Joji's Buying Guide for New Game Masters*

• I'm weird. I started not with D&D but with Dungeon World, and even before that I was very interested in game design. My experience may not be yours. May as well start with the disclaimer now. I'm pretty confident that even if you disagree with this guide, it will still be helpful to you, though.

###Starting Out

One. Buy the Player's Handbook and learn it. Ask questions to folks who game, online or offline, and get comfortable. Amazon and eBay are your friends.

Two. Buy the Monster Manual and learn at least the monsters you plan on using. Ask questions again.

Three. Skip the Dungeon Master's Guide for now. It is a great book, but the myth that you need all three to be a Game Master is a marketing lie. We'll come back to this later.

Four. Run a game, preferably after having already played in several. Your first game will suck. It's fine. It tells you some important things about yourself. If you're uneasy, you can watch Matt Colville's series, Running the Game. It is excerpts from his own experience, from the Dungeon Master's Guide, and from many other guides and web resources. He even has his own subreddit if you have questions, so it is more interactive than reading the Dungeon Master's Guide. You're beginning to see why I recommended skipping it. This will be a theme.

PAUSE. You have now run a game. What you want to purchase next is going to depend on how you felt about that game.

###Beginner GM to Competent Host

Five. Your first game may have sucked, but maybe you and your players are comfortable enough to keep going. You may not particularly want to improve any longer. It's a beer-and-pretzels game for you, and anyway you've got video games or Overwatch or board games as other options. If this is you, you can stop buying things until you feel the itch to improve. There is no shame in treating D&D as just a casual game where you have a good time, without diving deeper into it.

Five. Maybe you are comfortable continuing, but you want some highlights. You want to learn new tricks. I'd recommend finding plug-n-play, drag-n-drop content to enhance your game. The gold standard for that is Quests of Doom. There are 3 volumes. Get whichever one you find which is cheapest; again, Amazon and eBay will be your friends. They are all gold. Having ready-made drag-n-drop modules means you can read something you are immediately able to play. Each volume has an anthology of adventures from different authors, which means you're getting multiple perspectives. Finally, the drag-and-drop adventures span several levels. Each volume has low-level and high-level content. It will teach you tricks as you play, and show you how to up your game experientialy. This is critical, and one of the ways to really become a better GM in the real world, instead of just reading tips and thinking about them in your head. Here is a resource on experiential learning.

Five. Maybe you're uncomfortable with continuing to run. After all, your first session sucked, and you feel unsure about where to go next. If you want more hand-holding (and there is no shame in this! we all learn differently) then think about your tolerance for time spent before you get to make your own campaign again. If you're okay with your hand being held for a fairly long adventure, you can't go wrong with the Starter Set. Is it a bit mundane? Sure. Is it the most creative adventure? No. But it teaches lessons and was written with new game masters in mind. Do still remember what you did in steps one and two - ask questions. Talk about it before running it. Ask what problems others had with it. You spent the money, so get your money's worth by ironing everything out with real life folks who have also bought it.

Five. The accounting for time may have shaken out differently. You may want your hand held, but only for a short one-to-three-session adventure. If that's the case, get Cat & Mouse. It's cheaper than the Starter Set, it is also starts at level one, and it's also written to teach you skills. Plus, if you want more after finishing it, the setting of Cat and Mouse has its own campaign book (written for Pathfinder, but the fluff is easily portable and I love the non-European focus) plus the module has a sequel if you liked the story, called Grimalkin.

PAUSE. It's important to think what you want/need at this point. You've now run your own stuff as well as stuff that others have written for you. You should be talking to your players, getting a feel for what they enjoy and what you enjoy. What's next?

Deciding Where to Take Your Game

I'd say that in general, seeking out blogs which work for you at this point is a good idea. There are tons of blogs online about how to be a better GM, as well as blogs about monster design, blogs about 5th Edition builds, blogs about item design, blogs about game design principles. Forums abound. Video series abound. Heck, it may even be time (as short a time as you have spent) to look at other tabletop games.

Here is a video from PAX Australia about where you might go once you are "beyond D&D". You also have people who treat that sort of thinking as wrong-headed; those people prefer to keep upping their standards for D&D rather than swapping games. It's helpful to decide where you want to go with your GMing. Maybe you don't want to go anywhere else. You may be content.

Since this is a buyer's guide, I'll give some of my own thoughts on where I personally went, to give some insight.

I do think that checking out other game mechanics helps me GM D&D better. I really wanted to get a feel for a more heroic fantasy setting, so I bought the 13th Age rulebook alongside my PHB initially - I don't run my games in the Forgotten Realms, but rather in the 13th Age setting. I actually got Curse of Strahd initially not to run it, but to learn how the Hickmans made gothic horror work so well in D&D (I have since run it).

One thing I really wanted was a "creativity catalyst" - I am comfortable making my own adventures, but I wanted a resource to kickstart that process. Tome of Adventure Design by Necromancer Games is a delightful series of random tables which are "high-concept". Instead of just "what random item does someone find", it has things like political motivations, interesting plant parts, trap progression, and strange disease tables.

I noticed from player comments that I gave religion the shaft in my games. As an atheist in real life, this made sense. So I got Book of the Righteous by Green Ronin, to train myself to be more cognizant of how to use religion in a game, giving clerics, paladins, and faithful folks more interesting hooks to play with.

But overwhelmingly, I went to blogs. They gave me monsters, items, and campaign suggestions tailored to what I needed.

But when do I get the Dungeon Master's Guide? Or Volo's? Or one of WotC's campaign books?

For a lot of people, this question is important to them. It makes sense - Wizards of the Coast made this wonderful game, so it seems like their products would be the best, the most relevant, the most helpful. But I haven't found this to be the case. They cater to the mainstream, and that limits the sort of stuff they publish compared to other publishers.

For example, I really enjoyed Veins of the Earth, a system-agnostic introduction to the Underdark, because it's weird and evocative and filled with ideas that I couldn't find in Out of the Abyss. I ended up buying Veins, but never purchased Out of the Abyss. I also went backwards in D&D history, buying older Planescape books when I could find them for cheap. I bought an old UK module called When a Star Falls, just to learn more about old school play and to get a perspective of the game from a non-American designer.

So that's why I don't have a "time" to get those books. If those books suit your needs, get them. But really get to know the market for RPG products...you may find that something outside the mainstream scratches your itch way more precisely.

In my personal life, I ended up getting the Dungeon Master's Guide due to nagging from other game masters. They said that I wasn't a proper D&D game master without it, they said that it solved a lot of my frustrations, they claimed it helped them a lot.

In my games, I use it for the items. It is a beautiful book. It gives great advice. I use none of that, because I had already absorbed most of that advice from the other books I own. I actually use a non-D&D PDF, Adventurer Conqueror King, more than I use the Dungeon Master's Guide, mostly for its neat and complicated stronghold rules and pricing guides. A similar stronghold system exists in Swords & Wizardry, which has a $1 PDF.

I regret buying the DMG, to be perfectly honest. It wasn't money well-spent, though I have no criticism of the Dungeon Master's Guide itself. It's objectively excellent. It meets a lot of needs. It's better than past Dungeon Master's Guides as far as I am aware. It just doesn't suit me.

###But I'm Poor

It should be noted...if you've read this far into the guide, you've probably noted the expenditure involved. It's hardly insignificant, and with illegal PDFs available or borrowed books available from the library, you may feel that I'm trying too hard to market these things to you.

I'm not.

You may obtain information how you see fit, and there are plenty of free and legal options: playing with the Basic Rules for example gives you enough to run short campaigns with the classic 4 classes, and many monster statblocks are now legally available online, on Roll20 for example. You may use with a laptop or print-and-play. This is just a guide for those who are interested in owning materials, and for those who have the means to support the tabletop gaming industry. I know not all readers will be in a place, financially or just mentally, where this buying guide will be useful. I did not write this to target those folks, nor to judge them.

For those this guide does target...hope it has helped. :)