Ok, wow. This book is going to take me awhile to get through. Is there a D&D for Dummies? I bet there is. 

Felicity Beckett's uncle has tasked her with one goal for Lord and Lady Forsythe's country house party. Keep her innocent cousin away from the notorious rake, Lord Lindsay. The man's Rogues' Rulebook has earned him the most scandalous of reputations, but no one warned Felicity how irresistible a rogue can be.

Alex Evering, Lord Lindsay, agrees to attend his aunt and uncle's party for a bit of enjoyment before embracing the duties of his newly inherited title, but he loathes their scheme to redeem his reputation and marry him off to a proper young lady—until he meets Miss Beckett.

so might as well fit it into something for Halloween Bingo

fantastic production values

really looking forward to running games with the full rules instead of just the quick start ones...

my biggest issue is the lack of guidelines on scaling monsters up or down, and calculating xp per fight beyond individual monster worth.  i get doing flat rate works, but they've got so much support for alternatives and ways of molding the rules, that i feel like this is lacking

The other week my husband said to me a set of magical words.

"I think I want to try Dungeons & Dragons"

FINALLY

Well, I've never run a game, but I've thought about it and have some ideas kicking around, so I told him I was game, to ask some of his friends to form a party since this was his game (with fill ins from my friends if needed to bolster the party size to our target number), and I dug out my 3rd ed books.

Of course, in the years since I've last played D&D (mostly done WoD and Star Wars over the last 7-10 years) there have been some new versions to come out.  Like many D&D players I don't talk about 4th ed, but I was hearing good things about 5th.  So I started him out getting an idea of the classes & races in 3rd and placed a hold on the 3 core 5e books.  In the meantime I spent some time making my way through my 3rd ed DMG.

Once my 5e DMG came in I sat down and started flipping through and what hit me immediately is how much better the information flow is in this book.  In terms of what I needed to know to build a world and run a game the organization is fantastic.

It is important to note that there is really nothing in here about character creation, beyond information on creating classes/races and playable monsters, all of that is in the PHB. 

At this point we've successfully done character creation (with me not having had a chance to read through the 5e PHB, just flipping through while he's also trying to read, in order to guide him through the process) and my books are on order.