Looking back over this, a lot of these quotations speak for themselves for the person I originally mailed all this to, but most likely won't for you. So, anything you see in brackets is me explaining why something is so horrible here in relatively modern times.
"Playing with a group of four or six other players is easy with minor adjustments."
"With only two or three characters in a party, you don't have the different ROLES covered, and it's harder to get through combat encounters even if the encounter is scaled down for your smaller group."
[OK. The entire book here is stressing on a constant basis that all their careful balancing will break horribly if you don't have a party of exactly 5 people with exactly one fighter mage thief cleric and a spare (switching out if you wanna try those Other classes, which are all labeled with what they replace). It actually is true that they balance things like that, but then they also balanced it so that any fight is going to be a complete pathetic cakewalk. So not only are we getting all panicky that having only three people will get them all killed and make it a pain to calculate the EXP, but it's just rather embarrassing.]
"She enjoys interacting with the rest of the group, with characters and monsters in the game world, and with the fantasy world in general by speaking 'in character' and describing her character's actions in the first person."
[Now here we're starting to get into this rundown of the types of players out there and how to deal with them. Me, I'm just weirded out by some of the attitudes on display here. The general impression is that these are all totally valid and equal viewpoints that shouldn't be given priority over each other, which leads to some subtext in the language like "Every once in a while, you're going to get one of these ROLEPLAYING types who wants to actually come up with a character concept and explore it. For some reason freaks like this always get drawn to RPGs and get this, they don't even always care that much about rolling dice and killing stuff! Freaky, right?"]
"BE SURE THAT THE ACTOR DOESN'T... Bore the other players by talking to everyone and everything."
"BE SURE THAT THE INSTIGATOR DOESN'T... Get the rest of the group killed. Attack the other PCs or their allies."
[Oh, and make sure to keep them from eating all the dice, because then you won't be able to roll damage! Seriously, this is advice they think people need to be given in advance?]
"... The story and roleplaying are secondary to action and awesome abilities and magic items. Most players have a little power gamer in them."
[See how that's italic? That's not me getting all snarky, that's a real freaking quote.]
"ENGAGE THE SLAYER BY... Springing an unexpected battle when the slayer looks bored."
Player A: "Good day madam. I understand you have some sort of problem?" Player B: "Boooo-ring!" DM: "Ninjas jump through the windows!"
"ENGAGE THE THINKER BY... Recruiting her to help come up with quests."
[If there's only one person in your group who likes to come up with cool dungeon layouts and plot hooks and such, why aren't they the one running the game in the first place?]
"BE SURE THAT THE WATCHER DOESN'T... Distract the other players with TV, a video game, or surfing the Internet."
[I had to stop when I saw this again, go get my hands on a copy of the book again, and double check that that was honestly a quote and not me making a joke. Held this up a whole day. It's real. The gist is, some players don't really want to play, they're just kinda getting roped into it. There's a whole page instructing the DM to go "Hey! It's your turn!" and specifically specifying not to let them "Disappear from the table at crucial moments." Dear gods! I understand that we're writing this for the benefit of people who have never played an RPG before, but this is just ridiculous. People don't need specific instructions to make sure everyone who's playing is physically in the room!]
"THE WEAKNESSES OF A SINGLE DM ARE... One person does a lot of work. If the DM can't play, no one can. Multiple DMs: Different players take the DM role for different sessions. Two or three players might pass the job around, everyone in the group might take a turn..."
"If you don't want to use a published adventure, it's possible to create an adventure with no more than an hour of preparation. Choose a dungeon map. Section off an area that contains a limited number of potential encounters. Use the sample encounters in the Monster Manual, as well as sample traps and hazards in this book."
[Back in my day, the default assumption was that the DM was a big boy and could design their own adventures. Published adventures existed for people who aren't feeling creative and labor under the delusion that people at TSR could come up with a better dungeon crawl than you'd get just randomly doodling on some graph paper and opening what monster books you had handy to random pages. Here we've got this attitude like this is all really scary hard stuff you should never try to do yourself.]
"If you give the players a summary of events that have brought them to the entrance of a dungeon, your next words might be 'What do you do?' That question is a hallmark of the beginning of exploration mode."
I'd like to point out here that every other RPG ever has, in their general notes on how to GM, a big huge disclaimer that if you ever find yourself saying "What do you do?" you are doing a lousy job. Also, railroading. Also "exploration mode."
"Encounters are the exciting part of the D&D game."
Mainly because we cut all the other parts out.
This, actually, is a good rule- Keep notes on what everyone's take-10 result is for all their knowledge and perception type skills are. Any time there's some detail to be noted someone would catch according to that, just tell them. On the other hand, a better rule would be to not have those sorts of things as skills to begin with, and just frelling tell them.
[I hate D&D's whole spot and listen check concept so very very much. Even when used correctly, it's pretty stupid, but I have been in so many games where the DM is constantly asking everyone to roll dice and not describing ANYTHING if they get a lousy roll. That's another rant entirely though.]
"You might want to discourage players from bringing in a clone of the dead character in as a 'new' character, adding 'II' to the character's name or altering it slightly, but otherwise leaving the character unchanged."
... or you might want to smack them upside the head and say "No seriously. Make a new character."
"On the other hand, copying a character might be fine depending on the style and seriousness of your game, and it does keep the game moving forward with no delay."
This was a JOKE! You aren't supposed to have really meant might there!
"If you let the characters beat an encounter that was too hard for them, don't give them full experience for that encounter because it wasn't as challenging as its level indicates. Reduce the XP award by about half a level's worth."
OK. This is some bad grammar here, and it doesn't make sense out of context. The actual notion under discussion is, I decide to throw a really tough fight at the PCs. I look at the stats of the cool sounding monster I tossed in, and realize it'll totally slaughter them. So I blatantly cheat to make the monster totally throw the fight or run away, and then slightly reduce the EXP reward. NO! Bad! You either play it out, see if the PCs can actually handle it, if not, give'em a chance to escape. Possibly helping them out by discreetly tossing in some environmental feature that can give them a leg up if they improvise. Or, if we're playing THIS game, pick a monster off the list of things it says to in the rules.
"Stripped to the very basics, the D&D game is a series of encounters."
OK, I know I'm harping on this, but they keep saying stuff like this in extra big fonts at the start of chapters. Also that whole "the D&D game" bit drives me nuts. Say "the game" or "D&D" people. Alternate for variety. Don't use both at once!
"Additional Rules: Rules for actions not covered by the rules."
OK, this was from a "what's in this section" so I ASSUME I'll get to something that kinda fits that later, but this sucker really needs a better editor.
"Characters can gain no benefit from carrying a sack of rats in hopes of healing their allies by hitting the rats."
Curses! They DID spot the loophole! In all serious though, this line should be in the PHB, not the DMG. It's going to at least cross everyone's mind.
[This is, of course, a reference to how clerics heal people by hitting monsters and then having the little cartoon stars that spin around their heads go over and heal people.]
Ah, here's the rules for no rules. Basically, we've got a big chart of pre-done math. When you need to pull a number out of your butt, you look at what level the party is, slide over, find the number in the appropriate number column. Sounds good in theory. Then they give an example. An 8th level rouge kicks an ogre into a fire. How much damage does this do? Well, none from the kick, because that's just trying to set the rest of this up, and the fire does.... 2d8+5 damage. Yeah, sounds like a lot right, but remember, this is an 8th level rogue. Using a proper combat power would do 4d6. So if your players do the math, they'll realize it isn't worth it to keep trying the same trick. There's a lot to be said on the concept of fire damage scaling to match people's levels, but letting that slide, we're explicitly punishing improvisation as these rules are written. This is calculated out to the serve up the same damage as an attack at the high end of this table, for something requiring 3 d20 rolls to come out well vs. 1, and they add that you should up the TN on the skill roll portion of things like this by 5 on general principle. So once again, I'm totally with them on the logic, the execution makes me want to hurt them.
"A minion is destroyed when it takes any amount of damage."
Huh. So D&D finally gets a mooks rule tossed in. Incidentally, WotC has a really nasty habit of letting dev team jargon make its way into actual game rules. This whole monster classification system I'm reading through here is a good example. I have mixed feelings on this habit really. It hurts the feel of things, but tends to be somewhat insightful. I still say it'd be neat to have tabletop games with designer's commentary. As a special edition thing, or copious sidebar notes.
[OK, see, monsters all have classifying labels on them. There's Artillery, Brute, Controller, Lurker, Minion, Skirmisher, and Soldier. Every monster is going to be labeled as one of these. They use this to balance out encounters to be interesting, and generally give you a hint on how they should act. Have these smash around while these take pot shots from the balcony, swarm these, have these hide and smack casters who are left alone, etc. This is game design theory stuff though, and it is weird to officially show these labels to your player with such, well, jargon.]
Aha. HERE'S the table detailing how to tweak things for when you don't have exactly 5 PCs... and they really did design around that. It shows in all the hard math on display here. Anyway the balancing math here is actually pretty cool, but uh...
"Standard example for 5th-level PCs: 1 harpy (level 6 controller) and 6 orc raiders (level 3 skirmisher). Level 5 encounter, 1,150 XP."
This isn't me singling out the most absurd example. Not one example of what makes for an acceptable fight makes any logical sense. No wait, one out of a dozen or so is all different sorts of demons. Point stands though.
So at this point, it really gets too repetitive and wordy to be worth quoting all the WTF bits. The section on puzzles is pretty hilarious, suggesting you have players solve sudoku crosswords and word search puzzles. It then goes on to emphasize being nice to the players to the degree that it practically says "Give the players anything they ask for. Let them design their own adventures, just give them extra treasure when they want it, have any monster that's too tough for them just have a heart attack before it kills them..." Then you hit the random generation tables and I go frell this, I'm playing multiplayer tabletop nethack.
[To be fair? There's worse things to play than multiplayer tabletop nethack. I mean, you have to pretty much redo the random tables from scratch if you want to make it fun, but Dandifor actually works OK as a randomly generated no GM dungeon crawl board game sorta deal. It flat out does not work as an RPG in any context other than more or less pure combat dungeon crawling.]