Dungeons & Dragons Celebrates Two Anniversaries With Its 2024 Core Rulebooks

New core rulebooks are coming to Dungeons & Dragons, but they are intended as a celebration of the game’s popular 5th edition ruleset instead of a replacement. Two years ago, Wizards of the Coast announced “One D&D,” a new plan to rework Dungeons & Dragons with centered around a heavily reworked ruleset for the game and a new Virtual Tabletop (VTT) system that would synergize with D&D Beyond to streamline digital gameplay. After two years of playtesting and a gradual scaling back of many of the more controversial proposed rule changes, the work of One D&D (although that branding was abandoned last year) is now bearing fruit with the release of new Core Rulebooks, with the Player’s Handbook due to be released in September.

Edition changes have a controversial history within Dungeons & Dragons, with “edition wars” causing fractures in the fanbase as players decide whether to adopt new rules or keep their now defunct rulebooks. At least in part because of this history, Wizards of the Coast has stressed for sometime that the new Player’s Handbook isn’t the start of a new edition to the game, but rather a revised and reworked book, with the core rules remaining intact but incorporating a decade’s worth of lessons and feedback.

“Several years ago, we felt that the best way to celebrate 50 years of D&D was to return to the core books themselves, really the foundation of the entire game, and lovingly go through every piece of these books and incorporate all the lessons we’ve learned over the past decade and really make the best versions of these books that we could make,” Jeremy Crawford, game director for Dungeons & Dragons said during a recent press conference. “This is also the 10th anniversary of 5th Edition itself. So we have this amazing confluence of these two anniversaries.” 

The new Player’s Handbook follows a two-year playtest period, in which fans were given chunks of rules to try at their table and provide feedback. The design team believes that the playtest period proceeding the 2014 release of D&D was a key reason for the ruleset’s success, and subsequent playtest feedback helped provide valuable information for the team to use when planning these revisions. “One of the keys to 5th Edition’s success is that it was built in communication with our fans,” noted Chris Perkins, story director for Dungeons & Dragons. “Feedback has really helped shape the game over the last 10 years and actually even before that.”

Although longtime D&D fans might not find many surprises within the Player’s Handbook, a major change to the book is in its format and style. The first chapter, for instance, provides an example of gameplay that condenses all the basic rules of the game into a single example, with highlights used to both demonstrate and elaborate on key components to the rules. Likewise, the Player’s Handbook also contains an extensive rules glossary, providing a quick and easy reference guide to D&D players to turn to when they forget a rule or need some quick clarification. Also, most of the artwork for the Core Rulebooks are brand new, with updated monster designs and gorgeous new art by some of the game’s top artists.

Wizards previously revealed that character creation would change in the new Player’s Handbook, with a character’s background holding equal weight to a character’s species (renamed from race) when determining what mechanical abilities that character has. While the original 5th edition ruleset assigned certain ability score increases to certain races, those ability score increases are now determined by background, along with choices for certain feats. Backgrounds previously provided only a handful of minor benefits, but they are now an integral part of character creation and also notably decouple Dungeons & Dragons from an outdated bioessentialist way of looking at a multi-species world. 

The Player’s Handbook will also include 48 subclasses (4 for each core class), the most to appear in any single D&D rulebook. All of the 2014 Player’s Handbook subclasses (save for some Cleric domains and Wizard schools) return, but 16 subclasses have been “revamped to the point of being new” as part of an attempt to rebalance certain classes to make them more impactful. 15 of the 48 subclasses are brand new to the Player’s Handbook, many of which were pulled from other expansion-style books from 5th Edition and then reworked.

In addition to the new character rules, other parts of the game have been substantially upgraded. The new rulebooks contain a weapon mastery system for martial-themed classes that add more variety and choices during battle. Included in the Dungeon Master’s Guide are a brand new crafting system and a “bastions” system that allows Level 5 players to create their own strongholds and help build out their own corner of the world. The new Player’s Handbook meanwhile includes over 400 spells, 30 of which are brand new, 27 of which are redesigned, and 162 of which are “reworked.” The Player’s Handbook also includes 75 feats, which have greater importance in character-building than before.  

Some of the more interesting things to emerge from Wizards’ recent press release on the new Core Rulebooks was the announcement that a new Starter Set is in the works (many fans had assumed as much, given that current Starter Sets would be somewhat outdated with the release of the new Core Rulebooks) and a small pre-order bonus detail – namely that players who pre-order the Player’s Handbook would receive a gold dragon miniature for the upcoming VTT service. The gold dragon bonus is the first real mention of the VTT by Wizards in several months and seemingly hints that more news about the service could be coming soon. 

Pre-orders for the new Core Rulebooks are available now on D&D Beyond and here on Amazon. The new Player’s Handbook will be released on September 17th, the Dungeon Master’s Guide will be released on November 11th, and the Monster Manual goes on sale on February 18th, 2025.