LINE OF SIGHT

  Full Circle, Part 2

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So there I was, a blank screen in front of me waiting for me to write the new Dungeon Master’s Guide. Originally, way back when the 3rd Edition process started, it was thought that we would just take the existing 2nd Edition products and “update” them. By the time I’d gotten to this point, though, we’d chucked that idea right out the window. This would be a brand-new book from start to finish. Like the Player’s Handbook, some of the individual bits would remain (for the PH, it was the spells, for the DMG, it was magic items), but they’d be completely redone and reorganized. There would be a firmer system behind it all than in previous editions.

I’d just finished almost two years of meetings, discussing everything about the new game, from what races to include to how much damage a greataxe should inflict to how hold person should work. That was fun, but now it was time to actually put words on paper (or at least on the black screen staring at me). But there was so much I wanted to do with this book that it daunted me.

I wanted to capture the feeling of the 1st Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide. That book didn’t talk down to me. It assumed that, since I was a DM, I was intelligent and had a good vocabulary. It assumed that I knew how to play the game. That was a book a DM couldn’t leave home without (having the combat tables in there helped).

At the same time, I really wanted this to be the Dungeon Master’s guide. That is to say, I wanted it to be a book of advice and guidelines on how to be a good DM. I wanted to appeal to both brand-new DMs and those who had been running games for 20 years.

This was going to be quite a task.

So I began writing. The material on environments (now in the Running the Game chapter) was once going to be in the Player’s Handbook, so some of that was already done. A few magic items had already been dealt with, for playtesting. So there was at least some place to start. I dug in. Meanwhile, a rough draft of the basic rules was circulated out to the playtesters. Internal playtests at Wizards continued as well.

Unfortunately, the playtests and further development on the Player’s Handbook meant that things I was working on in the DMG had to change as I wrote them. A change to a spell usually meant a change to a magic item. A spell name change often altered many magic items. You can find, if you look around in the finished DMG, a few of these sorts of things that just never got caught because development of the two books was going on at the same time. Not much later, Skip Williams started writing the Monster Manual, and now we had all three books going at once. Any major change in one usually begged for a change in at least one of the other books. It was crazy. (Note to those who work on 4th Edition: Whenever that day comes: do the books one at a time).

One great thing about 3rd Edition, I think, is that we didn’t just change around some rules. The new game was based on the way we found that people really played. Although this approach was pretty obvious in the Player’s Handbook, it came through in the DMG like a locomotive. We didn’t just throw a table into a book, we tried to explain why that table worked the way it did. When we started thinking about the DMG, I really pushed for the “Behind the Curtain” sidebars, because I knew very well that people were going to develop their own house rules, races, magic items, and whatnot. I wanted DMs to know why something was in the game, and what would happen if they changed it.

And we didn’t stop there. We updated the book to make it read the way people really talked. They weren’t “magical items,” they were magic items. It wasn’t a “sword +1,” it was a +1 sword. People enjoy dungeons, so I filled the Adventures chapter with information about dungeon adventuring. Players don’t always start characters at 1st level, so we gave rules for starting them higher. Not everyone was going to like the new initiative system, so we addressed that too. This was a book where I, as a game designer, got to talk right to the DMs reading it. I wanted that discussion to be honest, frank, and between equals. No holds barred. I wanted to provide as much as I could in the space I had.

Before I knew it, the DMG was finished. It was a massive book, but the fact is, I wrote much more than it could hold. We shrank the text and tightened things up, but we still had to cut a few items and other things (most of the items made their way into other books, some still forthcoming).

I’m more proud of the Dungeon Master’s Guide than anything else I’ve ever worked on. But it wasn’t just me. Plenty of others jumped in to help out. Jonathan Tweet did most of the work on the encounter tables. Once we figured out how random treasure would work, editor Dave Noonan did the charts. Lots of people jumped in to help with the various NPC stat listings by class at every level. And the rules themselves were developed primarily by the team, not by any one individual.

And of course, Julia Martin, John Rateliff, and Kim Mohan improved the book in so many ways as editors, I can’t begin to list them all. Then there’s the great artwork provided by the artists under the guidance of art director Dawn Murin, the help and encouragement from D&D Creative Director Ed Stark… the list goes on, and this is about to start sounding like one of those boring Oscar speeches. You can read the credits page for yourself.

Still, I like to think of the circular nature of life. I can remember the day I bought the 1st Edition DMG as clearly as I remember the day I finished the 3rd Edition DMG. A personal career highlight for me came in an email from Gary Gygax, writer of the 1st Edition DMG. He not only liked my DMG, but he said it had taught him a few things about being a Dungeon Master.

Full circle.

~Monte Cook