The “Dungeons and Dragons 2024 Player’s Handbook” has heft, history and accomplishes a lot of heavy lifting. It proclaims itself as Fifth Edition and credits “10 years of feedback from the Dungeons and Dragons community.” It is 385 pages compared to the 2014 Player’s Handbook of 316 pages. It’s also being published during the 50th Anniversary of Dungeons and Dragons and celebrates the different settings in the book, even dedicating an appendix to the multiverse. The “Dungeons and Dragons 2024 Player’s Handbook” is scheduled to release on September 17, 2024.
We at GiN were given an advanced review copy and are planning to do more than one article on this book. I’m fortunate to have an in-person Dungeons and Dragons group that meets once a week with some great players and a great Dungeon Master. We use miniatures and our DM has some amazing home-built terrain that he stretches across a ping-pong table that sits atop a pool table. So, combat and movement require a ruler or a tape measure with every inch being five feet.
I showed some of this Thursday group the book, and we discussed a few of the changes to the fifth edition core rules set. I’ll continue to consult with them so as to provide more multiple person perspective views of the new player’s handbook. Like most Dungeons and Dragons groups, there’s a mix of younger people in our group who started playing with 5E in 2014, and then there are others, like me, who started playing with the red boxed 1983 Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set, which was rereleased recently as part of the Basic Starter Kit. We then went into Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. Our group also has those who have played both the third and fourth editions.
All of us loved the art of the new player’s handbook. Each of the twelve different character classes has a full-page illustration depicting them in some action-packed moment. Our Dungeon Master and his son noticed that the illustration of the rogue resembles one of our group’s players, which was kind of funny. Anyway, each of the subclasses has a heroic half page picture highlighting their various strengths and features. All character classes have at least four subclasses, with some, like the warlock, having six.
The book also contains revised content from “Xanathar’s Guide to Everything” and “Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything.”
This book has two art directors, Emi Tanji (lead) and Josh Herman. I looked at my old spine-cracked 2014 5E Player’s Handbook and saw that Tanji had been a graphic designer on that one. She definitely hit a home run by coordinating the over 80 illustrators listed in the credits of the 2024 book. Each art piece relates to a rule and communicates what the text is saying. For example, the top of the page with the fireball picture, showing a wizard immolating some monstruous spiders is excellent.
Graphic Designers Matt Cole (lead), Trish Yochum and Trystan Falcone (who worked on the Acquisitions, Inc. project) put together a great spread of pages on the weapons and armor section, which includes a musket and a pistol. Many players come to the game without an in-depth knowledge of medieval or late renaissance warfare, and this book does a good job of showing what light, medium and heavy armor look like for this or almost any fantasy game.
Some of the mechanics of this new book are different from before, but in my opinion, not so much to the point where we should label it Dungeons and Dragons 6E, but I will ask my Dungeons and Dragons group what they think about it, and I am planning on writing about it in a separate article. There are a lot of discussions, and it will be interesting to hear players thoughts on all of this.
For example, we had a great discussion in our group on the topic of surprise and how it works in Dungeons and Dragons now. Surprise in the 2014 player’s handbook is very powerful, and it ends up giving the person or party who surprise the others a full round to attack with practically no response from the surprised people. However, the new rule in the 2024 handbook gives a disadvantage on initiative, so that the surprised now have a chance, albeit a smaller one, to get into in a higher spot in the initiative order.
Some liked the new surprise rules in its simplicity and balance. Others thought it took away from the tactical importance of surprise and thematically made it less important. This change also supports some of the highlights in the 2024 version such as: streamlined rules, easier character creation, enhanced classes and reimagined origins.
The other discussion was on the 2024 species section replacing the 2014 races part of the book. Most thought that was a fine idea, but wanted to see how the mechanics of it change how it works for say an Elf or an Orc.
In character creation, the book lists the order that you create your character as first choosing your Class, then your Origin, your Ability Scores are third, Alignment is fourth and the fine details are the fifth thing that you do. The second step, Origins, starts with backgrounds, which gives you feats that can affect your ability scores and then goes into species, which gives you character size, speed and some special abilities. In total, this puts much more of an emphasis on your character’s background and upbringing, and much less emphasis on their race.
So, for example, being an Elf no longer gets you a dexterity bonus, while being an Orc does not give you a boost to your strength at the expense of speed. But you can still obtain any of those bonuses, plus special skills or equipment if you take certain backgrounds as you build out your character.
We also noticed that some spells have changed. For example, healing is much more powerful, with Hero’s Feast a little weaker. Divine Smite is spelled out more stringently while the Wish Spell now has actual parameters about how much it can affect hit points and to what level it can try to change the past.
Due to the significance of this new supplement, we here at GiN are planning on writing a few more articles on this consequential book. Many of us who got to experiment with the new player’s handbook did not see any definitive reasons to change our current campaign to adjust to the new rules right away. However, the changes seem good, and we all seemed eager to try the new character creation for our next campaign. From what I could tell, most everyone in our gaming group was going to go out and buy a copy of the new player’s handbook.
After I finish this sentence, I am going to roll up a brand new Fighter character using the 2024 Player’s Handbook, so wish me luck!