The Great Edition Wars have begun, and because of that, I've been going back and looking at some 4e classics. The first DMG was a really solid book, covering playing psychology and the elements of adventure design. In fact, I thought that it was praiseworthy because it was the first DMG that I'd seen where somebody who had never played an RPG before could pick it up, read it, follow the steps, and run a semi-competent adventure.

DMG2 continues the trend, but focuses on designing more complex Paragon Tier adventures. The strongest parts of the book concern how the build an adventure out of encounters, how to make interesting combats and skill challenges, fixing one of the major problems in the original 4e rules (the example diplomacy skill challenge is brilliant). DMG2 has great advice on how to build organizations, how to reskin and modify game rules, and how to solicit player input to improve your game.

The most interesting parts of the book where the parts devoted to explaining the 4e philosophy. More than anything else, 4e is actually inspired by television. Action occurs in encounters/scenes, 4 or 5 encounters make an adventure/episode, and about 10 adventures makes for a tier/season. The book advises that a scene that doesn't move the adventure forward in some way is essentially wasted, and also proposes using flashbacks, guest characters, dream sequences, and other TV tricks to spice up the adventure. Really, all those people say that 4e is like and MMO haven't read the books, let alone played the game. On the other hand, episodic TV is a very different narrative than the old Gygaxian dungeon crawl. Maybe that's why people don't like 4e.

What I didn't like was the space devoted to traps (I hate traps. 4e had an interesting idea with making them a combination of monster and terrain that can be used by friend or foe), not significantly improving the 4e treasure system, which I still don't understand how to make fun, and finally the lengthy chapter devoted to Sigil. If you like Sigil, you probably already know all about it. If you don't care for Sigil, this section is useless. I'd rather have seen a blurb for the Manual of the Planes, and more ideas for alternate planar hubs or tools to build cities, in the same way that they gave tools to build NPCs, artifacts, and organizations.