The "Competition"

Today, I purchased a 500+ page guidebook purporting to "provide the key" to unlocking your imagination and teaching you how to be an RPG game master.  Well-stocked on the shelf of my local Barnes & Noble, well reviewed on Amazon, this book is a USA Today bestseller (meaning it's one of the top 150 books by volumes sold considering all media across all outlets) and its author a winner of numerous game-related awards.

I went to the store, deliberately, with the intention of purchasing the book, for the following reasons:

• As someone working on a similar work, I thought it only "due diligence" to check out the competition and see what was deemed to warrant such rave reviews. 
• As someone working on a similar work, I thought it only "common sense" to see if there was anything left for me to ADD with a book of my own, seeing as how this one was designed to take you "right from the beginning of prep to running a successful game" (in the words of one reviewer).
• I needed to do some Christmas shopping at the bookstore anyway.
• I recently received a fat payment and had money burning a hole in my wallet.

So, I picked it up and, after a hearty meatball sandwich lunch, spent the afternoon reading it from cover-to-cover, mainly skimming it (there are a lot of examples and diagrams) but diving into the parts that seemed to present newer info, thoughtful advice, or deep(ish) ideas and "guidance."

Then I drove back to the store and returned it, getting a full refund.

You will notice that I am not naming the author nor the book in question. I have two reasons for this:

1. As a person who has written books before, and who is undertaking a similar gargantuan task of explaining how to DM this game I love, it is clear that the author put a crap-ton of effort into this book...a monumental investment of time and energy. While I may have a negative opinion of the work itself, I'm going to give the author some credit just for birthing this thing. 
2. In general, I don't believe in "bad publicity," and as such I usually don't name things...positive or negative...unless I'm okay with people putting 'em in their shopping cart. That's just a me thing. Yeah, I broke that rule when I wrote about the 2024 DMG, but that was more akin to a public safety announcement...I knew people were going to buy that (regardless) and felt a "warning label" of sorts was necessary.

The bottom line is this: yeah, a book like the one I'm writing is still needed. Maybe I'm not the one to write it, but if THAT thing is considered the pinnacle of "how to DM" books, than the bar has been set extremely low.  Most of the information in it wasn't anything more than what you'd get reading Moldvay's Basic book (a lot of the "adventure design" seemed to be taken directly from Moldvay with slight adjustments and a LOT of extra word count) and the NEW "guidance" was...bad. Just bad from the opening chapters. Always saying yes to players, just as a default...um, no. Explicitly stating that the DM's job is EASIER than the players' job? Um, sure...if you SUCK at being a Dungeon Master.

Do we really need a book to explain dice nomenclature? Isn't that on page one of every edition of every RPG ever? And you state right up front that you're not going to teach the rules, so they need to read the instructions so then what's with the elementary intro crap?

*sigh* That's enough. I could keep piling on but that's not productive. And it wasn't a waste of my time to read through it...it gave me solid ideas of what I should and shouldn't be doing with my own book, AND boosted my spirits that I'm not totally reinventing the wheel. That's a comfort. 

Now back to work.

; )