D&D (2024) 2024 Player's Handbook Reveal #1: "Everything You Need To Know!"

Each day this week, Wizards of the Coast will be releasing a new live-streamed preview video based on the upcoming Player's Handbook. The first is entitled Everything You Need To Know and you can watch it live below (or, if you missed it, you should be able to watch it from the start afterwards). The video focuses on weapon mastery and character origins.

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There will be new videos on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday this week, focusing on the Fighter, the Paladin, and the Barbarian, with (presumably) more in the coming weeks.

 

[Sir Brennen]

 

[Charlaquin]

I personally would love for someone to explain to me how a Wizard has less complexity than a Warlock.

My guess is they’re thinking in terms of how complex building a character of each class is, rather than how complex playing a character of that class. Warlock is kind of an odd duck, because it has the most decision points during initial creation and leveling up of any class in 5e, which in some ways makes it the most complex class. But it has fewer turn-by-turn decisions and less resource management than other casters, making it the least complex of the casters to play.

 

[Mistwell]

Hmm... wonder what that is beyond: 1) They give you some "pick between this and this" options, in particular for ASIs; and 2) Custom backgrounds are optional (DMG?) instead of the norm (boooo!).

He frustratingly (because of his NDA) says the "major change" is that something you could do with backgrounds in the playtest was removed and you can no longer do it. So I suspect he means that if there are custom backgrounds, they're not mentioned in the PHB.

 

[Zaukrie]

Not sure if someone provided this before, but there is a DnD Beyond Article covering it

https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1742-your-guide-to-weapon-mastery-in-the-2024-players

Edit: Sorry, moving quickly, didn't register you had mentioned DnD beyond and had seen this. Mea Culpa

no need to apologize, you were just helping. Helping is good.

 

[OB1]

Not sure you get to re-roll all 8 dice......but I could be wrong.

They weren't explicit about it, but the example was rolling 'a bunch' of 1s on a fireball, and made it sound like you wouldn't just re-roll one die.

 

[Parmandur]

He frustratingly (because of his NDA) says the "major change" is that something you could do with backgrounds in the playtest was removed and you can no longer do it. So I suspect he means that if there are custom backgrounds, they're not mentioned in the PHB.

We already know those are in the DMG now.

 

[Nikosandros]

We already know those are in the DMG now.

I'll throw a wild guess. Maybe backgrounds give something at higher levels? Seems unlikely, but not impossible.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

We already know those are in the DMG now.

I'd be okay with that if more of the background bits have "Pick this or this" - in particular skills & feats, but all of it, frankly. A short list of (two or three) options that match the BG theme would do it for me.

 

[Mistwell]

Apparently ALL of the new weapon mastery rules were revealed on DNDBeyond somewhere:

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I personally would love for someone to explain to me how a Wizard has less complexity than a Warlock.

Yeah the complexity table is obvious wishful-thinking nonsense. Playing a Wizard in practical terms is vast more complex than a Warlock.

Warlock Invocations are not new player friendly.

They're far more new-player-friendly than the way Wizard spells and spellbooks work. There's not even any real way to argue otherwise.

Guidelines for creating custom (i.e. freeform) backgrounds are in the DMG.

This is a straightforwardly dumb and bad decision that is going to absolutely haunt D&D 2024 for the entire time it exists, as people endlessly whine that they can only put the +2/+1 in the stats the background offers, which we can already see are hilariously unoptimized. Virtually everyone wants to put the +1 in CON or DEX, but you can bet many, even most backgrounds won't allow that.