XDM: Xtreme Dungeon Mastery

I saw the description of XDM: Xtreme Dungeon Mastery on the Schlock Mercenary blog. I'm still getting almost everything in dead-tree form, but I bought this in the Kindle edition and read it on my laptop.

Good point about e-book: you can click back and forth between the main text and the footnote.

Bad point about e-book: trying to find a font setting which makes the footnotes big enough to read, while leaving the main text small enough that the screen has more than six words at a time.

As for the content of the book...

The point of the book is to make RPGs exciting and entertaining. I'm all in favor of that, couldn't agree more.

About a third of the book is very good. Structuring a story, creating the atmosphere, keeping the pace, the Campbellian monomyth structure.

Another third boils down to "have a good, experienced DM and let him run things". You don't need a lot of charts, tables, skill lists, statistics and such, if the DM is good; you just get a few basic stats and then describe what you want to do. The DM assigns a target number and you roll a pair of d20s, to see whether you succeed or not, and how strong your success or failure is. This works out really well, quick and fun, IF you have a good, experienced GM. The fact that you don't have combat modifiers written down anywhere doesn't mean that you don't need them; you still need to know whether, for example, it's reasonable for a guy with a dagger to beat a guy with a sword, or a crocodile, or whatever you're likely to be facing. If those kinds of things aren't written down, they have to be in the DM's head. That is to say, this section is great if you have the sort of GM who doesn't need this section.

The third third was not useful--funny, a lot of it, but not anything to significantly enhance your gaming experience. It tells the imaginary history of the secret society of Extreme DMs. It tells you how to juggle, do card tricks, use flash paper, and perform a couple of stage illusions; but prestidigitation is hardly a key component of being a DM. I'm sure you can use magic tricks to enhance the game experience. I'm also sure that for the same number of hours, you'd get more benefit for your game by learning storytelling technique and doing prep work on your game than you would by learning stage magic.

I wanted to give this book high marks. For some people--people who have a moment of enlightenment and say "ah, I can streamline things and speed up my game", or people who haven't thought about making the game follow a story arc--this could certainly be worth every penny. In my case, though, I'm glad I only paid for the Kindle version rather than the hardback.