Dear Wizards of the Coast!

Thank you very much for releasing the Dungeon Master's Basic Rules for 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons, after having already given us a Basic Rules version of the player's handbook. But I think you made a mistake and published the wrong pdf file. What you *call* "DM Basic Rules" is actually a document in which 90% of the pages are stat blocks of monsters and explanations on how to read those stat blocks and how to make combat encounters with those monsters. Everybody else would call that a "Monster Manual".

Don't get me wrong, the Basic Rules definitively need a Monster Manual at this point. I just can't understand why you would put that misleading label on it which suggests it is a basic version of the DM's Guide.

The Starter Set plus Basic Rules Player's Handbook are an excellent resource for new players to start role-playing. And if somebody wants to turn the adventure from the Starter Set into a full-blown 5th edition basic rules campaign, he will be happy to have all those monster stats. But the fundamental danger of giving rules to new players is that they tend to play those rules as written. If you publish a DM Basic Rules that is only about designing and playing combat encounters, you will get new DMs which know all about designing and playing combat encounters. Which is exactly what happened with 4th edition: People played endless sequences of combat encounters because the rule books suggested that this was what the game was about. Experienced players who knew what a role-playing game is were able to play 4th edition as a proper role-playing game, and will be able to do so with 5th edition as well. But for new players this is a trap.

The PH Basic Rules and Starter Set make an excellent first step towards role-playing with the backgrounds, personality traits, and inspiration rules. Especially people who actually play the Starter Set with the pre-generated characters will find that their backgrounds are very well integrated in the adventure. What a DM Basic Rules book needs is more like that: How do you create adventures which not only mix combat encounters with exploration and role-playing, but also mix a "main story" that has a common goal for the whole group with all the individual background stories that give additional personal motivation for the players.

A DM's Guide need not only teach a new DM how to create a campaign with multiple threads of common and individual stories, but also how to create believable NPCs with proper motivations that perform actions that drive the adventure and campaign forward. Especially the villains need to be more than the static boss mob waiting patiently in the last room of the dungeon. A DM's guide needs to talk about how to role-play all those NPCs, and how to handle exploration, not just combat. If you want 5th edition to be a new start for pen & paper RPGs that brings lots of new players to the tabletop role-playing hobby, you need to do better than a list of monsters.