Dungeons & Dragons 2024 Player’s Handbook Review: Improved But Safe 5th Edition

The new rules revisions for Dungeons & Dragons contains numerous small improvements to the popular tabletop roleplaying game that should make the playing experience better, but the game is still 5th Edition for better or worse. With a reworked character building system, touched up spells and a handful of new subsystems, the new Player’s Handbook contains plenty of material that veteran players will pour over and compare to the previous set of rules. Almost all of the changes are improvements to existing rules or fixes of frustration points instead of truly new material, which makes sense given the framing of this new book as a “rules revision,” but also reduces the excitement level for the new books a fair amount. 

A decade ago, Wizards of the Coast published the core rulebooks for its 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons, which would go on to be the most popular version of the game in its 50-year history. Fifth Edition was probably the most accessible version of Dungeons & Dragons in the game’s history, sloughing off many of the game’s minutia with a “Rulings, not rules” attitude that put the onus on the Dungeon Master to decide how the game should work at the table. Parts of the 5th Edition ruleset were also woefully undercooked, although subsequent “expansions” in the form of Xanathar’s Guide to Everything and Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything cleaned up or at least patched some of those issues. However, a decade into Fifth Edition, the game felt a little long in the tooth and stale, especially with a deliberately slow release schedule that often meant only a handful of new “rules” (such as new subclasses, spells, or character-building options) per year. 

When Wizards of the Coast set out to make new core rulebooks for Dungeons & Dragons to celebrate the game’s 50th anniversary, it faced something of a conundrum. Fifth Edition had attracted a massive playerbase, most of whom understood the basic rules and concepts of the game due to years of exposure. The ruleset also benefitted from a massive ecosystem of creators and third-party supplements (although Wizards of the Coast executives rather infamously tried to curb the latter in a disastrous move that cost the company most if not all of its goodwill) that helped keep D&D at the forefront of the market and took oxygen away from any would-be competitor in the tabletop RPG space. 

Past edition changes had fractured the D&D player base substantially, something that could threaten the new “moment” that Dungeons & Dragons found itself in. So, instead of Wizards of the Coast risking all that momentum by introducing a new edition of the game, the D&D design team opted for a much more conservative “rules revision” that smoothed over the rough points of the current version of the game but offers little innovation or bold new design. 

To be clear, the 2024 Player’s Handbook is an improvement from its 2014 predecessor in almost every single way. The book is more accessible, has better art, a better layout, and has clearer rules. This time, the designers of the book understand that the Player’s Handbook is a gateway to the millions of players that will likely look at the game at some point in the next decade and lays out the chapters with a funnel approach that first explains what the game is and how the game works in much clearer terms that before. 

Many of the changes seen in the 2024 Player’s Handbook were either already implemented via different expansions or exist in the same design space as third-party material. For instance, the crafting system found in the book is a refined version of the one found in the Xanathar’s Guide to Everything. The Weapon Mastery system (a new subsystem of the game) is similar to the Weapon Traits system found in Pathfinder or the weapon descriptions found in D&D’s 3.5 edition. The much touted focus on backgrounds as a core part of character design was already explored somewhat in third-party material for 5E such as Ancestry & Culture: An Alternative to Race in 5e. Even some of the improvements to class abilities are basically improved bits from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything but benefitting from a few extra years of playtesting. Given that high fantasy games have dominated the TTRPG space and D&D has encouraged homebrewing and refinement of their rules for years, it makes sense that there are lots of comparisons to the changes made in this book, but the game’s biggest changes tend to err on the safe end.  

On the plus side, I do appreciate that the designers have cleaned up some of the frustrations from 5th edition, with grappling rules improved and some conditions revised to make more sense. A lot of the spells have gotten quality-of-life improvements, which should open up builds more because players won’t use the same handful of spells over and over. You can also see how the game designers “future-proofed” the game by standardizing class progressions and merging together some rules subsystems together so that they can better build on the rules system in the future. 

Ultimately, the 2024 Player’s Handbook is a clear upgrade for Dungeons & Dragons. The entry point for the game is better than it was 10 years ago and the rules are easier to understand and improved in countless small ways. These changes make the current version of Dungeons & Dragons a better game and the designers should be acknowledged for not needlessly damaging a ruleset that has ushered in a wave of popularity for the franchise. However, nothing about the new Player’s Handbook excites me as a veteran DM or makes me want to play Dungeons & Dragons more than I already did. I personally would have wanted to see something exciting or new rather than more of the same, but I also appreciate why Dungeons & Dragons played it safe. This is more than “just” a fresh coat of paint but less than a fresh start for Dungeons & Dragons, it’s more like a version 1.1 of Fifth Edition and pushes the game towards familiar ground as it begins a new era..