D&D (2024) D&D 2024 Player's Handbook Reviews

On Thursday August 1st, the review embargo is lifted for those who were sent an early copy of the new Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook. In this post I intend to compile a handy list of those reviews as they arrive. If you know of a review, please let me know in the comments so that I can add it! I'll be updating this list as new reviews arrive, so do check back later to see what's been added!

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Review List

• The official EN World review -- "Make no mistake, this is a new edition."
• ComicBook.com -- "Dungeons & Dragons has improved upon its current ruleset, but the ruleset still feels very familiar to 5E veterans."
• Comic Book Resources -- "From magic upgrades to easier character building, D&D's 2024 Player's Handbook is the upgrade players and DMs didn't know they needed."
• Wargamer.com -- "The 2024 Player’s Handbook is bigger and more beginner-friendly than ever before. It still feels and plays like D&D fifth edition, but numerous quality-of-life tweaks have made the game more approachable and its player options more powerful. Its execution disappoints in a handful of places, and it’s too early to tell how the new rules will impact encounter balance, but this is an optimistic start to the new Dungeons and Dragons era."
• RPGBOT -- "A lot has changed in the 2024 DnD 5e rules. In this horrendously long article, we’ve dug into everything that has changed in excruciating detail. There’s a lot here."

Video Reviews
Note, a couple of these videos have been redacted or taken down following copyright claims by WotC.

• 2024 PHB Rules Changes D&D 5.24 (Treantmonk's Temple)
• Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook 2024 Preview & Review | Key Takeaways and Comparisons with 2014 (Awesome Black)
• 10 Unexpected Changes in the D&D 5E 2024 Player's Handbook (This Effin' GM Games)
• Every Class and Subclass Change for 2024 (d4: Deep Dive)
• D&D Player's Handbook 2024 Winners & Losers! (The Character Sheet on ComicBook.com)
• 2024 Player's Handbook First Look Review (Dungeon Dudes)
• The 2024 Player's Handbook: Full Spoilers Review (DnD Shorts)
• Full Early Review! D&D 2024 Player's Handbook (JoeFudge)
• First Look at the 2024 Player's Handbook for Dungeons & Dragons (GameMasters)
• 2024 PHB Flip through (Jorphdan) [taken down]
• D&D New Player's Handbook, DM's Guide, Monster Manual, and Project Sigil Info (maturemindedgamers)
• 2024 Player's Handbook: Questions Answered! (Alphastream)
• D&D 2024 Player's Handbook Walkthrough (Sly Flourish) [redacted]

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Release timeline (i.e. when you can get it!)

• August 1st: Reviewers. Some reviewers have copies already, with their embargo lifting August 1st.
• August 1st-4th: Gen Con. There will be 3,000 copies for sale at Gen Con.
• September 3rd: US/Canada Hobby Stores. US/Canada hobby stores get it September 3rd.
• September 3rd: DDB 'Master' Pre-orders. Also on this date, D&D Beyond 'Master Subscribers' get the digital version.
• September 10th: DDB 'Hero' Pre-orders. On this date, D&D Beyond 'Hero Subscribers' get the digital version.
• September 17th: General Release. For the rest of us, the street date is September 17th.

 

[Daztur]

Not in my experience.

I've played 4E with people totally new to RPGs and they had no real problems, because of the discrete packets of information 4E uses, and the DDI handling the calculations for the most part, so they only need to add/subtract numbers I tell them. Also at low levels, there just aren't that many numbers to add/subtract in 4E.

I think this might be easier to teach 4e to newbies than to 3.5e veterans. I saw people constantly try to use 3.5e rules in 4e and getting naughty word mixed up.

Plus the other players help them too. So to me this seems like a made-up situation based on something you're afraid of, not something that actually happened to you.

Can only speak to my own experience. This happened to me in two different groups and in both cases we had one guy who just could not wrap their head around 4e rules.

But I think you're missing the main thrust of my argument, it's not so much the relative difficulty of learning different versions of the rules for the player it's what happens if you have a player whose brain bounces off the rules. For example I think that FATE rules are dead simple but I've seen one player's brain just completely bounce off of the abstract nature of the FATE point economy and you really can't play FATE if you don't get that.

So with 1e I've played it successfully with kids in cases where I didn't even teach them what AC and HPs were. All I told the kids was what the six stats represented, the name of their class and what that meant, what equipment they had, and (for the casters) a one sentence zero-rules description of each spells (for example: "Cure Light Wounds: heals your friends, Sleep: makes enemies fall asleep"). Everything worked fine because the rules could be a complete black box where the kid told me what they wanted to do and I spit back what happened. On a fundamental level in 1e you don't need to know how the rules work to be able to narrate what your character is doing.

That doesn't really work with a lot of games (including most Indie games) in which players have to know how the rules work in order to make decisions about what your character does. Same with 4e, even though the rules aren't that hard to learn, if your brain bounces off the rules then you just can't play it.

5e is somewhere in the middle, one of my sons knows the rules backwards and forward and the other will humor is brother and play it but REALLY doesn't want to learn the rules but he does fine with simple "I hit it with my axe!" characters but most characters in 5e require at least a passing knowledge of how the rules work.

 

[dave2008]

Very nice! I can envision that! My friend has managed to teach his kids to play 5E and one of them is only 6, but used modified character sheets to present the information even more clearly (and a bit more like 4E, oddly enough).

Of course this is me after the party. Fell asleep on the battlemat and became the cat's bed!

 

[Mistwell]

Id say its possible the legal jargon may have slipped past him but more likely sounds like they pulled his video because it was bad to neutral. IDK?

It definitely had nothing to do with his opinion. They only issued this take down notice to those who posted page by page screenshots of most of the book in a video, regardless of the reviewers opinion. It violates both WOTC TOS and YouTube's TOS. In fact, the videos bashing WOTC didn't get take-down notices, from the same creators.

 

[Mistwell]

Id love to see them do a pulp game, a supers game etc. Thing I loved about Alternity was that at the time it had bold and brave new mechanics

I agree I'd like to see other games out of WOTC. I happened to really like d20 Modern for example. d20 Future was not so good but I did play a really fun game of that once too. Gamma World was fun. I miss Star Frontiers and Boot Hill and Top Secret. I'd love to see updated versions of any of those games.

 

[Mistwell]

I think this might be easier to teach 4e to newbies than to 3.5e veterans. I saw people constantly try to use 3.5e rules in 4e and getting naughty word mixed up.

That's an interesting thought. And spending some time thinking about it, I suspect you're right.

In 4e, a DM could literally had a new player a character sheet and a small deck of cards representing their abilities. And, assuming that player had played a collectible card game or video game, they'd probably be able to pick it up very quickly.

I recall my DM even included a card in everyone's deck which said something like "Tell the DM something cool you'd like your character to attempt" as well, in case the players forgot they were not beholden to just their other cards.

 

[R_J_K75]

I agree I'd like to see other games out of WOTC. I happened to really like d20 Modern for example. d20 Future was not so good but I did play a really fun game of that once too. Gamma World was fun. I miss Star Frontiers and Boot Hill and Top Secret. I'd love to see updated versions of any of those games.

One thing I read somewhere that I thought was pretty apt. WotC is owned by Hasbro, who owns the GI Joe license, but yet they gave the IP license to Renegade Games to make an RPG from it, So, it seems they aren't interested in anything other than D&D

 

[UngainlyTitan]

One thing I read somewhere that I thought was pretty apt. WotC is owned by Hasbro, who owns the GI Joe license, but yet they gave the IP license to Renegade Games to make an RPG from it, So, it seems they aren't interested in anything other than D&D

This probably has a lot to do with history. as back in 2014 when they gutted the WoTC rpg unit at the beginning of 5e there was no non-D&D designers left and so no one the team or management to champion other games.
To support non D&D games they would have to add another design studio. It is fairly recently since they have added more design talent to the full time team.

 

[Corinnguard]

Id say its possible the legal jargon may have slipped past him but more likely sounds like they pulled his video because it was bad to neutral. IDK?

Whatever he did to have his YouTube video put behind a privacy wall, it can't be unseen by those who have watched it and have talked about it. More like dare to be neutral. thinks of a certain Weird Al Yankovich song

Level Up and the OSR saved me from that, at least. I'm sorry you're in that place.

Backing Level Up opened up a number of doors that I didn't think I would walk through. It was the first RPG that I backed during its' launch on Kickstarter. I have backed several more since then. It got me to actively participate on EN World's forums and meet and interact with a number of fellow D&D fans.

I mean level up is more 5.5 than the 2024 revision is. So I would say you have moved on to 5.5!

I think quite a number of us see Level Up that way. Level Up probably has fixed a number of 5e issues that the 2024 revision had failed to fix. It certainly has a number of elements that have made it better than 5e. What it has fixed, I don't know. I feel it has somehow, but that's for another thread.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

One thing I read somewhere that I thought was pretty apt. WotC is owned by Hasbro, who owns the GI Joe license, but yet they gave the IP license to Renegade Games to make an RPG from it, So, it seems they aren't interested in anything other than D&D

I mean, I think that's probably sensible, at least in the sense of not forcing WotC to take on merchandised IP RPGs, most of which are only very moderately successful and only for a short time.

The amount of effort and staff you'd need to support such a project at a "WotC-appropriate level" would be completely disproportionate to how successful it would be.

And that goes for pretty much all the Hasbro IPs that could potentially be TT RPGs, that I can think of. There are a few that could have done better than that, but even those are past their sell-by date (like MLP, they missed that window by about a decade even at the most generous).

I feel like WotC might do another TT RPG at some point in the next decade, especially if D&D flags slightly, but I don't think it'll be from a non-WotC-owned IP, not even a Hasbro-owned IP.

 

[DavyGreenwind]

Biggest surprise here, there are no named deities mentioned in the new PHB at all.

Actually, there are a few of them named in the Species section: Corellon, Lolth, Gruumsh, Bahamut, Tiamat, Moradin, Reorx, Garl Glittergold, Baervan Wildwanderer, Baravar Cloakshadow, Yondalla, Brandobaris, and Charmalaine!