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Like other volumes of Dungeons & Dragons handbooks, the Dungeon Master's Guide has gone through several versions through the years. Fans of the original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game often deride the Second Edition Dungeon Master's Guide for its paucity and lack of flavor.

The Dungeon Master's Guide contains scores of tables and charts for figuring damage and resolving encounters in a typical adventure, tables and rules for creating characters, and lists of the various abilities of the different classes of characters. More obscure and esoteric aspects of the game can be found in supplementary publications, such as issues of Dragon Magazine or rulebooks like the Psionics Handbook or Deities & Demigods.

One of the most useful features of the guide is the Random Dungeon Generator. The generator allowed, by the rolling of dice, to generate a dungeon adventure "on the fly." A dungeon complete with passageA passage in architecture, is a narrow room, most often called a hall, that serves to provide access to other rooms. A passage in geography, is another term for a strait, which is a narrow channel of water that connects two larger bodies of water. The terways, roomA room is an enclosed space in a house or other building. A room may have any number of doors and windows regulating light, airflow and access to the room. Large rooms are often named halls, small ones closets. Hall may also refer to a long, narrow room ws, treasureTreasure is a concentration of riches, often that which is considered lost or forgotten until being rediscovered. Some jurisdictions legally define what constitutes treasure such as in the English Treasure Act 1996. Searching for hidden treasure figures i, monsters and other encounter s could easily and randomly be constructed as the player progressed. Best of all, it could be used with several people or a single player. This was a useful tool to easily beef up new characters and to allow players to play the game when others weren't available to play.

For many players, the three core rulebooks were referred to so often that some players wore out one or more copies of each book over the years. This led to the development of the Dungeon Master's Screen: two heavy-duty boards with the most oft-used tables printed on them for easy reference. The screen could be stood on-end to shield players' eyes from notes, rolls and other adventure bookkeeping. The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Second Edition screen came packaged with a brief adventureSee also Adventure! (role-playing game a role-playing game from White Wolf Game Studio. An adventure is a publication used by a gamemaster to manage the plot or story in a role-playing game. Each adventure is based upon a particular gaming genre and is no; later editions of that screen, and screens produced for later editions, have instead included character sheetA character sheet is a series of numbers, notes, and other details about a character in a role-playing game. Character sheets can be found in use in both tabletop and computer role-playing games, although in the latter they are usually not expressly refers and general reference bookletA booklet is a small book. Postage stamps may be purchased in small groups known as "booklets"; see postage stamp booklet.s.