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Notable Sections of the 2024 D&D Dungeon Master's Guide

by Mike on 27 January 2025

A while back I wrote about Gems of the DMG in which I captured what I thought were the most notable sections of a book typically ignored or vilified among 5e D&D DMs. I think it's an underrated book but it's certainly a flawed book.

Now, with the new 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide in hand, we can look for similar notable sections of this book.

I have good news. The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide is well organized and does a great job introducing new dungeon masters to the craft of running D&D games. That was its primary goal and I think it meets this goal.

But how much do we want to use the 2024 DMG at the table? How often will we refer back to it? What parts of the book should DMs, new and old, keep in mind to help us prepare and run our games?

Let's dig in.

First, a DM's Trick

Before we go in, I have a trick I really love. Use little adhesive tabs to mark your favorite and most-used sections so you can reference them easily at the table. Tabs run a couple of bucks at a drug store and make all your books far more table usable. Work from back-to-front, putting tabs along the edge opposite of the spine starting low and working up. This way, by the end, you have neatly organized tabs running from the top to the bottom. If you don't get anything else from this article – tab your books!

Notable Sections of the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide

Ok, let's have a look at the 2024 DMG sections we're most likely to reference.

Dungeons – Page 65. A nice big list of dungeon quirks that can help fire up your imagination for the dungeons you want to prepare for your game. I wish there were more dungeon-focused tables, frankly. I feel like the 2024 DMG is missing tables to help inspire DMs to build out lots of different kinds of dungeons.

Running Mobs – Page 82. This section includes good information for running a large number of monsters. It has a cool table telling you how many monsters in a group succeed on a given attack roll or saving throw target number. This section also includes a table to determine how many targets are likely in an area when running theater of the mind style battles which I appreciate. It's only missing a way to handle hit points for lots of monsters other than letting low HP enemies just die. I use my own idea for pooling damage when running a lot of monsters. We offer other ways to handle lots of monsters in the Lazy DM's Companion and Forge of Foes that I think work better but this section works fine.

Common Names – Page 85. Everyone needs a good list of names and here they are in the DMG. Bookmark this page.

Poisons – Page 90. Poisons can be used in lots of different ways in your game. Heroes can acquire them. Bad guys can use them against your heroes. Traps can be poisoned with exotic poisons. It's a good section to remember.

Settlements – Page 93. These two pages offer lots of tables to help you build out settlements. I always love a good tavern name generator.

Supernatural Gifts – Page 98. It's easy to focus on tangible magic items but cool supernatural gifts and charms are a great way for the characters to be blessed by monuments or the will of the gods. Some effects permanent while others are temporary so they offer some good flexibility.

Traps – Page 100. These four pages of traps give you good models you can reskin into hundreds of different tailored traps for the lairs into which our heroes adventure. It includes specific traps with ranges for different levels and a trap-building table to build your own traps.

Adventure Situations – Page 107. Four tables offer ten to twenty different adventure situations for the four tiers of play. These tables are great when you need a quick sidequest or adventure idea and help us understand the types of adventures appropriate for characters at different levels.

Common Map Symbols – Page 109. Get out your Pathfinder Flip Mat or Chessex Battle Map and practice these simple and common map symbols to help you draw out awesome maps for your game. I wish they had included more of Chris Perkins's Map Fu article here.

Adventure Hooks – Page 111. Good tables describing the way characters can learn of the adventures they might undertake. These hooks are also good ways to reveal secrets and clues when needed.

XP Budget Per Character. This table to help you build and understand the threats of combat encounters is much improved over the convoluted two-dial system in the 2014 DMG. I would have preferred a system based on challenge rating that you can keep in your head instead of an experience-based table you must continually refer to and do a bunch of math with. Luckily, I offer such a CR-based encounter building system.

Monster Behaviors – Page 116. Good tables for monster hostility, personality, and relationships to shake up your random encounters. Too bad there aren't any random encounter tables in the book. Another big miss if you ask me.

Random Treasure Hoard – Page 121. An excellent and simple table built for session-based treasure hoards. Nothing fancy here and no tables to break out hoards into gold, bars, gems, jewelry and the like but enough to tell you how much gold you expect so you can break it out yourself. I love the simplicity.

Planar Adventure Situations – Page 179. I love these fantastic adventure hooks. While we often think of planar adventures as high-level adventures, some of these situations can work at mid-levels too.

Tour of the Multiverse – Page 180. The multiverse section of the 2024 DMG is about 30 pages long and this, along with the Greyhawk section on page 143, is where you can really dive into the lore of D&D. It's common to think you only care about this stuff when the characters are plane-hopping but this sort of lore can flavor dungeons and monsters at any level of play. It's worth the time to read through this whole section to fill your head with awesome D&D lore you can spout out during your games in all sorts of ways. Don't skip it.

Magic Item Special Features – Page 222. The 2014 DMG had this table too and I used it all the time. The creator and history tables are fantastic for any magic item. Who made the item? What is special about it? You can use these tables to flavor single-use magic items, trinkets, permanent magic items, and all sorts of other things. These tables are super-valuable. Keep them bookmarked.

Random Magic Items – Page 326. These tables are common in any good gamemaster's guide but always worth mentioning. Mixing up random magic items along with items tailored for the characters is the easiest and best way I've found to make players happy and make your game exciting. These tables break things up well and are easy to roll on to find interesting items for your characters. I wish they didn't mix consumable items and permanent items together. Sometimes I want to offer one without the other.

Maps – Page 365. I love Dyson maps for many reasons and I'm extremely happy to see a good pile of them at the end of the DMG. There are fifteen maps in here covering a wide range of common locations you find in D&D. These maps are fantastic for improvising adventure locations when time is tight. They include:

Multi-level Crypt
Small campsite
Small village
Ruined temple / Dragon's Lair
Dungeon hideout
Farmstead
Keep
Manor
Mine
Roadside inn
Ship
Spooky house
Underdark warren
Volcanic caves
Wizards tower

A Useful Book to Have At Your Side

Often the trickiest part of using the Dungeon Master's Guide is knowing what's inside. When you have the time, maybe once or twice a year, go through it and remind yourself what you have. Mark it with adhesive tabs so you can easily reference useful bits while you prep and run your games.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

I was at the Philadelphia Area Gaming Expo the previous weekend so I didn't have any YouTube videos or podcasts this week.

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

Give players a way to hack the dungeon such as secret passages, puzzle bypasses, and ways to get the jump on bad guys.
Set up a goal and a situation and let the story unfold during the game.
Avoid a series of hard combat encounters in a row.
Improvise combat encounters by what makes sense in the story and then what is the most fun for the game.
Tell the story of a location through the discoveries in each chamber.
Layer histories in your dungeons. What was it before? What is it now?
Modify dungeons as you play should they overstay their welcome. Cut off hallways. Collapse chambers. Move things around.

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