the case, but the original Greyhawk, which came in this tiny little folio, was not much bigger than 29 pages.

James Wyatt: I think it's 32.

Chris Perkins: It was 32, but it had big pages of just like little symbols and stuff. So it's actually like 28 pages of text.

Full circle in a way.

Chris Perkins: Exactly. So we come full circle. What we just had to make sure of — and the other great thing about the setting is it's also the home world for some of our most iconic characters. So Mordenkainen, Tasha, Bigby, and so on and so on. But one of the big things is we just want to make sure that the setting as presented is speaking to the rest of the campaign chapter, that the advice we give you on how to build and sustain your campaign is echoed in that Greyhawk material.

And so one of the things we talk about earlier on in the chapter is this idea of a campaign hub, a place to start. And so we had to make sure that that was in the campaign setting. That's why we detail the city of Greyhawk, as we do. We talk about expanding the map, going out from your campaign hub and discovering the area around it. That necessitated having some information in the Greyhawk campaign about what's around the city, where can we go explore for low-level adventurers? And then if we go beyond that, you know, make sure that there's information about the far-flung places of the world. And also making sure that when we talk earlier in the campaign's chapter about how do you pick your pick your conflicts in the world? Making sure that we then in the Greyhawk section echo that advice.

James Wyatt: Yeah. That approach carries through the whole chapter. We talk about deciding on the mysteries of the world, and then there's a section on the mysteries of Greyhawk. We talk about building a pantheon for a world, we give you the gods of Greyhawk. We talk about different flavors of fantasy, and as we expand beyond the immediate Greyhawk region, we talk about, well, this region is really good for this kind of adventure. If you want to do political intrigue, go over to the east, or if you want to do scrappy rebels fighting the evil empire, go over to the great kingdom of the east, that sort of thing.

Let's take this way back at the end, and I want you to imagine when, both of you, when you first tried your hand at being a Dungeon Master — what would have changed for you as a new DM with the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide in hand?

Chris Perkins: Oh, gosh.

James Wyatt: It was such a different world back then.

Chris Perkins: Yes it was. Yeah, I was a small town Canadian boy who didn't have much resources to draw upon. There was no such thing as an Internet.

James Wyatt: I mean, I had B1 In Search of Adventure trying to teach me how to be a dungeon master, which basically meant here's how you populate a dungeon. Take this list of monsters and this list of treasure and assign them to rooms. And I mean, the biggest thing — I was telling the story a little bit ago. When I first encountered D&D, it was the original box set that my older brother got as a Christmas present. And I spent hours reading those books and trying to figure out how it was a game.

So, I mean, the biggest thing for me is that both the Player's Handbook and the Dungeon Master's Guide include, right in the first chapter, examples of play. So you can see, this is how the game is actually played. This is the things that people say as the game is unfolding. And everything that happens in the game is what people say to each other. Which made that sort of script format really the ideal way to show you how this is a game and how it's played.

Chris Perkins: Yeah, I I was taught that an adventure was like a 32-page publishable thing. And so all of my home adventures I wrote as like 32-page things, fully written out. It didn't even occur to me that I didn't need to do all that work. And so if I had the 2024 DMG, which has sample adventures in it, which are tight and short and really sort of scripts for the DM to just to jog their memory and make sure that they're sort of ing the pace and flow of the adventure, I could have saved myself a lot of prep time.