See there for the complete preview.

Among which:

QuoteGroup Storytelling

The D&D game offers a Dungeon Master and the other players the ability to craft a story out of each session and each adventure. Sometimes a gaming group creates a straightforward story, with sword-and-sorcery action and little character development or few plot twists. Other times, a group weaves a magical tale with dramatic layers of complex storytelling.

Chapter 1of the DMG2 focuses on the narrative side of the game from the DM’s point of view, offering techniques to encourage your group of players to help you shape the story of the game.

This chapter includes the following topics:

    * Story Structure: The basic building blocks of narrative storytelling.
    * Branching: Consider the narrative as a series of choices leading to multiple possible destinations.
    * Cooperative Arcs: Consult with your players to build a campaign from the ground up.
    * Your Cast of Characters: Help players work with you and each other to create dynamic characters.
    * Cooperative World Building: The cooperative storytelling approach builds a story through joint improvisation. Players feel they have a stake in the story when they participate in building the plot.
    * Roleplaying Hooks: Strong personality and plot hooks established at the start keep the characters involved throughout the life of the campaign.
    * Vignettes: Short, directed scenes allow players to see events from a different point of view.
    * Drama Rewards: Significant, dedicated roleplaying deserves XP rewards.
    * What Your Players Want: Create surveys so you can adapt the game to your players’—and their characters’—requests.
    * Companion Characters: Your story might call for an ally to join the PCs for a time, or maybe they need help in overcoming a challenge you want to use. These rules work independent of the storytelling style you adopt for your game.
    * Making Things Level: Guidance for handling the situation when a character of higher or lower level joins the party.

"Narrative", "cooperative storytelling", "directed scenes", "dedicated roleplaying deserves XP rewards"...
Where did I hear these buzz words and expressions before?

:hmm:

[edit] About the general contents of the book:

New Information about the contents of DMG2:

QuoteWe know the following crunch will be in this book:
* Rules for removing magic items from the game
* Rules for giving the PCs sidekicks and followers
* An adventure town, ala Fallcrest. This time it's going to be Sigil.
* Monster templates and NPC class templates
* More kill challenge stuff
* New artifacts

The stuff on Sigil will include a lot of fluff as well as crunch.

Quote from: Benoist;321499"Narrative", "cooperative storytelling", "directed scenes", "dedicated roleplaying deserves XP rewards"...
Where did I hear these buzz words and expressions before?

:hmm:

Ooooh! oooh!  I know this one!  IknowIknowIknow!

The Forge!

Robin D. Laws will contribute a Chapter. I wonder if that's the one.

Most impressive!

Teaching DMs the fundamentals and even advanced tricks used by novelists, playwrights and screenwriters is a terrific idea.    It will definitely increase the quality of gameplay.   This is the kinda stuff you want taught in DM seminars.  

Shame more of this didn't show up in earlier DMGs.

Honestly, the thing that I hate most is a DM with a story to tell.  It invariably ends up as a railroad of the worst sort.

People, even 4e haters, didn't listen to me when I told them Mearls had taken the D&D boat up the Forge creek without a paddle, and now look what you all get.

It saddens me too that it'll still get eaten up like candy.

Apparently the Swine really did win.  They took the biggest game of all.  All the more resign to consign it to 2e levels of irrelevance.

Quote from: J Arcane;321594People, even 4e haters, didn't listen to me when I told them Mearls had taken the D&D boat up the Forge creek without a paddle, and now look what you all get.

You know, J, I was very much involved with Iron Heroes, with the creation of the fansite and running stuff for the first few months in the community. Looking through the rules, only some mechanics like the different "pools" to power character abilities make me think of the Forge.

With the later step of the Book of Nine Swords, we can see some ideas are common with IH, and yet, there's whole new dimension of "umph" here. That's by that moment that I should have known what was up. I didn't see it coming at the time.

The irony is, by using the "perfect gamist" game as the Trojan horse to sneak all this "narrativist" crap in there, they've ultimately created the ultimate "incoherent" game.  

Even in victory, the Forge is still full of shit.

Quote from: J Arcane;321594People, even 4e haters, didn't listen to me when I told them Mearls had taken the D&D boat up the Forge creek without a paddle, and now look what you all get.

It saddens me too that it'll still get eaten up like candy.

Apparently the Swine really did win.  They took the biggest game of all.  All the more resign to consign it to 2e levels of irrelevance.

I have to admit that even I was one of those who was fooled by Mearls, or rather who let myself downplay his "admiration" of the Forge as a kind of misguided optimism and not serious dedication to their ideology.

The only thing heartening about all this is that when the last group of Swine (the WW-Swine, before the Forge-Swine) took over D&D, the end result was a disaster for the company that owned D&D at the time, and it ultimately led to the triumph of D20.

RPGPundit

Quote from: J Arcane;321597The irony is, by using the "perfect gamist" game as the Trojan horse to sneak all this "narrativist" crap in there, they've ultimately created the ultimate "incoherent" game.  

Even in victory, the Forge is still full of shit.

Well put. Also, note that this isn't so much a victory as it is a Swan Song. The Forge and its ideology is deader than a doorknob (in the vital sense, not in any sense implying that there aren't still dozens of "storygamers" out there trying to push their crap), and 4e is already clearly a pyrrhic victory, which will lead to the entire ideology finally being completely discredited, the way 2e ended up utterly discrediting WW's "Story-based gaming".

RPGPundit

Quote from: mhensley;321593Honestly, the thing that I hate most is a DM with a story to tell.  It invariably ends up as a railroad of the worst sort.

I completely agree.

We'll see

What's all this about THE FORGE, and why is the aforementioned FORGE bad?

The Forge is a particular group of game writers, theorists and hangers-on centred around a website. A fellow named Ron Edwards basically became the boss of the community and started advocating a theory of roleplaying that was very problematic and poorly thought through, and the rest of the community adopted it and started writing games with those theoretical underpinnings. Along the way, many hyperbolic statements that were obviously false were made - for example that many games cause "brain damage" (he was not being metaphorical).

Anyhow, the Forge had a proselytic arm that went around trying to convince people to use its "GNS" theory to structure their play. They were very aggressive, none-too-bright and did a fairly good job of edging out other kinds of RPG theory and discussion for a while through the volume of their posts.

They produced a handful of good or interesting games and a large number of so-so mini-games.

Quote from: B.T.;321646What's all this about THE FORGE, and why is the aforementioned FORGE bad?

The Forge is a roleplaying game design forum for small, independent rpgs. Because of it's focus on innovation and the tendency of some of its members to use big words and lots of jargon the Forge is often accused of arrogance and pretention, which apparently is the one unforgivable crime, go figure.