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.

 

[Vaalingrade]

maybe i should have quoted what i was responding to. Just because something isn't called out explicitly in the PHB doesn't mean a player or DM isn't smart enough to have a conversation on changing something to better fit the character concept. Unless I'm giving DM/players too much credit on the whole conversation idea.

I mean, this thread is on page 119.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I like roughly a minute because it gives a good balance of different actions that can place in about that time. It works better for me than six seconds.

Minute always felt utterly absurd to me. You can get a lot done in a minute. That might be an entire fight scene in movie.
A person can run half a kilometre in a minute. There should be so much movement and back and forth actions in a minute, that is seems totally absurd as turn length.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Minute always felt utterly absurd to me. You can get a lot done in a minute. That might be an entire fight scene in movie.
A person can run half a kilometre in a minute. There should be so much movement and back and forth actions in a minute, that is seems totally absurd as turn length.

As an abstraction, IMO its a lot more versatile than six seconds. Allows for more opportunities for action, and also for the time-wasting stuff people do in real life all the time.

And folks absolutely should be able to cover more ground in a minute, if they're going flat out. That's a problem with rules for movement, not time.

 

[Bluenose]

Battle of Agincourt's French heavily armored, melee based calvary and English longbow archers beg to disagree...

I don't know...bows and crossbows were a thing for a reason.

Agincourt is a fantastic example. 5,000 English/Welsh archers, issued with 30 arrows each. That's 150,000 arrows. They ran out in the course of the battle, so they're all loosed. And the French still get into melee combat. Add in, careful reading of historical records suggest around 5,000 French troops died at Agincourt, some certainly in melee because that's recorded and some certainly after they'd surrendered because a French force attacked the English rear and King Henry ordered the captives killed so they couldn't arm themselves and join an attack from behind.

Everybody who wants their D&D character to need to shoot 50 arrows to kill a single person, should be asking for missiles to be reduced in effectiveness.

And to paraphrase someone more knowledgeable than me, "The arrow will start the battle and weaken the foe; but you will not win without coming in reach of the enemy with lance and mace."

I think there is a difference between massed archery, and a single shooter. Perhaps also between modes of archery - crossbows and the massed charge of knights overlapped as military techniques for some centuries, and crossbows did not uniformly dominate.

This is quite true, but there are also accounts of "storming parties" from across the world from the pre-gunpowder era, doing things that aren't too unlike what D&D parties do in assaulting with a small group to seize something vital from a more numerous occupant (watchtowers, gates, that sort of thing) And almost no matter where the story comes from, there's two or three melee fighters for every ranged specialist.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I mean, this thread is on page 119.

This post shows on page 120! Heh.

I like roughly a minute because it gives a good balance of different actions that can place in about that time. It works better for me than six seconds.

I've played with 30 second rounds, and in the late 90's/early oughts I wrote a game that used a clock-like turn timer that was 12 turn-"bits" that were described as being roughly equal to a second each, so 12 second rounds.

Six is pretty darn fast, a minute is pretty darn long. I honestly think 12 or 20 seconds would be ideal (your average 3-round fight would take a minute, in the 20-second version, which I think is pretty apt.) I don't think that you'd have to change movement by much, if you assume that "normal" 30-foot movement is done slowly and carefully to avoid getting yourself killed, but you'd have to drastically increase top speed (and make it dangerous to do while threatened) to balance it out.

 

[vagabundo]

A minute seems bonkers to me for a skirmish melee - I imagine DND combat more like a riot than organised battle lines. I could see it used for one on one combat maybe, but for archery it would fall apart.

I've done combat sports for years and time really slows down for you, so ten seconds is a long time. I'd probably settle on ten second with error bars.

 

[gban007]

A minute seems bonkers to me for a skirmish melee - I imagine DND combat more like a riot than organised battle lines. I could see it used for one on one combat maybe, but for archery it would fall apart.

I've done combat sports for years and time really slows down for you, so ten seconds is a long time. I'd probably settle on ten second with error bars.

I don't know if I remember it right, and it ran into issues around resource management, but older D&D had 1 minute rounds, and I think the idea was you had multiple swings etc going on but only one or two attacks that had a real chance of getting through defenses, so only rolled 1 / 2 attacks for the minute, but many more swings went on. Where it doesn't work is the one roll and one arrow lost for using bows, when in theory may have been 3 to 6 arrows lost per roll.

 

[Chaosmancer]

My preference (and that's all it is) is to minimize those abstractions as much as possible, so that outcomes fall into realistic parameters when clear supernatural elements are not a factor. I would just love it if folks would stop telling me that my preference for this wrong or impossible because perfection can't be reached. There are plenty of fantasy games with more realistic rules than WotC 5e (either 5.0 or 5.5).

I did not tell you that your preference is wrong or impossible.

I made an observation, answering someone else's question about how melee and ranged weapon usage is being compared by reviewers currently.

You swooped in with "That sounds an awful lot like GAMIST talk, not like the simulation I would run at it as". Note that you did make a remark about rewards for the players, clearly indicating the simulation direction. If you don't want comments about how DnD is a game, maybe stop criticizing discussion of the mechanics that had nothing to do with you by acting like it being a game is a bad thing.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I did not tell you that your preference is wrong or impossible.

I made an observation, answering someone else's question about how melee and ranged weapon usage is being compared by reviewers currently.

You swooped in with "That sounds an awful lot like GAMIST talk, not like the simulation I would run at it as". Note that you did make a remark about rewards for the players, clearly indicating the simulation direction. If you don't want comments about how DnD is a game, maybe stop criticizing discussion of the mechanics that had nothing to do with you by acting like it being a game is a bad thing.

I will admit to having an issue with gamist solutions to problems, and I apologize if I get too strident when I see them. But insisting that D&D and similar games are in no way reality simulators is straight-up denying the viability of my preference, which I have never done to yours.

 

[Incenjucar]

Imagine how audiences would respond to an action move where every fight was concluded in 9-12 seconds.