Just as the Essentials Player’s Book rushed you pell-mell into a solo adventure (in the fighter’s case, before you even had time to grab your sword) the DM’s book rushes you right into running an encounter. There are only 2 pages of text before the adventure begins. Of those two pages, half a page are credits, a quarter page is ads for other D&D Essentials products, and the other page or so is “What is a DM”? text and DM advice. There is no table of contents, here or in the Player’s Book! That’s what I call GETTING THE SHOW ON THE ROAD. There are also no indexes in either book, which is a bit of a problem if a DM forgets, for instance, where to find the difference between a turn and a round.
The DM advice is solid. I can imagine it setting the right tone for a n00b DM. “It’s not a competition!” “Don’t play favorites!” “Be fair!” Imagine if my DMs had followed that advice in my Junior High D&D games. OMG THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN SO AWESOME
Tags: redbox
If those three pieces of advice had been in D&D from the first books onward, as they really should have been, it would be a healthier hobby… and GM-less gaming might have never found its initial impetus (which I hold to be “all of the GMs I know are jerks”). 3.x’s and 4e’s legalistic design would never have been necessary. It is a world unrecognizable from our own, complete with a clean-shaven Ed Greenwood.
(I know it’s weird to comment on something this old, but I decided to go all the way to the beginning of the Blog of Holding and read my way forward. Thus far, this has been an awesome decision!)