Review copy courtesy of Wizards of the Coast.
Pros
Updated classes more in line with
Tasha’s.
If you’ve been wanting to get
into D&D, this makes it easier.
Weapon mastery properties are a
highlight, and something martial characters seem to be really
appreciate.
Could Go Either Way
Chances are you already have the
old Player’s Handbook, and Tasha’s Cauldron of
Everything. If this is you, the value of the book is reduced.
The new exhaustion rules are
different. My players looked at them, and preferred to use the old
ones. The new ones are easier to remember though.
Attribute bonuses are
moved to your species now.
Cons
Ranger is still...not great. It's alright, but it's not perfectly balanced among classes. Maybe I'll change my mind with more play time though.
There is still no SRD or updates
basic rules. I’m a bit late here, but this should’ve been
released on the same day, or better yet before the release of the
book.
There’s missing subclasses.
Wizard is particularly hit hard here as only 4 are in this book. The
original had 8, and total across all the books we had 13.
No PDF (there is D&D Beyond though)*
* Denotes nitpicking.
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The cove for the 2024 D&D Player's Handbook. Not bad, but I do wish the art was more like Rise of Tiamat.
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Introduction
Here
we are. A new Player’s Handbook 10
years after the previous. It’s hard to believe so much time has
passed. Ah,
the adventures we’ve had. Unlike the PHB 2 from 4th
edition, this is not an additional book for new classes and features.
Instead it’s more like revisiting what we had before. Some
things were changed, and some things were added, but in large strokes
it’s similar. Is
this one of those remixes people really like and makes the original
better than ever? Or is it sort of eh? Well, let’s jump into it.
New Monsters
It
does have monsters, but
these are the same ones we
saw in the original Player’s
Handbook.
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Art and introduction to classes page.
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The Contents
New backgrounds have been added, giving
more options to customize our characters. The old ones are also here.
Feats are here again, but unlike before they aren’t optional. Some
are locked behind certain levels, and some are now given as class
features. Ability score improvement is a feat, as is fighting style
now. Magic Initiate is gone now, which is kind of too bad. It was a
good flavour one for characters that flunked mage school. Though it
was also an easy way to dip into wizard for a casting of shield and
scaling cantrip.
The same classes
as the original book are here, but they’ve been changed. I’d say
in general they are better. And by better, I mean
stronger. Features are more powerful. Fighters get to use
their second wind ability many more times, for example. The
subclasses are...interesting. Instead of 3 subclasses from the
original Player’s Handbook, there’s 4 for the fighter.
Cool, they added Psi Fighter from Tasha’s. Though it still
excludes the other 6 found throughout the other books. The
wizard doesn’t call the subclasses
schools anymore. Or arcane
traditions. So instead of
“School of Evocation” we have “Evoker.” Big difference? Not
really. Enough to be annoying? Yeah. Worse,
there are only 4 subclasses for wizard now, reduced from 8
in the original Player’s Handbook.
And down from the 13 officially released ones. This will cause
issues. Do they plan to
release another book just with these additional
features? A Player’s Handbook 2 perhaps?
Would it have been that hard to bite the bullet and add them all
here? The balance of what we
have looks good in general.
The bare minimum that would make me happy would go like so. Every
subclass from the original Player’s Handbook
is included and updated. Every class that had less than 4 subclasses
gets some extras. At the end of the section, explicitly write how
to use the old subclasses. It’s not obvious as written, but D&D
Beyond does allow you to use them by following the description on
each class.
Then
there’s the Ranger...oh my poor Ranger, why don’t they like you?
To be fair, it reads like an improved version of the ranger from the
original rules. You can now switch between fighting groups well, or a
single enemy after a long rest. You
always have hunter’s mark. Hail
of thorns is no longer concentration. Swift quiver still is, meaning
you have to choose between it and hunter’s mark.
What I’m worried about is that it’s an improvement, but everyone
else has also greatly improved. Some
new spells or something else to help close the gap would be
appreciated. What
makes it worse is how things go on. Up until 5th
level, it’s probably fine. The 20th
level capstone is...not good (translates to +2 damage per hit
compared to an entire attack for fighter. Come
on, at least make hunter’s mark a d12 and not require concentration
or something).
The way it starts to interact with combat spells of around 3rd
level...also not good. You can up cast hail of thorns to try to close
things a bit, but still it’s
probably not enough to close the widening gap.
This probably should’ve come out in 2014, and we needed a bit more
in
2024.
I
was afraid it could be worse, but I wish it was better. That
said, you can make a perfectly fine ranger.
It
remains to be seen how this extra strength affects previously
published adventures, and this edition going forward. We will rely on
the new Monster Manual,
which has yet to be released but will release in early 2025. On
that note, we do get some creatures included like in the original
Player’s Handbook.
In fact, they seem to be largely the same creatures and largely
unchanged. There’s a new way to display the attributes with their
mods and saves which I’m not sure I love. I like seeing the mods
and saves, but we’ll see if I warm up to the colour coding.
As
for races...well, they are species now. You get your bonuses
from backgrounds now.
Otherwise, it’s very similar. I will say that they seem more
balanced to each other now, and humans are in line with the rest.
Backgrounds also come with a feat. It’s easy to see how you can
customize backgrounds or come up with your own if needed. Really, the
major change is renaming races to species, and moving the bonuses to
backgrounds. I don’t really mind this. It makes sense the farmer
will be stronger and hardier, while the scribe or sage are focused on
more mental attributes. I can see some people mad about this, and
wanting the old race/species based attribute bonuses. For those
people, I think it would’ve been easy to supply a chart that
reflects the bonuses from the previous version. Me
personally, I’m fine with it. It makes sense that a bunch of forest
survivalist humans would be different than elves from a city where
they’ve made magic items for centuries.
How
does this work in practice? At 3rd
level, you’d gain all of the features up to 3rd
level of your subclass. Going forward you map your subclass features
in the table to subclass features in the old book. Done. It’s not
that hard, but it should be explicitly stated. I’m not sure how
well balanced this would turn out, but at least we’d get all the
base class features.
Addressing
drinking potions in combat explicitly is a good move here. I
feel like some
classes got small increases by moving actions into bonus actions, and
other methods. As
a case study, let’s look at the fighter. The
extra second winds the fighter gets are powerful, and being able to
use them in
ways other than regaining health is powerful.
You
can use it to move without provoking opportunity attacks, or to add
it to an ability check.
Combine
that with weapon mastery, and tactical master (you can swap the
weapon mastery property to something else), and martial characters
specifically feel better in this version. How
does the Elritch Knight compare to the Battle Master? That’s...harder
to gauge, but
my gut feeling is that Eldritch Knight is underwhelming, but can be
fine with good spell choice.
The
way it gains spell slots gives it strong spikes.
Exhaustion
rules are
changed to be more streamlined. Basically, as the exhaustion grows
the characters lose speed and accumulate increasing penalties. Easier
to remember. I like that on paper. What has me worried here is that I
had a player express preference for the older rules. Either way, easy
to swap. Given this is a replacement, I wish the older rules would be
provided somewhere. Perhaps
in the basic rules in an optional rules appendix at the end?
One
shout out of a personal pet peeve of mine that’s still here. The
lifestyle rules still don’t add up exactly to me. 3 meals a day,
plus the corresponding inn stay doesn’t add up to the lifestyle
cost. At least for the lowers one I wish there was some kind of
formula.
The
real big improvement in this book, besides to martial classes, seems
to be the
rules layout themselves. They are explained well. They
give lots of examples. The
character creation rules are pretty well laid out. The glossary is
useful and I’m glad it is added. Wording
is often given to clearly say when something is meant to help you but
can be ignored versus something you must follow. I
showed it to someone who was a long time player but dragging their
feet, and it seems this version clicked. Hopefully
I’ll get to experience their first time DMing soon.
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Some of my favourite art from this book. The weapon art looks quite good. I'd love to see more like this in future books.
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The Art and Book Build Quality
The
art throughout the book is fine. It’s what we’d expect in this
edition…but I miss the art from the original. There was some breath
taking scenery shots that just made me deeply happy. The art on the
backgrounds is a standout for me in this book. It’s good. I like
it. Especially the farmer, sage, and soldier background pieces. But I
want more striking lighting like from my favourite images from the
original handbook. There is some reused pieces, like the one showing
the different shapes for spells. But a lot of this book is new art.
In fact, it’s more than I expected. I wish the cover was more
striking in that way with more pronounced light. Though it was far
from the best book, my favourite cover remains the Rise of Tiamat
cover. It just looks so awesome that it makes me happy.
My
copy of the book is flawless. The binding is good, the covers are
good, no stuck pages, all the pages are cut out. It’s good. This is
what I want to see. But as always, given some of my previous less
than good experience, if you can always look through the book and
look for those specific issues.
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An example of combat from the book. Such examples really help new players. This is part of what this book does well, though the art is OK for my tastes.
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Price
Typical prices you’re used to here. It's going for $56 CAD right now on Amazon for a new copy. As always, used can go cheaper.
What I felt was Missing
The basic rules and SRD have been
staples for this edition. I’ve used them to bring in many new
players. I’ve printed them off and had them when travelling in case
of emergencies. I really am thankful for them, and I believe they
were an incredible tool for getting people into the hobby. We still
lack this for the new Player’s Handbook. Really, we
should’ve had this a long time ago. I’m late
to reviewing this book, and it’s still not here. What’s in this
book, however, stands to make this an excellent basic rules system.
Free Stuff
Nothing. And
that’s a big missed opportunity. The basic rules are coming soon though under the Creative Commons license.
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One of the pages from the book. I do like this art. And enjoy the writing sample.
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Summary
Here we are. It’s been
10 years since 5th edition released, and we have some
updated rules. In general, it’s cleaned up, and beefed up. The
classes here are strong and more interesting, but we lack the new
monsters to really see how well balanced it is. I like what I see
here in general. What I’ve played so far has been fun. The way the
book is laid out makes a lot of sense, and I would say is a large
improvement. My main criticism is that we have lost subclasses from
previously released books, and even compared to the Player’s
Handbook from
2014, some classes like the
Wizard have fewer. Ideally
this would be the book to help get new players into the game and they
wouldn’t need to buy an entire library. I would have liked to see
all those previous options included and make this into a book that
could crack a lobster, though hopefully we’ll get a book in the
future with the missing parts so we’d only need 2 books to
have all the player options instead
of so many I lost count.
Oh, and the updated basic rules. It has simply taken way too long.
I’m glad it’s coming, it’ll be great when it does, but it
should’ve launched along with the book just like it did back in
2014.
