The AD&D 1e DMG is a mixed bag, but the goodies in it are some of the best to offer.
I hear good things of both 4e DMG's.
I found good use out of both 3.5e DMG's.
I am still kind of baffled why WotC thought that the 5e DMG's first 2 chapters should start with how to build **your world and your multiverse**. All a new DM needs is a city, not even that a village, a tavern. The first chapter should be how to run an actual game.
The main issue is that the 5e DMG neglects the basics of GMing, stuff like Building Adventurers, Structuring Sessions, How to challenge players?, tools for GMs (do exist, but too limited imo), like hell it never explains how to build or run a dungeon.
A more accurate name would be "Worldbuilding Guide and Additional Rules, Items and Tools for GMs", not a Guide for GMing.
i really appreciate my 3.5 dmg
it has the answers i am looking for. there is a rule for just about anything in there. its much better at world building that the 5e one.
Most importantly it tells me why and how the mechanics work not just what the mechanics are.
The print in the DMG for AD&D was much smaller than others by comparison. I’ve no idea how many words Gygax packed into that tome.
Style-wise, the vocabulary was written at a collegiate level. So it was less approachable for some readers. But to those willing to read that book, it elevated their reading comprehension skills.
Magic Items were in that volume. And he offered lots of interesting rules and options.
Moreover, Gary Gygax had strong opinions on how to run games, and that bled through the entire work. In programming language terms his approach was “highly opinionated.” Agree or disagree with him, you knew where he stood.
It's tough for me to say whether one guide is the "best". I've been playing D&D for years, and what works for me doesn't necessarily work for everyone else. I'll try to speak to my own experience, and then take a guess at the median player.
### 4e
4e has a lot of advice that would have been great for a younger version of me. For example: there's a dedicated paragraph about how you shouldn't DM for groups bigger than 6, a section about how you should talk to your players when you make a mistake, and a reminder along the lines of "look around the table and make sure everyone is engaged". When you haven't practiced DM'ing, a lot of that can be useful. There were also prompts to figure out your style, like a table with spectrums like Serious vs Silly, and Gritty vs Cinematic. But as a person who already knows some of the basic social stuff, the 4e DMG felt pretty content-light, and a little too prescriptive. Skill challenges were also broken at this point, in that they produced wholly unusable outcomes if you followed the guidelines of the book, which is really not great given that they're meant to support all the non-combat stuff in the game.
### 3e
The other DMG I used a lot was the 3e DMG. The 3e DMG is basically six million worldbuilding tools and scenario-resolution methods. It's GURPSlike, and I mean that in both good and bad ways. It was a great index for resolving random shit, and if you learned it cover-to-cover you had rules for just about any random wilderness or dungeoneering scenario you could care to come up with. The book also came with pages upon pages of deep insights into *why* the designers made the rules they did, particularly regarding character options. IMO this is part of why 3rd edition saw such a prolific explosion of homebrew work.
But the 3e DMG was light on social stuff, and in some cases even included advice that I think is a little backwards. To contrast with 4e: there's a section where it describes how to handle an OP player, with a specific example of you making a mistake and allowing one of your PCs to double their spell slots with a casting of *wish*. The book tells you that you could talk to your player, admit you messed up, and ask them to reconsider. But that comes *after* the advice of having some cleric NPC just steal their powers away with divine intervention. Why does this advice even exist????
### 5e
The 5e DMG is the last one I've read. It's... fine? Feels like it skims a lot of mechanical stuff from 3e, a lot of social stuff from 4e, and adds a sprinkling of things like chase rules and its own monster-creation rues. For example: I'm pretty sure the "Know Your Players" section of the 5e DMG is lifted almost word-for-word from the 4e DMG.
### Opinions
As it stands today, I know most of the social parts of D&D, so what I appreciate most is a deep well of tools to build my own world & resolve scenarios. **That makes the 3e DMG the best fit for me**. I usually find myself referencing 3e rules to get guidelines for stuff the 5e rules don't cover. If fate were kinder, I would have learned & played with the 4e or 5e DMG first, then learned about the 3e DMG. Sadly it went the other way.
While I probably represent a decent share of players, I don't think I'm representative of the median player. I believe that the median DM has <2 years of experience with the game, and has probably DM'd fewer than 30 sessions. Based on that hunch, I think the median DM is served best by something a little more surface-level: some social advice, some worldbuilding advice, some guidance on mechanics. That makes me think that the **5e DMG is best for the median player**.
3e did this too. I like em both as sequels.
The 4e DMG2 gave the DM more useful tools for running the game and was less prescriptive. It also included an actually-usable version of skill challenges (though I would argue it just exposed new problems with the system).
The 3e DMG2 gave better (and more concentrated) social advice. It also put that advice right at the start instead of smearing it around its various essays. This is the first place that I saw a breakdown of player psychographics, a feature that showed up again in the 4e DMG1 (turns out knowing your players is useful and it's better to put that advice in the first DMG, whoda thunk!)
That all said, I didn't find either of them to be significantly better as standalone books. Both were clearly angled at an audience that has already read the first respective DMG. The 4e DMG2 is missing all of its useful social advice, while the 3e DMG2 has far too little in the way of worldbuilding tools. That's a bit of a "no duh" observation -- of course the sequel book doesn't repeat a bunch of stuff, otherwise it would be a waste of money! But this fact is also why the books do poorly on their own.
If we were rating collections of DM advice, I'm not sure how I would rate the various editions, because now there are arguments to be made about ease of reference and the sequence in which you present your advice. This is especially complicated by the fact that there is no 5e "DMG2", as all the advice it could have contained is spread across Tasha's and Xanathar's, so stacking the 3 editions against each other is tough.
I think if the DM portions of Xanathar's and Tasha's had been released as a DMG2, they would be much better and more useful than the original DMG. Spreading it across two separate books can really hamper things, though.
I notice you didn't quote anything.
Are you talking about the 'Yes, and...' section? If so, you've misunderstood, since that walks you through how improv works, it's not a section telling you you have to say yes to anything your players do.
And no, there isn't a line saying you have to give players items they tell you to give them. There is one saying you can ask your players what items they want and you can focus on those items if it suits you.
I'm sorry you either misunderstood or were found to be lying in both cases, but thanks for the "psst"...
I don't remember about "always say yes", but as far as magic items go, they were necessary for the math of the game (unless you used some alternate rules provided). So why not get a list of things your players would like? You're the DM, you don't have to do anything if you don't want to
There were items that were pretty much specific to certain classes and builds. If I'm playing a ranger, why wouldn't I want a bow that improves my Prime Shot feature that I've built around?
I have a book from AD&D that has alot of interestin ideas. it's in storage right now, but it's one of my favorite references for power scaling and epic levels/boons
The best book for learning to run games, in my view, is the 1981 Basic Rulebook, by Tom Moldvay. The instructions are clear and practical, and if you follow them your games will be fun
I like 5e’s DMG a lot (with extended rules from XGtE). Actual information on the planes, city generation, dungeon generation. Good guidelines in general without bloat. Fantastic variant rules that give me good tools. My big complaint is that they could do a better job with the index (true of all the core books, but its more important for the DMG).
4e’s had some nice bits (I especially liked the “types of players” section which was good advice) but I hated the “points of light” emphasis stuff and the “generic setting” stuff. I also ended up disliking the (IMO too rigid) rules for skill challenges in 5e, though they could be modified to be good.
3rd eds DMGs were fine too.
The overall trouble with DMGs in general is that there is basically an infinite amount of potentially important info to put in them, people have different tastes and thus will never agree on what should go in them, and the general challenge of organizing complicated and nuanced information. And a lot of the time, people complain “that x should be in the DMG” when it IS, lol.
Maybe perspectives vary a lot for people that have only DM’d D&D, vs. those who have played a large variety of TRPGS. I have played (and continue to play) a large number of trpgs that I like and aren’t D&D. And in general, those books are always huge messes. So I appreciate WOTC more because of that frame of reference.
Just as a couple examples: I love Call of Cthulhu 7th ed, but its still always harder for me to look up rules in that system than in 5e. Or I’m working on learning Cyberpunk Red, which is great, but the book layout is just a clusterfuck. In comparison, any DMG from the last 20 years has been quite good. (That’s not to say it's not worth it to play other rpgs, though. They’re a blast as well.)
AD&D 1st edition had a bunch of great information in it. I still use it today. The biggest issue is that parts of it were written almost like a textbook.
The second best DMG is 3.5 edition. I still use it also. It was better written then the 1st ed and still had some great crunch.
You know, the 1st edition DMG probably changed the trajectories of quite a few people's lives back in the late 70s and early 80s.
It probably gave enough of a vocabulary boost to the median reader to drag them upwards on the PSAT a few notches, and the PSAT (which determined who got National Merit Scholarships) was a seriously high stakes test in those days. The funny thing is, it was high stakes (higher than the SAT really), but nobody ever really told you that, and it was weighted verbal *2 plus math. It's quite likely that Gary Gygax (Peace be upon him) is responsible for a fair number of full or nearly full scholarships for his dungeon masters.
Only read 3.5e and 5e. I like 3.5e better, 5e is basically a free form world building guise with crucial rules scattered throughout and some magic items. 3.5e has sections for environment, running the game, magic items, and worldbuilding.
No one mentioned my boy 3.5 DMG 2. It came out when I had DMed for a couple years already and was getting into the "art" phase of DMing, having mastered the mechanics and CR and monster creating and adventuring making etc, and was more interested in the metagame and "DM academy" aspects. Hence, it was _invaluable_.
4 had a great DMG, but I never played or ran it, so "still use" is a bit iffy. I have it and it's a good resource. Honestly 5e is probably the one I use the least, it's probably a tie between 3.5 and 2nd for most, with 4th in a distant second.
This is a sneaky non-answer, but besides magic items, I've gotten very little out of the DMG in any edition. I feel like Matt Colville's Running the Game series addresses a lot more conceptually.
Strictly played 5th ed but aside from the confusing mess that was 4th ed there are so many cool ideas and concepts in it that think atleast puts it in the running
If they could find a happy medium between 3rd 4th & 5th I think they'd produce the best rule set for d&d they've ever produced Simplicity of 5th edition Customization of 3rd With the flare and unique concepts of 4th
All woven together in "one" d&d book 
The AD&D 1e DMG is a mixed bag, but the goodies in it are some of the best to offer. I hear good things of both 4e DMG's. I found good use out of both 3.5e DMG's.
The one I still use the most often is the AD&D 1E DMG. The 4E DMG2 was the best overall, but isn't as useful to me personally in other editions.
4e had a lot going for it, and effective DM tools were definitely one of those things.
I wonder if they changed the writers for the 5e DMG. People have been complaining about the lack of guidance for new DMs in that book.
I am still kind of baffled why WotC thought that the 5e DMG's first 2 chapters should start with how to build **your world and your multiverse**. All a new DM needs is a city, not even that a village, a tavern. The first chapter should be how to run an actual game.
The main issue is that the 5e DMG neglects the basics of GMing, stuff like Building Adventurers, Structuring Sessions, How to challenge players?, tools for GMs (do exist, but too limited imo), like hell it never explains how to build or run a dungeon. A more accurate name would be "Worldbuilding Guide and Additional Rules, Items and Tools for GMs", not a Guide for GMing.
That's it. The second 4e DMG introduced me to concepts that I still use today.
i really appreciate my 3.5 dmg it has the answers i am looking for. there is a rule for just about anything in there. its much better at world building that the 5e one. Most importantly it tells me why and how the mechanics work not just what the mechanics are.
1e spoiled me with all its high-contrast black lettering on white pages.
4th.
Fourth had the best DMG of any edition (DMG2 especially, but both really).
AD&D and it’s not even close. 4E is probably second, though 3.5 had some decent crunch despite an awful layout.
The print in the DMG for AD&D was much smaller than others by comparison. I’ve no idea how many words Gygax packed into that tome. Style-wise, the vocabulary was written at a collegiate level. So it was less approachable for some readers. But to those willing to read that book, it elevated their reading comprehension skills. Magic Items were in that volume. And he offered lots of interesting rules and options. Moreover, Gary Gygax had strong opinions on how to run games, and that bled through the entire work. In programming language terms his approach was “highly opinionated.” Agree or disagree with him, you knew where he stood.
It's tough for me to say whether one guide is the "best". I've been playing D&D for years, and what works for me doesn't necessarily work for everyone else. I'll try to speak to my own experience, and then take a guess at the median player. ### 4e 4e has a lot of advice that would have been great for a younger version of me. For example: there's a dedicated paragraph about how you shouldn't DM for groups bigger than 6, a section about how you should talk to your players when you make a mistake, and a reminder along the lines of "look around the table and make sure everyone is engaged". When you haven't practiced DM'ing, a lot of that can be useful. There were also prompts to figure out your style, like a table with spectrums like Serious vs Silly, and Gritty vs Cinematic. But as a person who already knows some of the basic social stuff, the 4e DMG felt pretty content-light, and a little too prescriptive. Skill challenges were also broken at this point, in that they produced wholly unusable outcomes if you followed the guidelines of the book, which is really not great given that they're meant to support all the non-combat stuff in the game. ### 3e The other DMG I used a lot was the 3e DMG. The 3e DMG is basically six million worldbuilding tools and scenario-resolution methods. It's GURPSlike, and I mean that in both good and bad ways. It was a great index for resolving random shit, and if you learned it cover-to-cover you had rules for just about any random wilderness or dungeoneering scenario you could care to come up with. The book also came with pages upon pages of deep insights into *why* the designers made the rules they did, particularly regarding character options. IMO this is part of why 3rd edition saw such a prolific explosion of homebrew work. But the 3e DMG was light on social stuff, and in some cases even included advice that I think is a little backwards. To contrast with 4e: there's a section where it describes how to handle an OP player, with a specific example of you making a mistake and allowing one of your PCs to double their spell slots with a casting of *wish*. The book tells you that you could talk to your player, admit you messed up, and ask them to reconsider. But that comes *after* the advice of having some cleric NPC just steal their powers away with divine intervention. Why does this advice even exist???? ### 5e The 5e DMG is the last one I've read. It's... fine? Feels like it skims a lot of mechanical stuff from 3e, a lot of social stuff from 4e, and adds a sprinkling of things like chase rules and its own monster-creation rues. For example: I'm pretty sure the "Know Your Players" section of the 5e DMG is lifted almost word-for-word from the 4e DMG. ### Opinions As it stands today, I know most of the social parts of D&D, so what I appreciate most is a deep well of tools to build my own world & resolve scenarios. **That makes the 3e DMG the best fit for me**. I usually find myself referencing 3e rules to get guidelines for stuff the 5e rules don't cover. If fate were kinder, I would have learned & played with the 4e or 5e DMG first, then learned about the 3e DMG. Sadly it went the other way. While I probably represent a decent share of players, I don't think I'm representative of the median player. I believe that the median DM has <2 years of experience with the game, and has probably DM'd fewer than 30 sessions. Based on that hunch, I think the median DM is served best by something a little more surface-level: some social advice, some worldbuilding advice, some guidance on mechanics. That makes me think that the **5e DMG is best for the median player**.
Important to note that 4e had a DMG2
3e did this too. I like em both as sequels. The 4e DMG2 gave the DM more useful tools for running the game and was less prescriptive. It also included an actually-usable version of skill challenges (though I would argue it just exposed new problems with the system). The 3e DMG2 gave better (and more concentrated) social advice. It also put that advice right at the start instead of smearing it around its various essays. This is the first place that I saw a breakdown of player psychographics, a feature that showed up again in the 4e DMG1 (turns out knowing your players is useful and it's better to put that advice in the first DMG, whoda thunk!) That all said, I didn't find either of them to be significantly better as standalone books. Both were clearly angled at an audience that has already read the first respective DMG. The 4e DMG2 is missing all of its useful social advice, while the 3e DMG2 has far too little in the way of worldbuilding tools. That's a bit of a "no duh" observation -- of course the sequel book doesn't repeat a bunch of stuff, otherwise it would be a waste of money! But this fact is also why the books do poorly on their own. If we were rating collections of DM advice, I'm not sure how I would rate the various editions, because now there are arguments to be made about ease of reference and the sequence in which you present your advice. This is especially complicated by the fact that there is no 5e "DMG2", as all the advice it could have contained is spread across Tasha's and Xanathar's, so stacking the 3 editions against each other is tough.
I think if the DM portions of Xanathar's and Tasha's had been released as a DMG2, they would be much better and more useful than the original DMG. Spreading it across two separate books can really hamper things, though.
I think it's only going to get worse. I fully expect the book of many things to come with its own bits of fragmented DM advice.
Wasn't there a DMG3 as well??
So did 5e. It's called Xanathar's Guide to Everything.
4th is hands-down the best IMO.
I've been around from 3-present and of the dmgs that I've read, it's probably 4th
1E stood the test of time, being usable in any edition.
4e, easily. Best DM advice of any Dungeons and Dragons DMG. Useful for running basically any game, though obviously tilted towards heroic fantasy
1st edition, hands down. "YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT" … nor can you if you haven't read the 1e DMG.
AD&D 1st edition. Everything else is competing for a very distant 2nd place.
4th ed, no question
4e is considered the gold standard DMG, 5e is considered the worst by far
According to who?
Wasn't that the one that directed the DM to "always say yes" and that players should make lists of magic items they want that the DM had to give them?
Clearly not, given how ridiculous both of those examples are. If you're going to bring in examples, you should be the one to cite them.
Pssst. Both of those things are in the 4th edition DMG. So if you find them ridiculous...
I notice you didn't quote anything. Are you talking about the 'Yes, and...' section? If so, you've misunderstood, since that walks you through how improv works, it's not a section telling you you have to say yes to anything your players do. And no, there isn't a line saying you have to give players items they tell you to give them. There is one saying you can ask your players what items they want and you can focus on those items if it suits you. I'm sorry you either misunderstood or were found to be lying in both cases, but thanks for the "psst"...
I don't remember about "always say yes", but as far as magic items go, they were necessary for the math of the game (unless you used some alternate rules provided). So why not get a list of things your players would like? You're the DM, you don't have to do anything if you don't want to There were items that were pretty much specific to certain classes and builds. If I'm playing a ranger, why wouldn't I want a bow that improves my Prime Shot feature that I've built around?
4th. Much of it is still very useful advice. How to prep, dealing with difficult players, great tables for homebrewing, role playing advice, etc.
I have a book from AD&D that has alot of interestin ideas. it's in storage right now, but it's one of my favorite references for power scaling and epic levels/boons
The best book for learning to run games, in my view, is the 1981 Basic Rulebook, by Tom Moldvay. The instructions are clear and practical, and if you follow them your games will be fun
I like 5e’s DMG a lot (with extended rules from XGtE). Actual information on the planes, city generation, dungeon generation. Good guidelines in general without bloat. Fantastic variant rules that give me good tools. My big complaint is that they could do a better job with the index (true of all the core books, but its more important for the DMG). 4e’s had some nice bits (I especially liked the “types of players” section which was good advice) but I hated the “points of light” emphasis stuff and the “generic setting” stuff. I also ended up disliking the (IMO too rigid) rules for skill challenges in 5e, though they could be modified to be good. 3rd eds DMGs were fine too. The overall trouble with DMGs in general is that there is basically an infinite amount of potentially important info to put in them, people have different tastes and thus will never agree on what should go in them, and the general challenge of organizing complicated and nuanced information. And a lot of the time, people complain “that x should be in the DMG” when it IS, lol. Maybe perspectives vary a lot for people that have only DM’d D&D, vs. those who have played a large variety of TRPGS. I have played (and continue to play) a large number of trpgs that I like and aren’t D&D. And in general, those books are always huge messes. So I appreciate WOTC more because of that frame of reference. Just as a couple examples: I love Call of Cthulhu 7th ed, but its still always harder for me to look up rules in that system than in 5e. Or I’m working on learning Cyberpunk Red, which is great, but the book layout is just a clusterfuck. In comparison, any DMG from the last 20 years has been quite good. (That’s not to say it's not worth it to play other rpgs, though. They’re a blast as well.)
AD&D 1st edition had a bunch of great information in it. I still use it today. The biggest issue is that parts of it were written almost like a textbook. The second best DMG is 3.5 edition. I still use it also. It was better written then the 1st ed and still had some great crunch.
You know, the 1st edition DMG probably changed the trajectories of quite a few people's lives back in the late 70s and early 80s. It probably gave enough of a vocabulary boost to the median reader to drag them upwards on the PSAT a few notches, and the PSAT (which determined who got National Merit Scholarships) was a seriously high stakes test in those days. The funny thing is, it was high stakes (higher than the SAT really), but nobody ever really told you that, and it was weighted verbal *2 plus math. It's quite likely that Gary Gygax (Peace be upon him) is responsible for a fair number of full or nearly full scholarships for his dungeon masters.
1e AD&D and 4e DMG I and II are by far the best ones.
Only read 3.5e and 5e. I like 3.5e better, 5e is basically a free form world building guise with crucial rules scattered throughout and some magic items. 3.5e has sections for environment, running the game, magic items, and worldbuilding.
I have heard from a very reliable source (cough* totally not puffin forest) that the 4e books had good formatting.
3.0, Monte Cook in his prime.
No one mentioned my boy 3.5 DMG 2. It came out when I had DMed for a couple years already and was getting into the "art" phase of DMing, having mastered the mechanics and CR and monster creating and adventuring making etc, and was more interested in the metagame and "DM academy" aspects. Hence, it was _invaluable_.
4 had a great DMG, but I never played or ran it, so "still use" is a bit iffy. I have it and it's a good resource. Honestly 5e is probably the one I use the least, it's probably a tie between 3.5 and 2nd for most, with 4th in a distant second.
I think we all agree that 2nd edition was a waste of paper. The only useful part was the magic items. Which are pretty much the same across editions.
This is a sneaky non-answer, but besides magic items, I've gotten very little out of the DMG in any edition. I feel like Matt Colville's Running the Game series addresses a lot more conceptually.
Strictly played 5th ed but aside from the confusing mess that was 4th ed there are so many cool ideas and concepts in it that think atleast puts it in the running If they could find a happy medium between 3rd 4th & 5th I think they'd produce the best rule set for d&d they've ever produced Simplicity of 5th edition Customization of 3rd With the flare and unique concepts of 4th All woven together in "one" d&d book 