Customer Reviews

Dungeon Master's Guide II (Dungeons & Dragons d20 3.5 Fantasy Roleplaying Supplement)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is the latest book from WOC and I found it to be very useful. It is primarily for DM's but players will find things helpful.

Chapter one opens with particulars of running a campaign. There are discusions with the DM's responsibilities for running a campaign with various styles of gamers and your particular style of running campaigns. Most of it is basic like letting your players know before hand about any house rules you may have, ways of imparting information to the players about their environment and rough guidelines for preparing a game.

Chapter two deals with the particulars of running an adventure, both using published and your own materials. the third chapter deals with specifics of running a campaign. Things like guilds, law and order, and building a city are contained in this chapter. I felt this part was better than the information about cities in the complete adventurers guide.

Chapter four contains the city of Saltmarsh, was part of a series of modules years ago. It is expanded and really could be a useful part of a campaign. I will probably adopt it at some point myself.

chapter 5 deals with npcs and their care and feeding.

Chapter 6 deals with the characters themselves and introduces apprenticeships, mentors and teamwork options for the players. I have done similar things in the past and I feel that it is a good idea as it gives the players more continuity with the campaign and plot hooks. There is a section on designing your own prestige classes and pc organizations.

Chapter 7 is about magic items. A section on signature magic items and bonded magic items is discussed and rules for doing such things. There are new magic items and new templates like the hellforged template which allows a magic armor to have additional hardness, hit points, maximum dex bonus, arcane spell failure modificiations to it. it closes with a section on artifacts, their introduction and use in a campaign.

As I said in the title its a very useful but not necessary. I would recommend that new DM's, DM's who might be a little jaded and for players to check out the new options for the players. There is nothing amazing new but it has many things collected together for you to look and use.

As the other two reviewers have stated, this book would be great for new or struggling DM's, however if you've been behind the screen for any length of time much of what is contained here will be common sense.

That's not to knock the book at all. I really enjoyed reading it from cover to cover and found several nuggets of information burried in it that will be making their way into my campaign. The archetyical and special encounters in chapter 2 come to mind right away for their interesting handling of the rules. The magic items section of the book was also an interesting read.

My biggest problem with the book was the "psychology of role playing" section in the beginning. This seems to be a recurring subject on the boards at WOTC and in their magazines, however they really love beating the dead horse... not everyone enjoys the same game, 'nuff said.

Presentation and artwork were all first rate, as was the writing for a sourcebook of this type. I reccomend it for all DM's, if not as a "every session reference," at least for a good read.

The Dungeon Master's Guide II is not a replacement for the DM's Guide but rather a complementing supplement that adds much more additional information for the DM to use. In all there are seven chapters in the book covering the following topics:

1. Running the Game
2. Adventures
3. The Campaign
4. The Saltmarsh
5. NPC's
6. Characters
7. Magic Items

Running the game provides tips on knowing your players...their behaviors, their personalities and tendencies. Examples are given on how to add drama and developing a story in your games. Suggestions are provided for using house rules and laptops to assist the DM. While this information is nice, it's more geared towards inexperienced DMs.

The adventure chapter covers things such as many new traps, map and grid design, building encounter tables, and encounters for such areas as the Abyss and Infernal planes, graveyards, haunted buildings, lost ruins, and several other specific type locations.

The campaign section provides information if you want to develop your own campaign as opposed to buying an off the shelf product such as the Forgotten Realms. It provides all the information you need on setting up a medieval-type world including social and political structures, lifestyles and more. There are also 50 rumors/adventure hooks provided that the DM can use to flesh out adventures.

The Saltmarsh is recognizable to older fans of D&D as the name of an old module. The Saltmarsh is provided here as a kind of drop-in city for use in any campaign. It's ready made with all the information you need to run if you don't feel like making a city from scratch, providing maps, business locations, NPCs, guilds, adventure hooks and more. It's one of the best sections in the book.

The chapters on NPCs and characters are ok. The NPC section is short and fairly forgettable but the character section features information on designing prestige classes which is very well done. There's also info on working with other players as a team when attacking and combining spells for maximum effect.

The last chapter is on Magic Items and goes into customizing items with signature abilities or items that are bonded to their creator. A new type of magic item, sort of, are magic locations. These are ancient, and very powerful sights that can be found within a world which can imbue a character with certain abilities for up to one year. For example the Heart of Fire is a location that can imbue a spellcaster with magic that increases his casting level by +1 for one year when casting fire-based spells. There are a bunch of these locations as well as tons of new magic rings, rods, armor, weapons, and miscellaneous items.
The Dungeon Master II guide is kind of like the whipped cream and cherry on a sundae. It's not necessary and you can certainly live without it, but it does add a little flavor and certainly makes it more filling. Take what you want out of the book. I personally like the section on designing prestige classes and the inclusion of Saltmarsh is a great aid to the DM.

Reviewed by Tim Janson

It took me Dungeon Master's Guide II to find out that I had bought too many D&D books already. I am used to flipping through a D&D book and sorting things that I like and might be useful from things that are a waste of space. I didn't find anything useful in this book. If you're an experienced DM, you won't either. Here's why:

Chapter 1 - Running a game provides you with tips on how to deal with different kinds of players, and different tastes for games. The approach is almost therapeutic, and deals with communication issues on the game table.
Chapter 2 - Adventures has more new traps, some tips on using published material, and rules for aerial battles, crowds, mobs... to save you from the effort of coming up with them yourself.
Chapter 3 - The Campaing Has tips about preparing a campaign. That's where my biggest disappointment is - at the session on how to create towns, it has very few numerical statistics. It basically lists what kind of professionals and shops you'll find in a fantasy-medieval city.
Chapter 4 - Saltmarsh describes the city of Saltmarsh. Pretty generic.
Chapter 5 - Non Player Characters have a lot of ready-made multiclass NPCs (as if they were hard to create) and a list of powers to make NPCs unique (but unfortunately they have no rules to use them in PCs).
Chapter 6 - Characters has rules on apprenticeship and masters (that is actually nice), and general guidelines (nothing numerical) on designing custom Prestige Classes.
Chapter 7 - Magic Items has actually no new magic items! Just a new approach to old ones.

Novice DMs may find it actually quite useful and inspiring. So may lazy DMs. If you're used to running campaigns and using your own material in your game, you'll find this book nothing more than a collection of nice illustrations and things you already know.

I'm in agreement with some of the other's who've reviewed this book here. I don't think it's very useful to someone like me who's been playing the game since the mid 80s, but this book has its charm, and it is very useful for the highschool kid who's been stuck with the task of DMing for the first time and needs some advice. Sure, there are useful section on cities, NPCs, prestige class creation, etc, but the bulk of the book is an aid for those who need to hone their Dming skills. I'll admit, it made reassess my own style as I read it. One thing I found to be really important about this book is that it specifically states, several times, that you don't have to DM one specific way, that FUN is the goal. It's all about putting the FUN back into the game. It tells those of us, who've become set in our ways, to step back and ask ourselves if our players are enjoying the games we run. This is one of few DnD books of late that hasn't been choke full of prestige classes, feats, spells and other fluff. I recommend it to everyone if for no other reason that it makes you think, instead of offering you a pile of junk your players will get pumped on and you'll have to find a way to incorporate in your game.

All right. Let's begin with a discussion of irony. Not irony as in the Alanis Morissette song (the greatest irony of which almost none of the things she calls ironic actually are). Instead we will talk about true irony.

Those of you who have read my previous reviews may have noticed a certain resistance to a phenomena I call "prestige class bloat." DMG II arrived at my door a bit late for a review copy, and I had some time to think about how I would view the prestige classes in this book. Every other book has drawn my anger, my disdain, sometimes even my pity for their prestige classes. But this book, I thought, "You know . . . I'm gonna give them a pass on this book. They might put the contents into the SRD at some point (it's possible). I'll let this one go."

And there are no prestige classes in this book.

I might weep. I might actually weep.

Anyway. We won't hold that against them. We won't. My review will be objective. Honest.

Actually, that won't be very hard. There's a lot to like in this book. Almost everything is useful. Some of it is downright insightful. When I reviewed the first DMG all those year's ago (all right, the first 3.x DMG . . . I'm not that old, people) I was amazed at how good the advice was. This wasn't just a set of DM specific rules, it really was a guide to being a good DM.

So here we are, years later, holding DMG II.

Chapter 1 deals with the actual running of a game. Now, in many ways this chapter resembles the Gamemaster's Law product from ICE. For years I've said that was the best book on GMing ever written. I'm friends with one of the authors. I'm crushed to say this, but, I like this one better. The bits on how to actually run are pretty blaise, although if your DM routinely shows up surly, sleepy and unwashed you might make him read this book. No, the true genius is the treatment of the different play styles. There was a lot of insight here I've missed over the years. In this section they talk about the different type of players and how to tailor a game for them . . . most importantly, they talk about how to avoid the pitfalls caused by these players. For instance, I've had problems with "Outliers" over the years. These are the players that choose strange class/race combinations, bizarre backgrounds, and seem to set themselves up to fail. An outlier can cause a great deal of trouble in a game if they go out of control at a bad moment. This book gave the simplest advice, to give the outlier the opportunity, a specific set up, to allow him to fail spectacularly early in the session, when it won't hurt anything. By doing this you'll avoid the problem of the character imploding later and taking your plot line with him. It's the simplest advice, but I've missed it for years, and now I know. I'm anxious to put it into use.

Chapter 2 deals with adventures. Now, this was sort of a ho hum chapter for me. When it's useful, I expect it to be very useful, but otherwise I doubt I'll ever look at it. It gives a section on using published adventures that I hope no one needs to read (but if you do, study it. I'm going into business as an e-publisher). It follows this up with some new traps, which are probably the most consistently useful thing in the chapter. Then it moves on to strange locations, such as the tree top city and all the rules necessary for play there. Then it moves onto special encounter rules, such as how to deal with mobs, which again, could be useful. Finally it wraps up with miniature and encounter advice, which was fine.

Chapter 3 deals with building a campaign. Most of the advice is pretty good, but the detailed examples of some medieval environments was truly spot on. I've studied a lot about medieval culture (I'm no expert, but above the gamer layman) and I thought they did a fine job here, especially in examining the fine line between realism and the style of play that is conducive to a good game. You absolutely need to compromise to find the perfect ground between the two, and I loved this book for even trying it. The rest of the chapter treats with general subjects like building a city or magical events and I looked upon it and I called it good.

Chapter 4 outlined the city of Saltmarsh. You know, I could have done without this chapter. I mean it was fine and all, but I thought the locale was a little too evocative of specific images to be as universal as a city in a book like this needed to be. We needed a Homlet, or better yet, a location that doesn't carry the baggage of roleplaying history with it (either good or bad). This chapter just didn't work for me as is. No offence to the writer. I believe this one went astray at conception (and as a game designer, I know the feeling. I've taken the fall for decisions that weren't mine in at least one book.)

Chapter 5 deals with NPCs. Its starts with a treatment of contacts and hirelings, plus a section on unique abilities. Then it hops into my favorite part, the complex NPCs. Lets face it, when you suddenly need a Blackgaurd, you need it now and it's not something you can wing and do it justice. This section gives a nice sampling of these types of difficult-to-improvise characters.

Chapter 6 is the character chapter, it starts with apprentices and mentors and moves on to running a business. Then it hits on teamwork benefits, like those given by special training in Heroes of Battle. I'm still glad these were added into the D&D system and I'm anxious to see more. Then it moves onto prestige classes. Sigh. Now, I was willing to see a few prestige classes in this book, hoping they'd make it into the SRD. Let's face it, only so many people can create versions of the Knight before you're accidently stepping on a half-dozen copyrights. I doubt anyone would sue you over retreading the same ground as everyone else, but we need to stop beating this poor horse. Still, they went a different way. This section is on how to build even more prestige classes. When I read the words, "Why make your own prestige class?" I wanted to find a set of precision needles and stick the one after another into my eyes. Flash forward ten years. "Why did he kill so many people, officer?" "Well, prestige class bloat was bad enough, but then they came out with DMG II. It was the beginning of the end." The chapter wraps up with some stuff on PC organizations.

Finally, the finishes with expanded magic item rules. The book needed this section, and I was happy with it. Of particular note is the section on magical locations which are essentially giant, immobile magic items. These types of locations have worked their way into my campaigns several times over the years. I was happy to see them here.

Overall, I enjoyed this book. I would recommend that everyone who intends to run a game read at least the first chapter. I thought it alone was worth the cover price, and so if you can find a good use for the other material in the book, so much the better. Now I'm going to take a nap an imagine a world where prestige classes are few, balanced, and in some way prestigious.

The Dungeon Master's Guide II for Wizard of the Coast's game-line Dungeons and Dragon's 3.5 Edition is a decent resource book, but lacks in true versitility.

If you're unsure of how to DM, new to the game, or looking for more of a "Idiots Guide of How to Run a D&D Session," or you simply felt that the standard Dungeon Master's Guide wasn't enough - then this book is for you.

The information it provides is useful, if you can find ways to implament it into your own Gaming style and have it fit the group.

However, if you've been a gamer for some time, or already know how to DM - then the majority of the book will probably fall onto information that is already known, such as "How to use Guilds" or "Building Prestige Classes." This makes the first several chapters of the book rather useless and a waste of space.

The magic items are nifty, as are some of the other trinkets that are tossed in here and there. However, if you've got a grasp on the D&D Game, and know how to DM - save yourself the money and go look into some of their more interesting books.

This book is a useful supplement for DMs. The new magic item traits and the magical events and locations can really spice up an otherwise stale treasure hoard, and the specialized example NPCs are pretty cool.

While it is by no means necessary (hence it being a supplement), it is not as full of fluff as some of the other d&d 3.5 books out there. Everything in it can be of some use to DMs and players alike.

My one complaint is that WOTC forgot to proofread it before sending it off to the printers. It's chock-full of typos and spelling mistakes (I must say, though, that it's not as bad as the Monster Manual 3.5, which actually has a proofreader named in the credits and yet still manages to come off looking like a rough draft).

Definitely worth getting if you're a DM looking to spice up your game a bit and don't know how/don't have time/can't be bothered to think of ways of doing it yourself. Also useful for new DMs, as it has tips on managing unruly players and the like.

While this book is not nearly the resource that many of the more staple books are, like the Epic Handbook and PHB2, it is still extremely useful to add more flavor to the campaign. It gives some very good tips to create details and subtlties that make the campaign much more real without seeming narrated to the players. Anyone creating a new campaign could benefit with some of the examples in the Saltmarsh city, novice and veteran players alike.

There are also new and interesting traps, items, and rules that make this book very useful. I havn't read anyone talking about the Teamwork benefits, which are very interesting to me. I intend to implement them into my next campaign, assuming the players want to use any of them. The basic idea is that the group has worked and trained together, so they have studied each other to an extent that you gain special abilities and even feats when certain conditions are met. For example, a character with high Spellcraft and the Evasion ability can teach the rest of your party when to dodge a spell cast by a teammate. This means that the mage can cast fireball right on the fighter wading into melee and he gets to avoid the damage on a reflex save.

The new items, magic locations, and traps have some good ideas behind them, but nothing that a clever DM can't come up with on their own. I'm not saying they are useless, but many are hard to place into a campaign. The magic locations grant the owner specific powers and abilities, but in order for the players to get the location, it almost has to be the entire focus of the campaign. Very few are "side-quest" material, and the majority can take several sessions to get to, capture, find reagents to use them, and defend in order to reap the marginally useful benefits.

Most of the rest of the book is given over to npcs. There is a very large section of sample npcs to use for a fight. Unfortunetly, many aren't optimized, but that doesn't prevent them from being used by a lazy DM that doesn't feel like leveling up every single important npc in case the players fight him. There is also a section on making npcs more distinctive. This can easily be skipped over since DMG1 has a very similar section.

Overall, I have to say there is some interesting material and ideas to make a campaign world more interesting and unique. On the other hand, nothing in this book is game-changing. Useful? yes. Needed in any way? no

I'm not going to go into this review too much; understand that my depth of dungeon mastering goes above and beyond the norm and I can get very wordy with my critiques. The DMG 2 (Dungeon Masters Guide 2) is AMAZING and should've been the first installment instead of the second. Know this. Wizards of the Coast were under pressure to produce the 3.5 system and needed to get a guide on the shelf that cohesively conveyed game rules and mechanics. Of course there were sections to help a DM create a game world; however nothing that compares with the DMG2. As backward as this might sound, if there are any beginner Dungeon Masters out there who might be struggling with campaign/world creation - the DMG2 is going to put everything into perspective and read much more like a normal guide than stereo instructions (so to speak).