After three years of prognosticating, hand wringing and trash talking, the next version of the Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook is here.
The ruleset formerly known as #OneD&D has arrived as 2024 Player’s Handbook and although it’s set for a general release on September 17th, the displacer beast is out of the bag. Copies have turned up in the hands of influencers, actual play stars and 3,000 lucky attendees of Gen Con 2024. I ended up taking a copy home with me from Indianapolis as well. This review contains my impressions of reading it over the past few days.
I have not played it yet and have only seen it be played as part of the big D&D live show that also acted as a coming out party for D&D’s VTT program 'Sigil'. I strive to get the games I review to the table at least once but time is of the essence here. I wanted to get these impressions down in writing sooner rather than later as more and more people rush to get their first impressions out weeks before the actual release of the book. Is this new version of D&D worth the upgrade? Let’s
Make no mistake, this is a new edition. There are changes large and small to the game even as it sticks to the general form and function of Fifth Edition. Veterans of the Edition Wars will understand it when I say the shift is closer to the one between Third Edition and 3.5 or Fourth Edition and the Essentials books than the big shift between Fourth and Fifth Edition. Much of the underlying structure is the same. But small changes are everywhere and can sometimes have larger implications than it first seems.
The thing I love most about the 2024 Handbook is the organizational clarity. The 2014 Handbook often felt like a stream of consciousness rules compilation trying to get everything out before the reader got distracted or fell asleep. It wasn’t helped by an index that often bounced information seekers around to two or three entries before giving up the proper page number. It’s a nightmare to look up rules in that book and one that this edition wakes up from. The book starts with how to play the game, how to run combat and then leads into how to make characters. It then ends with an index and a glossary that defines terms right there rather than bouncing the reader back inside the text.
Rules layout is more art than science but the choices made here worked for me. Having the most important reference points at the front and the back of the books is immensely helpful in keeping downtime to a minimum. This is a book aimed at new players rather than trying to lure back the faithful and it shows in this restructuring of the text. This shows the fundamental shift between the two books. The first one was written to appeal to existing customers. This one is aimed at the huge audience coming into the game over the past few years.
There are a few places where I wanted more attention to detail. The sidebar discussing the new changes is heartbreakingly brief and unhelpful. It took me far too long to figure out just how often characters get new feats. The spell lists for each class have been expanded with more details but not with page numbers for each spell. I know that talking about layout choices and page number references is probably not the sexy hot take most readers are looking for at the top of the review but it’s important to establish how I feel about this book. Overall, I think the changes are positive but it is not a flawless book.
Each of the 12 classes gets a luxurious spread of a few pages complete with full page art kicking off each section. Each of the four subclasses also gets a half page art piece along with a focus on trying to give an elevator pitch on why playing that character is fun or cool. The art is colorful, vibrant and inclusive, which will no doubt fuel some angry screeds from certain places on the Internet upset that D&D has moved on from hardscrabble black and white scoundrels to high fantasy heroes.
I think the Class section is the best part of the book. The Class section starts off with a short chart listing the complexities of each one which I found very useful when 13th Age did it, too. These sorts of discussions during session zero cut down on players being dissatisfied with their characters if they know going in just how involved they'll be in using game mechanics. Between the complexity chart, the illustrations and the high level summaries it seems easier than ever to sit down with a player, let them flip through this chapter, point at a picture or subclass name and set to work building a character. I would have liked to see further discussion of this in each Class section as playing a Fighter Champion is less complex than playing a Fighter Battle Master.
All the classes have had something changed about them with each of the four available subclasses being a mixture of the ones in the 2014 Handbook, ones from other books like Xanathar’s Guide To Everything or Tasha’s Cauldron Of Everything, and a sprinkle of new ones across the Barbarian, Bard and Druid. Classes have generally changed to allow them to get to the cool stuff faster or get additional stuff at higher levels. They’ve also gone through a terminology purge to remove words like ‘totem’ and ‘ki’ to remove lingering real world exoticism.
The College of Dance gives Bards an option that feels more Rogue like. It makes them extremely mobile strikers with a touch of support actions that help everyone get out on the floor and kill the dinosaur. Path of the World Tree allows Barbarians some battlefield control while also being able to blip round the battlefield to apply their rage directly to the face of their most deserving opponent. Druids get an aquatic attack aura with Circle of the Sea that feels like the designers watched a lot of Aquaman recently. There are also enough psionic subclasses that make the initial jump to make me wonder if those fans still clamoring for a Dark Sun book in this era might yet see their wish granted.
A class by class comparison of everything is a bit beyond the scope of this review but I at least wanted to touch upon the two classes that the designers have been most excited to change. The Monk now has abilities that key off of Focus Points as well as rolling their Martial Arts die. Anything that doesn’t have tangible mechanical effects, such as the high level ability to become immortal, is out. The two classes in the 2014 Handbook are included with different levels of change. Open Hand remains the simple monk that wants to punch things but a few of its abilities have been beefed up. The element Monk has been replaced as a spellcaster that punches things into something more akin to a bender from the Avatar animated series. Rather than complicate things by giving the character a tight spell list most of their abilities allow the player to add a keyword or damage type to their attack and be done. The hurt or heal monk and the ninja smoke bomb antics of the Shadow Monk round out these choices. These all feel like solid archetypes for anyone coming into the game wanting to play a martial arts fighter.
On the Ranger side, they’ve always been problem children in this edition because their niche rubs against so many other classes. They’re a little bit Fighter, a little bit Rogue, a little bit Druid, a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll. The 2014 Handbook tried to set them up as masters over specific domains and creature types but all it did was make them very cool when those things showed up and very generic when they didn’t. This ranger abandons that expertise for focusing on hunter’s mark which gives them an extra Force die of damage against the target. If the target dies, the mark can be shifted to another one for free. I’m not sure why they kept this a spell rather than a class feature, though I assume it’s out of a sense of backwards compatibility and how it interacts with some monsters in the upcoming 2024 Monster Manual. This puts the new Ranger in the role of a character that hits one opponent hard, similar to the role of the Rogue, but can be built for ranged combat to be more of a back row sniper rather than a backstabber. The Fey Wanderer leans into the spellcasting aspects of the class while the Gloom Stalker brings more of a stealthy Rogue edge to it. The new Beast Master gives the Ranger a pet that can help gang up on a marked creature while the Hunter continues the original intent of the Ranger as monster expert but makes their abilities more situational. They can choose their bonuses during short and long rests to decide if they are good against boss characters or better at crowd control depending on what they think they will be up against.
Situational bonuses also come to martial characters through the weapon mastery system. Upon first read I thought these were a little redundant because they felt like the weapon qualities the 2014 Handbook already had. But I realize now they are Feats that can be used in specific combat contexts. Characters can Cleave if they have mastery in weapons like the great axe or halberd or still do damage on a miss if they use a greatsword and Graze. These are small bonuses that tick off a couple of hit points or grant advantage on a followup attack, but I’m a fan of anything that speeds up combat and gives players options in battle beyond attempting to hit someone over and over.
This edition is where the designers fully embrace Feats even if they do so a bit awkwardly. All characters now get them at 4th, 8th, 12th and 16th level with a few Classes getting more specific ones like Fighting Styles on a more regular basis. Characters also get one as part of their Background, which offers a specific Feat rather than the vaguely worded Background feature from the 2014 Handbook that was some variation on “you were this thing once, so you know other people who are this thing and can ask them for help.”
While I like having a solid mechanical definition of Backgrounds and Feats, I also feel like there were some slip ups in the execution. The first is that they are called Feats everywhere in the book, including an entire chapter named “Feats” except for the breakdown of what each level gets you in the Class writeups. There, the 4th, 8th, 12th and 16th level benefits are called Ability Score Improvements and it is awkwardly explained in the text that players can choose an ability score improvement or a Feat at that level. The first Feat listed in the chart that kicks off the Feat chapter is the Ability Score Improvement Feat. Why not just have characters choose Feats rather than break out the ability score improvement as its own thing? With a short message explaining that if none of the Feats seem like a good fit, just take the ability score one? This is probably the thing that vexed me the most during the reading because I was confused for a while about how Feats worked in this edition. I can only assume new players could also fall into this trap.
The other aspect of Origin Feats is that they are one to a Background. Every Merchant is Lucky, every Sailor is a Tavern Brawler. There are other choices to be made here, such as which attributes to apply bonuses to, so why not give players a choice between two Feats? I get that they wanted to streamline this process a little but I think two available Origin Feats doubles the available backgrounds in the book. This encourages players to think about why their character makes that choice. Maybe their sailor spends their time whittling leviathan bone as a Crafter instead of getting into tavern brawls.
Species are now a gathering of unique traits with bonuses and Origin feats solely part of Backgrounds. This is the one of the heaviest changes to the game, bucking 50 years of tradition of Oops All Hearty Dwarves and Strong Orcs. I like that shift better than the floating trait bonuses in later species descriptions which made species choice feel a little muted. The art for these pages depicts the various peoples at home without wreaths of power or gritted faces locked in combat. The book focuses a lot on the combat and epic feel but players need to see that D&D also has room for silly little stories about cooking dinner and hanging out with family.
There was some discussion in early meetings that players would be able to create their own backgrounds and species origins. While it seems like you can pull the existing ones apart and build new ones modeled after them easily, this continues a troubling trend where Wizards promises something will be in a book and then it disappears between press briefing and the printing. I hope that deeper guidelines for this appear in 2024 Dungeon Masters Guide to allow Dungeon Masters not just homebrew but bring over their favorite species from earlier books relatively painlessly.
If it seems like I’m nitpicking, it’s because I am. 2024 Players Handbook has really pushed itself as a revised and expanded version of the Fifth Edition rules rather than a new edition. For the most part it is done well, and I would probably pick up a copy even if I didn’t get one as a member of the press. But small rules changes stack up to big ones even before we get into big things like Monks and Rangers. It also makes the misses stand out more because these will inevitably be questions the target audience will be asking in places like EN World.
If you are happy with your Fifth Edition game and don’t care about revisions and rebalancing because CR is mostly vibes anyway, you probably don’t need this book. If you’re planning on cobbling together a blended set of rules based on what you’ve seen in the press, you probably don’t need this book. If you plan on playing at game stores or conventions, you probably do need this book. If you want to run D&D for people that have never played, you probably need this book. If you are an unhappy Ranger or Monk player, you probably need this book.
I hope it does amazing from a sales standpoint simply to keep Wizards of the Coast from deciding that they should go completely digital sooner rather than later. I appreciate the fact that D&D has never been more friendly to new players. I hope this 2024 Player’s Handbook cements a transition from a book built as a placeholder to one that’s an open door. Come on in, new players. We have pizza, dice and memes.
Bottom Line: 2024 Players Handbook walks the high wire act to a new edition with impressive organization and editing changes even as it wobbles in a few places before it completes the journey.
