Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide 2024 Review

While the Player’s Handbook is the most important book for any TTRPG, as the core instructions for play, the game master’s own instruction manual can be the most influential. As the second part of the main rulebook trio, it gives DMs the guidance and tools to roll with the punches at the table, shaping everything from a one-shot to a campaign that spans years. And in this department, the Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide 2024 is a potent ally.

Now several sessions into a new Dungeons & Dragons campaign utilizing the updated rules for 5th Edition, the revamped DM Guide has been an incredibly useful tool for reference and inspiration. I’ve been running D&D games since 4E and readily hopped into 5E when it launched, so I consider myself an experienced GM—and now I wish this new iteration had been available when I first started.

From a distance, the Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide 2024 doesn’t necessarily break a ton of new ground. A lot of familiar content has been presented again, tweaked and rebalanced to suit the substantially different Player’s Handbook. It starts out by explaining the basics of the DM’s role in a way that’s accessible for anyone who’s brand new to D&D or roleplaying games altogether.

And that, in itself, is a huge improvement. Since I’d already played one campaign and ran half of another in 4E, I essentially glazed over this back in 2014, but the original 5E D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide glazed over this aspect and got right into some nitty-gritty talk about factions and homemade pantheons. Perhaps they expected aspiring DMs to know the score or to have already played the Starter Set. Either way, having this ground floor info available immediately is a huge course correction that will surely benefit the new DMs who start from here.

“…the Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide 2024 is a potent ally.”

After Chapter 1 lays down the very fundamental concepts of TTRPG gameplay, Chapter 2 explores the more practical aspects. This spans from knowing your players and accounting for how many there are to running social interactions and combat encounters to improving along the way. Then, Chapter 3, the “DM’s Toolbox,” bridges the gap from these basics to broader and more system-specific elements. This pipeline eases complete rookies into the system while gradually rolling in new elements for returning DMs.

To its credit, the advice in these chapters goes a little further than the usual base-level talk usually found in the core rulebooks, incorporating lessons I’ve picked up from experience, other DMs, or third-party RPG books.

Taking the torch from the Player’s Handbook, the Dungeon Master’s Guide 2024 has improved the format and layout in subtle yet profound ways. Information has been structured in more intuitive ways, the space on every page is used more efficiently (including the distribution of large art pieces), and yet it retains the familiar aesthetic of D&D 5E overall.

This culminates in the fourth chapter, which details the process of planning adventures or sessions. The Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide 2024 offers charts to get the creative juice flowing, whether by inspiring with examples or simply giving tables to roll on and make the decisions easily. Building combat encounters is still presented as a bit of math homework—determining “XP budgets” based on the intended challenge and party size—but has at least been streamlined into a more palatable form.

Ending the chapter with five small example adventures is a welcome addition as well. Not only are these handy, ready-to-play pieces a new DM could use, but they also provide a case study of what encounters look like at different levels. This is a subtle thing that’s harder to pick up just by playing, especially once your party gets to a higher level than the group is used to. This could’ve used expansion past level 7, but it’s a start.

“Taking the torch from the Player’s Handbook, the Dungeon Master’s Guide 2024 has improved the format and layout in subtle yet profound ways.”

A similar philosophy runs through the chapter on Campaign planning, providing the tools for anyone to develop their own long-term adventures and, by extension, their entire approach to running D&D. This chapter segues into a small campaign primer for the classic setting of Greyhawk, either to be used directly or to serve as an inspiration for one’s own creations.

Throughout the Dungeon Master’s Guide 2024 are nine templates for “tracking sheets,” meant to be handy planning tools to track NPCs, the campaign itself, and more. These are a perfect encapsulation of the direct tools supplied in the book: I don’t think I’d personally use any of them exactly as they are, but they get the mental gears turning and include things DMs should generally be more mindful of. They’re a great springboard to making your own notes (and are all available through D&D Beyond as PDFs).

Naturally, much of the book lays out the nature of the planes and a treasury of new magic items (along with invaluable guidance on creating one’s own homebrew items); these are nigh-essential if you’re making the jump to the 2024 rules. There’s also a handy glossary for the magic terms and famous D&D characters players are most likely to encounter in the game’s official materials. The biggest original chunk of the Dungeon Master’s Guide 2024, however, is the chapter on Bastions.

Bastions are meant to be character-owned facilities that can enhance a party’s downtime between adventures. Should everyone choose to incorporate them, they become available at level five (almost magically upon levelling up, as written) and provide specific advantages depending on the kind of facility the players choose. For example, a wizard may choose to add an Arcane Study to their Bastion to gain a magical Charm, while a Rogue might invest in a Garden to harvest components to make potent poisons.

Coincidentally, this concept sounded perfect for something I wanted to incorporate into my current D&D campaign, where the players have a manor that acts as their home base. Bastions seemed great for adding some gameplay function to that concept, on paper.

In actual implementation, however, I found some qualms with the Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide 2024‘s largest game-changer. As written, they’re meant to be something controlled solely by the players and not touched by the Dungeon Master, which is fine in itself. However, we found it more compelling in playtesting to collaborate with everyone around the table, especially since there are factors at play that fall closer to the DM’s jurisdiction.

The options offered range from somewhat obtuse (your garden can manufacture bouquets of flowers worth 10GP, hooray?) to balance-threatening, like crafting or imparting resources (gold, magic items, boons, etc) that are said to be at the DM’s discretion elsewhere in the book. DMs can counter this by having misfortunes befall the facilities while the players are away, or having enemies attack them.

Not to mention, many campaigns won’t necessarily allow for the time or resources to fiddle around with private clubhouses. An adventuring party may be on an interplanar journey with no time to zip back home and check on the hirelings, or they just might not gel with the overarching tone or structure. They add another level of complexity onto a machine that’s already very complicated, and I wouldn’t fault anyone for skipping over them.

That being said, Bastions struck me as another part of the Dungeon Master’s Guide 2024 that invites personalization, another template to be honed to the DM or campaign’s needs. Jumping off from the rules-as-written, my group started to turn their manor into something interesting to play around with on narrative and gameplay levels.

If not for the hiccups in this department, I’d have proclaimed this the best first-party DM reference I’ve read to date. I’d recommend it not only to existing D&D game masters but even to people who run other games, as it’s refreshingly system-agnostic at times. Often, even when it’s talking about something specific to D&D‘s updated rules, it’s imparting advice that’s applicable to any other game in a way that I haven’t seen from Wizards of the Coast before.

Dungeons & Dragons is not the world’s only TTRPG, but it is the most famous, and it’s the first contact many players will have with the medium. Knowing that many new DMs will start from this point for the next 5-10 years is reassuring, as the D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide 2024 is a well-made and thoughtful introduction to the skill of running a tabletop RPG, not just D&D itself.

There are several tips, philosophies, and tools within its nearly 400 pages that I wish I had been introduced to a decade ago. Now a new generation of game masters will start from this new point, further up the mountain, and their games could be all the better for it. If I wasn’t already sold on the updated rules after the Player’s Handbook, this would have swayed me off the fence.