As a relative newcomer to the RPG hobby, I had to equip myself to play D&D 4th Edition without taking advantage of the D&D Insider tool. Since recent developments with Wizards of the Coast indicate that D&D Insider might be retired soon, and at the same time since the most-if-not-all of the 4th Edition books are legally and officially available as PDFs from dndclassics, I wanted to share my experiences as to what I used to start playing with 4th Edition.

Bare Necessity: Player’s Handbook 1

This covers everything that a player needs: races, classes, class powers and abilities, feats, basic sets of equipment and magic items, all player-facing rules for skill checks, adventuring and combat, and rituals.

Bare Necessity: Rules Compendium

This covers most, but not all of what a DM needs to run the game.

* A class-agnostic overview of what makes up a character, their powers, their abilities, and how to level them up

* A basic overview of what makes up a monster

* How to assign DCs to skill checks, and how run Skill Challenges. Importantly, the skill check DCs on page 126 of this book supersede previously published skill check DCs, such as in the Dungeon Master’s Guide 1

* Adventuring and combat rules (redundantly covered in the PHB 1)

* Equipment rules, but no equipment specifics. That’s where the PHB 1 comes in

* The absolute basics of building up an encounter according to the game’s intended XP budgets

* Rewards: XP, action points, and how to roll for and generate loot. Importantly, the loot generation in the Rules Compendium uses the Essentials model of randomly rolled loot, whereas 4e originally used a “set parcel” model. Again, the magic items list in the PHB 1 is what you can refer to whenever the random loot rolls tell you to generate a magic item.

Bare Necessity: The Monster Vault

The Rules Compendium does not include any monsters in it. The Monster Vault fills in this gap. Critically, the Monster Vault has all of the “fixed math” that began with Monster Manual 3, but contains a more traditional variety of monsters and covers a better spread of levels, since MM3 was more geared towards high-level and more esoteric monsters.

That’s it. If you wanted the absolute minimum to play 4th Edition with, you can stop reading now and go with this.

At this point, I want to mention the Dungeon Master’s Guide

This book covers a lot of topics:

* How to run a game from an IRL perspective

* How to be a GM, starting from a very basic, maybe-you’ve-never-GM’ed-before perspective

* How to create combat encounters, including sets of monsters with interlocking roles that the Rules Compendium doesn’t really cover

* How to run adventures, either pre-made or homebrewed

* How to build a world to run your homebrewed adventures in

* How to run a campaign to string your adventures together

* How to dole out parcel-based rewards (and this can supersede the Rules Cyclopedia’s rolled loot model)

* How to create monsters

It even has a short dungeon adventure that you could immediately run a game with. It’s a very comprehensive book that you could almost recommend as great general reading for GMs regardless of the game they’re running because the advice is very practical, straightforward and easy to understand.

It just has one critical flaw: most of the math dealing with the 4th Edition-specific mechanics is outdated. The Rules Compendium’s skill check DC table replaces the one you’ll find in this DMG, and the Monster Vault gives you a set of premade monsters, but if you ever wanted to make your own monsters, we’re going to have to go farther afield.

Replacing the DMG 1’s Monster Creation Rules Part 1: The Monster Manual 3 on a Business Card

This boils down the monster math used in Monster Manual 3 and every supplement thereafter to the single simple formula that you’ll want to use if you’re going to homebrew your own monsters. That said, it’s almost too simple and leaves out a few key points:

* The attack bonus for attacks that target Fort/Ref/Will defenses should be [3 + Level] (or 2 less than the attack bonus vs AC)

* The hit point count might still be too high, as the author alluded to in a further follow-up. Personally, I use the HP counts calculated from this follow-up, but the downside is that it requires you to recalculate the HP of the monsters in the Monster Vault rather than making them plug and play

* The card does not sufficiently cover how to create Elite and Solo monsters beyond simply inflating their HP. These details, such as giving them Encounter powers and Action Points, are covered in the DMG 1.

Replacing the DMG 1’s Monster Creation Rules Part 2: Damage value assignment

The MM3 on a Business Card has a number for what the average damage of a monster should be, but it’s just a flat number with no die rolls and no adjusting for roles and different kinds of attacks.

The DMG 1 has a table and tells you how to use it:

* Medium damage expressions should be most At-Will attacks

* Low damage expressions should be for AOE attacks, melee attacks by Artillery monsters, and attacks by Controllers that also inflicts a status effect

* High damage expressions should be for Brute attacks and Lurker attacks that are triggered by their Lurky-ness

* Limited damage expressions should be for monster Encounter powers

But as I said, the math in the DMG 1’s table is outdated, such that those damage expressions aren’t going to make your monster hit hard enough if you use them.

This blog post fills that gap, giving you three levels of damage to choose from:

* The reverse-engineered damage level in the Monster Manual 3

* Damage levels that keep the game/monsters roughly as deadly as it was in 1, rather than dropping off over time

* Damage levels that make the game deadlier over time, expecting the players to make up the difference via tactics and character optimization

At this point, we’ve managed to find resources that replaces all of the outdated math in the DMG 1 (and would also allow us to “fix” monsters from earlier Monster Manuals and supplements), and we can move on to other things to address 4th Edition’s issues.

The Feat Tax Supplements: Heroes of the Fallen Lands and Player’s Handbook 3

The Heroes of the Fallen Lands has the Improved Defenses feat, which improves your Fort, Ref and Will defense by +1 at Heroic tier, +2 at Paragon tier, and +3 at Epic tier. This is necessary for those three stats to scale properly with the monsters as you rise in level.

The Heroes of the Fallen Lands also has the Melee Training feat, which allows you to use a different ability modifier besides Strength when making Melee Basic Attacks, although only half of the ability modifier is added to the damage roll. This is important for any class/build that expects to be able to, at the minimum, make decent Opportunity Attacks.

Player’s Handbook 3 has the Versatile Expertise feat, which improves your attack rolls by +1 at Heroic tier, +2 at Paragon tier, and +3 at Epic tier. This, like Improved Defenses, is necessary for those stats to scale properly with the monsters as you rise in level.

I’m including the sources of these feats for the sake of completeness, but technically if you’re just filling out character sheets by hand then there’s no real reason to need to own these books specifically just for one feat that really should have been errata in the first place. Just write down a +1 to your attack rolls, Fort, Ref, and Will at level 1 as you create the character, increase it to +2 at level 11, and then +3 at level 21, and make the necessary notations/changes to your Melee Basic Attack.

The Inherent Bonus Supplement: Dark Sun Campaign Setting

This book has the rules for the Inherent Bonuses option in the Character Builder, which provides the “necessary for scaling” bonuses to the characters’ attacks and defenses in order for you to be able to run a game without looking over your shoulder all the time over whether the players are getting as many magic items as they should be.

The source is listed here for the sake of completeness, although the rule itself is small enough to be described below in full:

Attack and Damage – All characters gain a +1 enhancement bonus to attack rolls and damage rolls at 2nd, 7th, 12th, 17th, 22nd, and 27th level. When characters score a critical hit, they deal an extra 1d6 damage per +1 enhancement bonus to their attack rolls.

Defenses – All characters gain a +1 enhancement bonus to AC, Fortitude, Reflex, and Will at 4th, 9th, 14th, 19th, 24th, and 29th level.

These bonuses stack.

If you have a magical item that provides an enhancement bonus to attack, damage, or defenses, you may choose to use that bonus, or the enhancement bonus you’re receiving from this rule (unless otherwise noted). You may use a magical weapon to attack with a power but use your enhancement bonuses to attack and damage – if you do so you may still use the critical bonus and properties of the weapon.

All told, that’s 35 dollars in PDFs for PHB 1, Rules Compendium and Monster Vault, another 10 dollars for the DMG, and 48 dollars if you also wanted to own the feat tax and inherent bonus supplements specifically.

That should cover the basics. All other books would expand your class, power, feat and ability selections, or provide you premade adventures to run, or more items, or more monsters (that may need to be recalibrated if they were published earlier than MM3 on June 2010), but otherwise you could run entire 1 to 30 campaigns using just the books and rules mentioned herewith.