Notable Sections of the 2024 DMG

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 definitely saw its flaws.

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

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 that goal.

But how much do we want to use it 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 have a look!

Weather, Travel Terrain – Page 38

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.

Hazards – Page 76

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 my recommendation for pooling damage when running a lot of monsters. We offer a couple of other ways to do this 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. A good page to bookmark.

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.

Settlements – Page 93. Two pages here 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 are permanent and some 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.

Adventure Situations – Page 107. Four tables offer ten to twenty different adventure situations for the four tiers of play. These are great when you need a quick sidequest or adventure idea and they help you 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 really 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 are also good ways to reveal secrets and clues when needed.

XP Budget Per Character. The much improved method to help you build and understand the threats of combat encounters in 2024 D&D. It's way better than the goofy two-dial system of the 2014 DMG but I would have preferred a CR-based system you can keep in your head instead of an experience-based table you must constantly refer to and do a bunch of math with. Luckily, I have such a CR-based encounter building system to give you!

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.

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 can work at mid-levels too.

Tour of the Multiverse – Page 180. The multiverse section of the 2024 DMG 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 it? What is special about it? You can use these tables to flavor single-use magic items, little trinkets, permanent magic items and all sorts of 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.

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 include: