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The AD&D Second Edition Dungeon Master Guide has three uses. First, it could serve as advice for a budding DM (this is presumably what most people would expect), second, it's a collection of additional optional rules, and third it's a tome of magical items and treasure.
It's only roughly laid out in this fashion. One and two are mingled together, three sits at the end of the book. The explicit goal was to have it chapter for chapter match the PHB in content. I guess this is an admirable goal, and would have been more appreciated had the layout of the PHB made more sense. The art work is actually quite beautiful, I wish more art work would follow suit, but that's not really enough to help the DMG. The area in which it is most needed, DM advice, it suffers in terms of layout. All the good advice is usually a paragraph long, sometimes two, inserted randomly into rules discussions. The index is sometimes of use for finding it, and I like that the index colour codes for the PHB and DMG, so you're only looking in one place, but it doesn't cover everything, so to find all the good advice you need to read it through cover to cover. And for that, it's a lot of wasted effort. I doubt the page count would even match Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering if it were just distilled to advice.
For rules, the layout is somewhat better, and at least benefits from the index. Some of the rules though are entirely constrained to the tables, with the discussion of them being optional reading. Unlike the PHB, the DMG doesn't have all the tables at the end of the book for quick and easy reference. Really, most of the rules can be summed up with the tables, and it bogs down play to have to look everything up. In practice I wouldn't use any rules that weren't conveniently referenced on the character sheet or on the Dungeon Master Screen, and none of the DMs I played with did either.
The treasure appendices are actually fine. They're logically laid out, the descriptions are good and clear, striking the balance between brevity and long windedness.
The reason I'm giving the DMG a 2 for style, is that while the treasure layout is fine, the most important thing for the rules would have been to have all the tables in one place, and the DM advice was pretty much hidden throughout the text.
Now, on to the content. The DM advice is all over the place. As a whole I didn't find it to be good. When I first tried DMing (without having read it), I predictably screwed the pooch. The DMG did help somewhat, but not nearly as much as simple experience through trial and error did. Some of the advice was actually bad, and contributed to the errors, and some of it was good, and I made use of it. Some also manages to sit on the fence and do both. As an example, it quite astutely points out the issue with character scores is that the hardest to play with are all average scores - something low or high at least gives you an interesting hook to work with. It then goes on to say that a character with too high scores should perhaps be not used for the campaign. I'm not kidding! The scores are determined randomly, the luck and chance of getting high scores is what makes getting stuck with low ones worth it. So we end up with a situation that high scores are supposed to give access to the rare character types like Rangers, Paladins and Illusionists, but if they're too high, then it's not suitable for the campaign, while if the scores are low the player should just have to stick with it? That seems like a strange admission that the high ability scores are overpowered.
Speaking of ability scores, it recommends that someone who doesn't have the scores to be a Ranger should just play a Fighter who aspired to be a Ranger. On the one hand, it's a great way to add more diversity to the character classes, but on the other hand it makes some of the specialty classes seem pointless. Like, for that matter, why bother playing an Illusionist when you could just play a Mage who prefers Illusions? Why play a Paladin when you can get a specialty priest of a god of war? There is of course good advice too on handing out too little or too much experience as the right balance will motivate the players, whereas extremes will make them disinterested. This advice is certainly spot on. The problem, going back to the layout issue, is that taken as a whole, all the good advice ends up canceled out by the bad advice, and the neutral advice sits there, and in the end you end you end up figuring things out for yourself. The wording of a lot of the advice points to pretty much that anyway, as it's always presented as "some DMs prefer X" rather than any type of real instruction.
There really, really, isn't much point in reading the DMG for these morsels. Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering the D&D4e Dungeon Master Guide, HeroQuest 2e all provide far better advice. There are others of course, but that's a good starting point for better advice.
For the optional rules, a big problem is it's not clear which rules are optional and which rules are just contained in the DMG instead of the PHB. For practical purposes, you can ignore all the rules presented in the DMG and it won't negatively impact your game. In fact, using some of the rules, particularly the ones not explicitly listed as optional, can make it worse. One of the biggest culprits here is the level cap rules. They've led to a fair bit of bashing and dislike of the system, a lot of one sided debates about how bad they are (one sided in the sense that nobody defended them except to play devil's advocate so everyone else could blow off steam). Racial class restrictions were also bizarre, although those also existed in the PHB, the justification in the DMG was that if you allowed Gnome Paladins suddenly you'd have 6 players wanting to play one. In my view, that's pretty cool, and makes the game very easy for me as a DM. You've got your party concept right there!
Some of the optional rules are even worse. The new class creation rules, ostensibly there to alleviate some of the problems with restrictive class roles, were absolutely atrocious. Even the point system from Player's Option: Skills & Powers, as broken as it was, is several orders of magnitude better than this steaming pile of ogre crap! It's just plain broken. Not in the sense that they forgot to playtest it and some clever, unexpected uses leads to something unusually powerful, but in the sense that the only thing that possibly makes sense is they had someone deliberately tweak some of the numbers to make it just not work, at all. Nobody intelligent could have possibly come up with it. I'll give some examples. Experience tables are the ostensible balancing mechanic for AD&D, but they're completely misused for that purpose in the PHB to begin with. As a concept, it's not bad, but the implementation was bad to begin with. This made a bad balancing even worse. The experience tables for a new class were determined by taking a base cost and multiplying it by a number determined by the abilities you chose. The multipliers made no sense. Wizard and Rogue THAC0 tables were both -1 to the multiplier. Who would ever choose Wizard? +2HP and +3HP were both +2 for the multiplier, who would ever choose +2HP. The abilities were also wacky - backstab is +1 but animal empathy is +1.5, I'm not sure how they came up with that. On another front, each additional race the class is available to increases the multiplier by 1. Now I know they want some justification to keep humans at the forefront, but how many races it's available to shouldn't slow the advancement down, not to mention that if you're custom making a class it'll be for a one-off character, so at most you'll allow one non-human race. Some of the restrictions that reduce the multiplier are also bizarre, having a specific alignment can reduce it by -2, which is again silly for a one-off, and some of them just stack. You could have must be lawful good for -2 and cannot associate with lawful evil, neutral evil and chaotic evil for -3, along with an ethos that must be followed for another -1. If that fits the character concept that's free XP essentially. In the end, you just want to throw it out, arbitrarily throw together a character class, and arbitrarily assign XP values to it. That's how the other ones were designed. It's better and less headache inducing. In the end, the class creation rules leave you with the feeling that they were there to sabotage the notion of alternate classes.
As a contrast, the alternate race rules were pretty good. The guidelines were sensible - must be humanoid, must interact with normal player character races, can't have any unusual powers not available to regular races, ability modifiers due to size make sense, bonus hit points for large creatures reflect the extra damage done by weapons to large creatures, and the natural armour class is handled reasonably well. Basically, follow those rules, you can take any number of creatures from the Monster Manual, or even create your own, that should be balanced with the rest of the player character races (to the extent that they already are - which isn't bad not counting the optional race expansions). There are actually a fair number of rules in the DMG that are balanced and usable in this fashion - alternate damage for piercing, slashing and bludgeoning weapons, aerial combat, and the like. In fact, they're straightforward enough that you can read a table without referring to the text to figure out how they're used. There's a problem with this though, pretty much all the useful rules like this show up as a table on the Dungeon Master Screen, making the book rather unnecessary. The aforementioned race creation rules aren't really necessary either, you just need some common sense.
One thing though, that I liked, and wasn't self evident, or discernable just by reading a table, was the section on magic item creation, as well as treasure distribution. I don't think any of the published campaign worlds followed any of it, but it was neat nonetheless. The treasure distribution covered explanation for why there are hoards of treasure, and the magic item creation gave 3 ways of making them. One is the practical method - get components that make sense for the item, salamander blood to inscribe a wand of fireballs, for example. Another is the fantastical method - you go on a crazy quest to make the item, and the ingredients are metaphors. The last is a combination of the two, which I think is really the best. It suggests using practical for more mundane magic items and fantastic for the more powerful ones, although it laughably uses a sword +1 as an example of a very powerful item. This would only be true in a campaign that was low magic and featured monsters with resistance to non-magical weapons, but given the existence of +5 swords, a +1 is really just basic. The magic item creation supports the trope that magic treasure is something you generally find, while still giving the opportunity to make some, and more importantly, have the players go on a quest to be able to make it. That's really the only gem I take out of the DMG, and sadly it doesn't get much play.
Like the DM advice section, the additional rules aren't much good. You're better off just using the DM Screen, as you'll be making judgement calls most of the time anyway, and it's the only way to keep from bogging down play if you're using a more fleshed out rule-set.
The treasure section can actually stand on its own to an extent. The treasure tables are even handy for rolling up some items if you don't want to put effort into it yourself, but they did end up producing some pretty bizarre results that would have me usually tweaking something along the way. Of course, that's a DM's perogative, and it's better to offer something to tweak than not offer anything at all. I also really enjoyed the magic item section, it's a lot of fun to just read the descriptions of them, think about the kinds of adventures that could centre around them, and decide which ones the players should get. A well placed item that's very useful to a particular character is sometimes far better than an XP reward. So, I'm pretty much happy with this section, but given the whole context of the book, it isn't quite good enough. A lot of space is wasted on rule descriptions that aren't necessary, and DM advice that's all over the place, and once again there's a product that does this section much better - Encyclopedia Magica.
That's the short of it really. For DM advice you're better off buying Robin's Laws, which will then help for any game. For rules, you're better off just getting the DM Screen, and for magic items you're better off getting Encyclopedia Magica. Hell, you can totally skip buying any sort of advice and just learn by trial and error as most people did (and not be any worse off than with the DMG), not bother using any of the rules not covered in the PHB (and have a more streamlined, and probably more enjoyable, game) and just get Encyclopedia Magica. It is actually pretty hard to think of an AD&D game without magic items. If you drop them, you'll have to think a bit about how you'll change the game to suit that. It's also hard to ignore that tons of RPGs have been released without even a chapter on being a GM, and did just fine, pointing to the DMG being a vestigial product. If anyone's a good DM, it won't be because of this book, and if someone's a bad DM, I can sometimes track it to the page number in it. That said, if you can't find Encyclopedia Magica, or you can get creative with a photocpier, scissors, glue and some cardboard, you've got yourself magic items and a DM Screen. As long as the price is right. I wouldn't recommend paying more than $5 for it, and would rather have it thrown in with the PHB and MM for $10 for the lot of them. $15 for all 3 wouldn't be bad either, particularly given how cool the MM is.
