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biggest hazards is that giving your PCs more choices to consider means longer turns and sloggier combats.

Natural Language as a design goal is dead in 2024.

Given enough time, any discussion about d&d 2024 will inevitably become about the stealth rules. Can't we just wait for the sage advice/errata to drop? There's no point in arguing which interpretation of the rules is correct until then.

Yep! Originally Shove and Grapple were just two examples of a limitless number of Contests the GM could call for. Now Shove and Grapple are codified actions and Contests are gone.

Other system stuff being redesigned/removed while I'm at it: The new edition removed the rules for contested rolls and improvising contests. Terrible decision.

You could always do this.

Exactly. Group checks as written in 2014 were one of the better designed features of the edition. Not only are group checks now relegated to a random page in the new DMG, but they're redesigned to strip away their entire purpose.

I see this new rule zero definition as part of the general trend of dnd2024 taking power away from GMs and putting more power in "The Rulebook". Rather than indicating that the rules are the GM's to change as they see it, the rules are a far more the expected baseline and changing them is...

1) I like 5e and I don't think the changes 2024 makes make it a better game. 2) I'd rather play pathfinder most of the time

(Nearly) every OSR system is written with the implicit assumption that you have already read B/X.

Hi Mike, thanks for responding! I am looking forward to your full analysis on this. My gut feeling is that it is generally going to be an improvement over 2014 but I'm worried about the new math undervaluing large groups of low CR monsters. While The Multiplier certainly was overkill, I am...

I've always and exclusively seen the numbers in the 2014 DMG as lower thresholds - mainly since using the XP multiplier meant that you would almost always end up at some random number between the difficulty levels.

No, the difficulty is the same. Hard is Hard, its the same band of XP values. A single CR 8 creature is a Hard encounter in both methods. The differences only show up when you build encounters which trigger the XP Multiplier - that is, swarms of weak creatures or small groups of medium power...

Agree, same takeaway for me. The biggest thing to keep in mind is that higher level parties can handle harder average encounter difficulties. Which, like.... yeah. Anyone who's run a lot of 5e has realized that.

Ultimately the encounter building rules are intended to be loose guidelines - that's how they're treated by official adventure writers for wotc. Wotc obviously doesn't want to market their DMG by saying "yeah the encounter rules don't work, build your encounters based on vibes" since people...

I fully intend to stick with my 2014 books. That's my long-term solution.

Very possible. The removal of the group multiplier is, in my opinion, a far more impactful change than adjusting the upper level difficulty thresholds.

So I've analyzed the DMG encounter building math, which I've included below. TLDR - Deadly difficulty is gone, Easy/Medium/Hard remain largely the same until level 8+, after which they get harder. The big changes to the encounter math process are as follows: The XP number of each difficulty...