Ryan

The way that D&D 4e has evolved has wound up consolidation all of the latest character (race, class, etc.) rules and monster stats into D&D Insider, a suite of online tools available for at most $10 per month. A subscription to this give you access to a character builder that allows you to make anything from the previous books. It also includes access to all past articles from Dragon and Dungeon, giving you plenty of adventure modules to run right away.

For the rules of the game, players and DM’s can find everything else they need in the Rules Compendium, another more recent release which combines rules from the Player Handbooks and Dungeon Master Guides into an easy to read format. This book and the subscription above can get you and a DM everything you need to play with the newest rules for about $30.

Aspiring Dungeon Masters might want to continue to pick up the Monster Vault, which comes with a huge set of Monster Tokens and classic D&D monsters, and possibly a Campaign Setting if fleshing out the world themselves is too much work.

That’s really all you need to get started these days, and with the rules as simple as they are, it’s a great time to begin D&D!

Here’s a great way to adjust monsters between levels on the fly: The Monster Manual (3) on a business card!

http://blogofholding.com/?p=512

It works best on monsters from the most recent monster manual and monster vault, but show be balanced enough for making adjustments to anything! Having this at ready allows the DM to improvise encounters and monsters more easily.

The Medic and Scientist are incredibly powerful cards, so much so that they can affect the game’s difficulty more than adding a single infection card to the deck.

If you want a smoother level difficultly from game to game, remove these from the deck of role cards when drawing, or simply pick them both before drawing. If you are consistent in whether or not to use these role cards, you’ll find that drawing other roles doesn’t have a huge impact on the game’s difficulty.

Have fun!