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.

 

[pemerton]

This is one of those things that I'm not sure how to reply to, especially with someone who's experienced with many game systems. D&D has a pretty clear split between the player and the DM's duties. If you go and look at the first few pages of the PHB (I just pulled my 5E PHB out of storage) it talks about the duties of the players, the group, and contrasts them with the DM. It doesn't talk about shared narrative creation or players portraying characters other than the one they are about to write up.

That is really different from other games. Dungeon World (or PbtA games in general), Fate, Amber, Fabula Ultima ... they all discuss the roles of the players in terms of being able to shape stories. And there are many other games that do so as well.

D&D doesn't do this. In the rules. That's what I'm talking about when I say what it's designed to do.

But with that said: I give players authority to create things. I ran a game recently where the PCs stepped into a bar that one of the players described as being a place they went to all the time. I said, okay: set the scene and tell me about the place. And they had fun with that. I took some notes and added this place to the game world.

So you can definitely say I'm on the side of giving more authority to players. But I also admit that's not how D&D is designed. I was just looking through the new PHB last night and once again, the designers haven't taken the opportunity to explain to players all the things you're talking about in terms of creating material for the game. Compare that to a game like Fate, which goes into a lot of detail about that and has mechanics to back it up.

There's nothing wrong with playing D&D with giving players authorial control over parts of the game. That is literally how I do it. At the same time, there isn't design to back me up for this. I don't care about that, but if we're discussing the game as it is designed... it isn't made that way. Maybe 6E?

In 1986, when I first GMed a campaign using the original AD&D OA, one of the players built a kensai PC. That player used the rules in the book to invent their PC's martial arts style; wrote up a backstory about their mentor/master; etc. Nothing in the rules of AD&D got in the way of that.

Ten years later, when I built a PC for use in a 2nd ed AD&D game, I wrote up some details of my cavalier PC's noble family, knightly order, etc. Nothing in the rules of 2nd ed AD&D got in the way of that.

The Hermit background for 2014 D&D says that

The quite seclusion of your extended hermitage gave you access to a unique and powerful discovery. . . It might be a great truth about the cosmos, the deities, the powerful beings of the outer planes, or the forces of nature. It could be a site that no one else has ever seen. You might have uncovered a fact that has been long forgotten, or unearthed some relic of the past that could rewrite history. It might be information that would be damaging to the people who consigned you to exile . . .

Work with your DM to determine the details of your discovery and its impact on the campaign.​

This actively invites the player to contribute important content to the shared fiction of the campaign setting, its background, and the present situation in which the PC finds themself.

This is why I can't agree that D&D's design is in some fashion at odds with players playing this sort of role. The game can handle it perfectly well. The fact that is is not commonly done is a feature of play culture, but not of the game's design.

 

[Chaosmancer]

That's why, if I may paraphrase The Dark Tower, "There are other games than this." Once you move from 5E you can see a lot of different options for how to play a game. People should do that. The 5E PHB is not targeted at that audience. Maybe there will be some info in the new DMG.

I recently got a book from Pointy Hat, his Hexbound book for 5e. I'm not a big fan of the mechanics of it from what I saw after supporting the kickstarter, but the idea is cool. It is all about witches.

Witches do not appear in the official WoTC DnD rules. In fact, quite literally if you CTRL+F for the word "witch" in the 2014 Corebooks, the only reference is "Witch Bolt" spell and a single line in the Monster manual, under scarecrows that says they can be created by Hags or Witches... but witches don't exist anywhere.

So, if I wanted to include a witch in my games... is DnD 5e not including me in their target audience, since they don't include witches? Do I need them to include that, for me to decide to add witches? And... what makes the social contract at the table any less malleable than whether or not I add a witch to my game? Why would I need the books to explicitly tell me that I could make things really fun for my players if I take their suggestions and explore the stories they want to explore? Which, it does kind of tell you that in the DMG, when it goes into detail about the types of players and the things they find engaging. The point of that is to make DMs consider what they should do for player engagement. And that can include letting the player decide things about their backstory and origin.

 

[pemerton]

Of course. The thing that I think you, and other posters who like this playstyle, are forgetting is that if you've only read the 5E PHB you don't have the ideas that people who have played other games have experienced.

In 1986 I had read rulebooks for Classic Traveller (Books 1 to 3, 1977 edition) and for D&D (B/X, and the AD&D PHB, DMG, MM, MM2, UA and OA). Yet I worked out what I've described above. It's obvious that a player might want to contribute to the background/context of their PC: why would playing D&D be any different, in this respect, from other forms of imaginative play that I was familiar with as a child?

 

[Chaosmancer]

A DM can probably role-play more than one NPC at a time with the right amount of time and practice. Some voice actors in the cartoon industry are capable of doing it.

So the DM is capable of role-playing multiple characters in the same scene, but a player is not capable of the same? Why not?

As for players role-playing a NPC, if an NPC is role-played by a player, doesn't that make the NPC into another PC?

No, I don't think it does. Particularly if the Player did not come up with the NPC or their motivations.

 

[pemerton]

There's no reason you couldn't play D&D narratively, just like there's no reason you couldn't play in solo.

I don't know exactly what "narratively" means here.

But there are obvious problems with playing D&D solo: in most approaches to the game, play relies on the GM creating information that is (initially) secret from the players, which they learn by declaring appropriate actions for their PCs that will prompt/oblige the GM to reveal secret information.

Gygax's Appendix A on random dungeon generation has some suggestions for how to work around this problem in respect of secret doors, but doesn't offer any solution in respect of tricks or traps.

Additional systems and procedures of play - such as the structure of a Fighting Fantasy Gamebook - are needed to play D&D solo. Whereas nothing additional is needed to incorporate player-authored backstory/situation (as per my examples just upthread). So far from being "just like", the contrast here - as I've already posted - is pretty marked.

 

[pemerton]

What you should think about is, for a new player, where do you get this idea?

From their common sense familiarity with imaginative game play.

 

[Micah Sweet]

But we aren't speaking to playing D&D narratively... We are speaking to a single optional mechanic that gives the players some (but not complete) narrative control over a specific thing. Again D&D has always had small exceptions like this, where PC's can play things or manage things or take actions outside of their character.

EDIT: The only reason this is ruffling some feathers is because it explicitly states that DM's cannot have control over it.

It's also in the DMG, which even you have to admit is counter-intuitive.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So when the player's return the kidnapped princess to her Father's castle, and the two start arguing... who roleplays the other NPC?

It can't be the player, because player's aren't allowed to RP NPCs in your set-up, so do you need to bring in a temp DM?

I try to avoid having talk to myself, actually, but sometimes it has to happen. It doesn't if a PC is involved.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That is a really really poor argument.



And this is a worse one, since many Player's create NPCs that are in their background. Heck, I'm about to start a new character, likely doing character creation next week. Very very simple backstory, and I've only gone into sketch levels of detail.

I've come up with at least an entire tribe in the broad strokes, a parent, a mentor figure, a dead antagonist, at least two living antagonists, a potentially helpful NPC and am considering more. So, I've created a minimum of four NPCs, therefore I should control them?

I've already received this objection. Wanting each creator to voice their own creation isn't the only reason. Perhaps you should read below? Coordinate with your rhetorical teammate?

 

[Corinnguard]

So the DM is capable of role-playing multiple characters in the same scene, but a player is not capable of the same? Why not?

No, I don't think it does. Particularly if the Player did not come up with the NPC or their motivations.

I am sure a player could be just as capable of role-playing multiple characters, again with the right amount of time and practice. However, role-playing a single character is a lot easier than trying to role-play several characters, and this is true for both player (new and old) and the DM.

Also, the DM would have to do a lot to accommodate the extra characters in a given adventure. Most adventures in DM are built around a party of 4-8 players.

If a player wants to play a warlock and the warlock's patron, wouldn't the latter become a PC (and a high level one at that)?