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.

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!

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.


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.
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Sometimes a person is going about their time, thinking everyone is fine, and suddenly they are being confronted with a series of things they didn't give a second thought to. But they will catch onto the fact that your thought process is "I have to be strong, and not let him bully me" which will make them defensive and less willing to adjust or change. Approaching with the mindset of "I need to find what works best for everyone, while not impacting THIS player's enjoyment too much" is more likely to get them to work with you, instead of against you.
I feel like you're not reading my posts, or at least injecting your own thoughts/prejudices/biases which is warping what I've said for you. "I have to be strong, and not let him bully me"? Wut?

And as I've already repeated once, empathy is a good thing!

The rest of your post was pretty good though.
 

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Chaosmancer

Legend
I feel like you're not reading my posts, or at least injecting your own thoughts/prejudices/biases which is warping what I've said for you. "I have to be strong, and not let him bully me"? Wut?

And as I've already repeated once, empathy is a good thing!

The rest of your post was pretty good though.

Maybe you have them blocked? But this is the post which started this tangent.

"I was waxing philosophical and not thinking only of feats. 5e abandoned my playstyle and WOTC abandoned me long before that.

I think a lot of DMs are sadly weak. They don't want to fool with something but they are intimidated by some subset of the players. Now there are other reasons too but that is one big one. So starting with the simplest as core and then having all subsystems as optional add ons is desirable. They will likely all chose some of the optional add ons but they can always fall back and say anything that is optional is not allowed by them.

I don't have that problem. I'm too old and too curmudgeonly to tolerate bully players.
"

To which there was a response that said "For what it's worth, I see a lot of this (and maybe it's just me, but it seems more prevalent in the 5E era, though that may be due to the increase of overall players)"

I responded to that second post, which is when people, including you, started responding to me. Now, you have not ever used the "strong/weak" language yourself. But that was the origin of the conversation. That was what I was responding to initially. So I am making sure, so that people don't misinterpret, that I am keeping the origin of the conversation in mind.
 

Yeah they might nit even be true.

Some are. I've avoided to worst of them. One toxic player minor scale compared to the worst and 3 chaos monkey types.

Social aspects more important than edition or playstyle imho.

There’s also plenty of horror stories about bad DMs online too.
I just don’t think one can say that 5E is any better or worse than previous editions, let alone make comments about how 5E DMs are sadly weak.

There has always been bad players and bad DMs, regardless of what rules are being used.
Maybe I’m just lucky, but I’ve had some great experiences with first time DMs in 5E.
 

Zardnaar

Legend
There’s also plenty of horror stories about bad DMs online too.
I just don’t think one can say that 5E is any better or worse than previous editions, let alone make comments about how 5E DMs are sadly weak.

There has always been bad players and bad DMs, regardless of what rules are being used.
Maybe I’m just lucky, but I’ve had some great experiences with first time DMs in 5E.

Yeah it's not an edition problem.
 


Maybe you have them blocked? But this is the post which started this tangent.

"I was waxing philosophical and not thinking only of feats. 5e abandoned my playstyle and WOTC abandoned me long before that.

I think a lot of DMs are sadly weak. They don't want to fool with something but they are intimidated by some subset of the players. Now there are other reasons too but that is one big one. So starting with the simplest as core and then having all subsystems as optional add ons is desirable. They will likely all chose some of the optional add ons but they can always fall back and say anything that is optional is not allowed by them.

I don't have that problem. I'm too old and too curmudgeonly to tolerate bully players.
"

To which there was a response that said "For what it's worth, I see a lot of this (and maybe it's just me, but it seems more prevalent in the 5E era, though that may be due to the increase of overall players)"

I responded to that second post, which is when people, including you, started responding to me. Now, you have not ever used the "strong/weak" language yourself. But that was the origin of the conversation. That was what I was responding to initially. So I am making sure, so that people don't misinterpret, that I am keeping the origin of the conversation in mind.
No, I don't have anyone blocked. Thanks for explaining!
 

My experience is you encounter more horrible people in the workplace than playing DM though.
I find there are not many truly horrible people, anywhere. Way more really good people than horrible, although I find most people are somewhere in between.

There are some socially maladjusted people (who I find are far more prevalent 'when playing DM' than in the workplace... although I guess that depends on where you work!), who can come across as horrible, and will occasionally prove to not be so if you give them a chance.
 

I find there are not many truly horrible people, anywhere. Way more really good people than horrible, although I find most people are somewhere in between.
I tend to agree but horrible-ness is cultural and where you find one horrible person, you often find others near them.

Like, I've worked at a few places, two for a really long time, and in neither of those two places were "horrible" people at all common. In fact, they were the wild exception. People can be weird, or difficult, or angry, but there's usually a reason that's not just being a twonk. Hell some people others thought were pretty bad I just had no issue dealing with (I think being raised in a family full of well-educated and argumentative but good-natured pedants prepared me well for the legal sphere!).

However, I also worked at a place before that, as an intern, for most of a year (they had a lot for me to do), where I would say at least 30% of the male employees roughly fit into the "horrible person" mould. Like, creeps, freaks, loads of sexual harassment guys (indeed a culture of sexual harassment), loads of drunks, lazy people who blamed others for not doing their work, etc. Basically imagine the worst possible intersection of Mad Men and the UK version of The Office, at the height of the dot com bubble. There were still some genuinely nice men there, and none of the women were bad at all, but bloody hell some of the other men. Quite apart from their obsession with looking at porn at work (in a very mixed workplace, which was open-plan, note!), they'd often get drunk at lunchtime and just not come back or come back like 4 hours late, and they could barely handle a conversation with a woman without engaging in sexual harassment of a kind you'd get fired for today. The capstone moment was walking into the server room to find the hardware guy literally sitting in there in his y-fronts (tighty-whities I think you'd say in the US), all the lights off, with several monitors, at least two of which had what appeared to have porn on, and him acting like being in his underwear was normal. It was like a scene from some kind of edgy sitcom! I told my boss and he was just like "Oh well, he's just like that, nothing we can do! He's really good at his job!".

You see the same thing with TT RPGs - if one person in a group is a creep, probably most/all of that group are creeps.
 
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I tend to agree but horrible-ness is cultural and where you find one horrible person, you often find others near them.

Like, I've worked at a few places, two for a really long time, and in neither of those two places were "horrible" people at all common. In fact, they were the wild exception. People can be weird, or difficult, or angry, but there's usually a reason that's not just being a twonk. Hell some people others thought were pretty bad I just had no issue dealing with (I think being raised in a family full of well-educated and argumentative but good-natured pedants prepared me well for the legal sphere!).

However, I also worked at a place before that, as an intern, for most of a year (they had a lot for me to do), where I would say at least 30% of the male employees roughly fit into the "horrible person" mould. Like, creeps, freaks, loads of sexual harassment guys (indeed a culture of sexual harassment), loads of drunks, lazy people who blamed others for not doing their work, etc. Basically imagine the worst possible intersection of Mad Men and the UK version of The Office, at the height of the dot com bubble. There were still some genuinely nice men there, and none of the women were bad at all, but bloody hell some of the other men. Quite apart from their obsession with looking at porn at work (in a very mixed workplace, which was open-plan, note!), they'd often get drunk at lunchtime and just not come back or come back like 4 hours late, and they could barely handle a conversation with a woman without engaging in sexual harassment of a kind you'd get fired for today. The capstone moment was walking into the server room to find the hardware guy literally sitting in there in his y-fronts (tighty-whities I think you'd say in the US), all the lights off, with several monitors, at least two of which had what appeared to have porn on, and him acting like being in his underwear was normal. It was like a scene from some kind of edgy sitcom! I told my boss and he was just like "Oh well, he's just like that, nothing we can do! He's really good at his job!".

You see the same thing with TT RPGs - if one person in a group is a creep, probably most/all of that group are creeps.
Wowza! Some basic human social clumping behaviours at work here right? Like attracts like. Folks tend to socialise with those whose world views and attitudes are similar to theirs, regardless of whether it's a work, social, etc. environment.
 

ad_hoc

(she/her)
Wowza! Some basic human social clumping behaviours at work here right? Like attracts like. Folks tend to socialise with those whose world views and attitudes are similar to theirs, regardless of whether it's a work, social, etc. environment.

There is a saying that if you let a bad person stay at a bar then the bar becomes filled with bad people.

The same will be true of D&D tables with selfish/disruptive players.
 

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