Today’s review is Sly Flourish’s Dungeon Master Tips by Mike Shae. It’s available only in electronic format (as a PDF, Kindle eBook, ePub, or MobiPocketBook) for $7.99. Here’s how the author describes the book:
You’re a good dungeon master. You’ve read both Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition Dungeon Master’s guides. You’ve run a few games. You pick up ideas here and there on the net. Or maybe you’re an old grizzled vet whose run games for 20 years.
Maybe your game is feeling a little stale. Maybe your encounters didn’t run exactly as you wanted them too. Maybe you feel like you’re stuck in a rut. Maybe you feel a bit overwhelmed when you have to come up with an exciting, creative game every week.
You’re not looking for a huge tome on game theory. You don’t need yet another take on world-building. You’re looking for some practical tips you can use today to help you focus your energy in the right places and make some kick-ass D&D games for you and your friends. You want something you can read quick and start using right away.
My friend, here is the book for you.
This book was written to give you solid usable tips to help you build your story, design exciting encounters, and run a great game when you’re at the table. It’s a short book, designed to be read quickly and referenced often.
I am reviewing the PDF version of the book which I purchased through PayPal.
Physical Details
Sly Flourish’s Dungeon Master Tips is a 73-page PDF, formatted for standard letter-sized paper (8.5” x 11”). It is on a printer-friendly, plain white background, with a color image on the cover as well as a mixture of color & gray-scale art inside. The cover art, a very obvious homage to the original AD&D Player’s Handbook cover, is cool, if somewhat amateur (but in a good way) looking as is the rest of the art in the book – I like the cover and find most of the art in the book interesting but it is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. Of course that’s more a matter of the reader’s personal taste. A couple of the pieces are pretty humorous – I especially like the one where the characters are sitting inside (presumably) a monster’s stomach.
I have to state right from the beginning that the DM Tips book is clearly a very amateur production – the layout is, to put it mildly, very poorly done with little attention to detail or understanding of basic layout principles. It’s obvious that the entire book was laid out in a word processing program like MS Word and then simply exported as a PDF and that really detracts from its presentation. Images are simply placed in the center of pages and the cover has a very unattractive blank border around the edges which detracts from the cover illustration and once again makes the whole thing look unprofessional.
The biggest problem is that there is an enormous amount of white space in this book – the left & right margins are 1”, while the top and bottom margins vary but often are two or more inches. Section headings take up a complete page of their own, as do any illustrations irregardless of their dimensions. The result is a book with a much higher page count than it should have for the number of words. I’ve included images of a few pages with this review so you can see examples of what I’m referring to when I talk about white space – just click on the thumbnails to see larger versions.
Exporting the text to OpenOffice, I ran a word count on the book and with all the text (index, etc.) it comes in at under 14,000 words for the entire 73 pages. By comparison, the free PDQ Sharp! rules, which are professionally laid out, have over 18,000 words fit in to a 28-page book and that includes a number of illustrations. My guess is that professionally laid out, with proper-sized fonts (the book uses a rather large point size), margins, and spacing, the book would probably come in at under 35 pages. It also needs to be pointed out that 21 pages of the book have absolutely no real contents on them, being taken up by section heading pages, art, ToC, acknowledgments, etc.
The wasted space aside, the book also suffers from a lack of aesthetics in its layout – section headings are simply bold faced and float in between sections, so that they’re not visually tied to the section they’re supposed to be heading, and the text is double-spaced and fully justified. Worse yet, it appears that no attention was given to page breaks since there are multiple occurrences of orphaned section headings (i.e., the sub-section heading is all by itself at the bottom of a page with its accompanying text on the following page). The results are something that looks a lot more like a high school essay than a professional book that I paid $8 for.
In addition, there are some minor issues with page numbering (as in the numbers are missing haphazardly from pages, including ones referenced in the table of contents), and the use of the dreaded blue underlined html link text (with the full URL visible rather than just having a text descriptor with an embedded link). There’s also a complete lack of bookmarks, something which I would expect in any book that is being published exclusively in an electronic format.
On the upside, the book’s proofreading is excellent. I couldn’t find any significant typos or grammatical errors, something which even major publishers struggle with; kudos for the great proof-reading skills to whoever did it.
Contents
Okay, I have criticized the book for its layout and appearance, how about the contents, which are what matter most to the the majority of potential buyers?
The book is divided in to three sections: Build Your Story, Design Fun Encounters, and Run a Great Game. Each one of these sections is then divided into a number of sub-topics or “mini-articles” (for lack of a better term). The first section (Build Your Story) includes sub-topics covering basic tips and advice on creating stories, villains, and plots. The second section (Design Fun Encounters) provides advice on constructing memorable, fun, & challenging encounters. The third section (Run a Great Game) offers more general “meta-game” sub-topics for the DM on how to manage their table, some ideas on props and game tools, player management, and how to encourage roleplaying. Within each of these major sections are mini-articles (for lack of a better term) about a particular topic.
The contents of the the book are specifically aimed at 4th edition D&D Dungeon Masters, although it’s unclear whether the target audience are new DMs or experienced ones. I say that it’s unclear because most of the advice seems very obvious to me, as an experienced DM, but isn’t detailed enough to really benefit a novice. While each of these sections offers some decent tips (which at times feel more like bullet points), most of them are very sparse in explanation and thus almost completely useless except as an inspiration for a would-be-DM to go search for more information on the internet. The book provides some basic kernels of advice, but there’s very little detail to flesh out that advice or even examples to illustrate how it might be used.
For example, here’s all the advice that’s offered on the “Prepare music” item in the Adventure Checklist article:
Prepare music
A good selection of music can keep your game entertaining. While you might gravitate towards classical, don’t be afraid to add music of any genre to your playlist.
Maybe I am just being picky, but that does not seem like particularly useful advice. In fact, most of it is just common sense and the real advice – for example what kinds of soundtracks or genres might work well for evoking a particular feel – are entirely lacking.
Another example, this one from the Create Awesome Villains article:
Make your villain smart but not all seeing
An interesting villain is smart. He has his own goal and plans. While your PCs are moving the story forward, so is your villain. He doesn’t make stupid mistakes or twirl his mustache and yell “curses!” Your villain should move forward with his own plans as the PC’s move through their own.
This is another example of what I would consider fairly obvious (though useful, particularly for a new DM) advice. The problem is that there is nothing more provided on how to actual implement the advice – the reader is left to completely solve that problem on their own which to me doesn’t make the book particularly useful as anything more than inspiration.
The book also has an annoying habit of making reference to concepts and ideas presented in outside blogs without providing enough detail to make the information particularly useful. Thus, the reader is forced to seek out that particular article to get more than a basic overview of the subject. For example, Dave Chalker’s great 5×5 method of campaign pacing/building/plotting is brought up but not given enough explanation to make it useful at all – the book may as well have just provided the link (which it does) and say “Go here and read this cool article.” That’s not exactly what I want, nor think, belongs in a book I paid for and which is supposed to be offering advice.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some useful bits of advice in the book but there is nowhere near enough to justify the price of the book. I feel as if there is about a dollar’s worth of actual content spread out across 73 pages, and the length of the book is misleading since it’s largely due to a poor layout.
I am a big fan of the author’s website (Sly Flourish) and have recommended it to people wanting to improve their 4E DMing skills. The site does a wonderful job of providing succinct, useful advice. Unfortunately the same can’t be said of Dungeon Master’s Tips since it lacks the depth any specific article on the Sly Flourish, Critical-Hits, At Will, or EN World. There is almost nothing in the book that isn’t covered in more depth somewhere else on the net for free. Individually SlyFourish’s own blog articles are better than any of the overlapping topics covered in this book.
I am also pretty dubious about the author’s claim that the book’s content is not simply a rehash of his blog’s content. A quick comparison of the blog’s list of post titles and the articles in the book clearly reveals a huge amount of overlap between the two. In many ways I wish the book had simply expanded upon the blog’s excellent material instead of what appears to have happened which is a condensation of the blog’s advice in to very short, very sparsely detailed advice. For example, the monster optimization section would have greatly benefited from including some (in my opinion all) of the specific monster optimization posts that have appeared on the Sly Flourish website.
The Verdict
I really wanted Sly Flourish’s Dungeon Master Tips to be a useful book. I purchased it based on the description on the book’s website as well as the expectation that it would be a more in-depth analysis and explanation of the great advice the author’s blog already offers. I also was hoping that it would prove a useful resource for the DMs-in-training I deal with at the after-school club I run. Unfortunately the only claim the book lived up to was that it was a quick read – I finished in in less than 30 minutes and was left severely disappointed. I cannot recommend this book to anyone, whether you’re a seasoned 4E veteran or a complete newbie. It’s simply not worth the price (without the art it should have been a free product), especially when you can read better content on numerous 4E blogs, including the author’s, for free. Whether it’s the amateurish presentation, the lack of detailed explanations or examples, or simply the lack of regular PDF features like bookmarks, the book simply doesn’t offer a good value for the price.
