Once upon a time, I thought the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide was a great book. However, my appreciation of it has dimmed. I have read the book many, many times in the past few years; this isn’t an opinion based on old memories.

The biggest problem with the book is that it often fails to explain how the game works. These days, those explanations are in the Player’s Handbook. Back then, the rules on how to handle combat and many other tasks were placed in the Dungeon Masters Guide.

Unfortunately, the DMG doesn’t handle well many of the core procedures, and it doesn’t describe others at all.

Rules to confuse players

Gary Gygax’s explanation of how combat works is riddled with inconsistencies, clunky sub-systems, and stuff that just doesn’t make sense. The less said about unarmed combat the better, but the initiative system is a complete mess. “Compare the speed factor of the weapon with the number of segments the spell will require to cast to determine if the spell or the weapon will cast/strike first, subtracting the losing die roll on the initiative die roll from the weapon factor and treating negative results as positive.” In later years Gary said how much he regretted including that rule. I wish he (and his editor) had omitted it at the start.

Most AD&D DMs I’ve known ignore large sections of the initiative rules and use the simpler Basic D&D rules. And that is for a very good reason: the rules do not work as written. Heck, even Gary didn’t use the DMG’s initiative or training rules!

The explanation of how to award Experience Points makes sense, but includes a complicated section on scaling awards. You are meant to compare the power of the monsters to the power of the characters and adjust the rewards downwards if the characters are more powerful. This leads to some interesting scenarios – especially against tough solo monsters – where experienced characters can’t gain full XP. If you face a lone beholder, a party of six need to be at most third level to get the full reward! Give me a party of third-level characters that can take on a beholder and I’ll conquer the world! This also applies to experience points gained from treasure: the relative difficulty of the fight needs to be taken into account.

These are two examples of major systems that were rarely used as written. In the case of initiative, it was never used as written, because you couldn’t!

Rules that aren’t there

Also fascinating are some areas the book doesn’t address. After sections explaining “Adventures in the Outdoors” and “Adventures in the Air”, you’d expect something about “Adventures in the Dungeon”. That section is not included. You can find some of this information in a section confusingly marked as “The First Dungeon Adventure”, but a comprehensive look at running dungeon adventures – including how to determine random monsters – is missing.

Likewise, the book contains no explanation of the procedures used to stock a dungeon – though an appendix gives random dungeon tables, it’s not quite the same thing.

Where are they then? They’re in the original D&D books and in Basic D&D. And, by the time Gary wrote the DMG, the AD&D system diverged in many respects from the older work. So, I’d expect to pick up the core AD&D books and have a complete game. But I don’t.

Compared to the cleanness of the AD&D Players Handbook, which I greatly admire, the Dungeon Master’s Guide has a structure that doesn’t quite work, and with a lot of rules that may have seemed a good idea at the time, but were genuinely terrible in play. D&D was a living game at that time, always under development, but some of these rules don’t seem to have been play-tested at all.

Explaining the right way to play AD&D

Part of the charm of the DMG are the sections where Gary Gygax offers advice on what AD&D should be. Some of this advice works better than others. He describes the horrors of Monty Haul games, Killer DM games, games that allowed Monsters as PCs, and so forth. At one point, when talking about treasure awards, he says that “AD&D means to set right both extremes”, thus showing how to run a campaign that gives away the right amount of treasure – not too much and not too little.

Unfortunately, the DMG spectacularly fails to do so! There are no examples showing what a reasonable amount of treasure was. After criticising his own magic items tables in D&D for allowing low-level PCs to gain any item… the AD&D magic item tables still allow this to happen!

However, amongst these essays about what not to do are some excellent insights. The advice to start small and expand outwards as you get more confident would serve many well today.

The wargaming and territory acquisition aspects of the early game are lightly sketched in. The book has little advice as to what happens when you build a stronghold, while still giving rules for hiring mercenaries, building the castle and clearing the territory around it. There are no mass battle rules, an interesting omission. At the point the DMG was published, D&D was turning more and more to heroic play, but the old territory acquisition and realm management aspects of its origins were still apparent, if left mostly up to the DM to detail.

Great Explanations of Rules

Although I’m completely frustrated by some key sections of the rules, there are other sections the book presents really well. In particular, the rules for Wilderness exploration remain high on my list of rules I reference, even today.

They detail how often encounters occur, the distance at which groups meet each other, and sundry other items, such as the chance of getting lost!

The random encounter tables for the wilderness are also a sight to behold: Many many tables, based on climate, terrain, and how civilised the area is. These are brilliant for the DM running expeditions into unknown lands.

Tables and Tables of Inspiration

Where the DMG shines isn’t in its descriptions of the core rules, but instead in giving tools to the Dungeon Master to populate their adventures with interesting encounters. The appendices are pure gold. I note that most of the useful tables are now in the 5th edition DMG.

And the background descriptions for the artifacts still give me much pleasure in the reading.

Mostly, I find that the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide is a book for experienced DMs looking for inspiration in the dungeon-crawling and territory-acquisition world of Gygax’s D&D. Gary Gygax’s D&D material is rarely suitable for inexperienced DMs (Keep on the Borderlands being the one exception). I have a feeling with the Dungeon Masters Guide that you need to read the earlier work to understand it properly. It’s hard to overstate how important the Basic D&D sets were for their role in providing clear rules for the game. People liked AD&D for the options, but the game was very poor at actually explaining the rules.

However, without the groundwork laid by Gary Gygax in the Dungeon Masters Guide, we likely would not be sitting here discussing it today. Despite all its flaws, the original Dungeon Masters Guide was a ground-breaking book. It just didn’t accomplish everything I expected it to. Thank Moldvay and Mentzer for the revised Basic D&D sets!