You’ve probably seen an enormous amount of coverage of the new Player’s Handbook all across your Usenets and your BBSes, but this is surely the first one coming to you live and uncensored from your very favorite website. I bet your pal who went to GenCon has already faxed you all the juicy deets, but I? I’ve got a hot new technomagic here called a blog. Gotta keep with the times, that’s what I always say!

…anyway. I’ll do more in-depth coverage as time goes on and I absorb more of the book directly into my brainmeats (which is a totally normal way to describe reading), but today I’m giving you my Ten Best Changes, Five Changes that Didn’t Go Far Enough, and Five Changes That I’m Not Sold On. Maybe a few little extras along the way.

Ten or So Best Changes

(I want to be very clear: there are a lot more than ten positive changes.)

1. The Rules Glossary. A unified place to look up rules terms is a great improvement. I’m the kind of person who did internalize a lot of the 2014 PH and where to find things, so right now it’s hard to find specific rules. For people who are normal, this organization is going to be much better. For most use cases this is going to cut down on rules-lookup time at the table, which is a great benefit. (Also, the generous font size is a huge help to rules lookup.)
2. True Strike in 2014 was just awful. The new version is very good, letting you make attack with your spellcasting stat rather than Str or Dex, and adding scaling damage at higher levels. Characters who can cast a cantrip as a Bonus Action or as a replacement for an attack (Valor Bards, Eldritch Knights) are going to get a lot out of this, since they might also have a weapon that adds to the damage or carries other effects. The optional Radiant damage replacement makes no sense, though, and there’s no attempt to explain that narrative in the spell text.
3. Exhaustion is a much more playable condition than in 2014. The drawbacks of even 1-2 levels of Exhaustion in 2014 rules make players very much want to drop whatever they’re doing and rest. The new rules are a -2 to D20 Tests per level of Exhaustion, and you still die at 6 levels of Exhaustion. Three or more levels of Exhaustion are a bad problem, of course, but levels 1 and 2 feel like something you can cope with for now and I like that.
4. The Influence action (though I’m not fully convinced it should be an action, rather than additional conversation potentially happening during combat rounds) emphasizes the creature’s attitude along the Willing/Hesitant/Unwilling spectrum and the Friendly/Indifferent/Hostile spectrum. Most of all I appreciate that Unwilling is a hard barrier to what you can cajole someone into doing, preserving the DM’s capacity to say no to fully unreasonable things. I also like that Wis (Animal Handling) is useful as an interaction skill for Beasts and Monstrosities.
5. This will be unpopular with a lot of folks, but I think limiting Paladins to one Smite per round is a good thing. Paladins have few enough spell slots and deal enough damage with their Smites that this is pushing back against a 1-minute adventuring day, and against going nova against enemies in the opening of a combat. Many Smites not using Concentration also means that other Paladin spells are a lot more viable. Huge net gain for variety in Paladin gameplay.
6. I like that Cure Wounds and Healing Word heal an additional die of damage (2d8+stat and 2d4+stat, respectively). I don’t like that they can heal Constructs and Undead just fine. I think it weakens the narrative of the Undead, and of the healing spells.
7. Heroes’ Feast doesn’t grant Immunity to Poison damage anymore. It still has Immunity to the Frightened and Poisoned conditions, which is… fine. But “no Immunity to whole damage types” is a great minimum bar. The green dragons of your campaign will be thrilled!
8. I am ecstatic that Paladins and Rangers can pick from the full slate of Fighting Styles when they get the Fighting Style feature at level 2, rather than being locked out by the designer’s arbitrary idea of what they “should” want. A two-weapon Paladin or a great-weapon Ranger should be readily supported. (Also, bonus item: Blind Fighting, Interception, Thrown Weapon, and Unarmed Fighting from TCOE all made it into this PH!)
9. I love that tieflings have officially-supported Abyssal and Chthonic (the Neutral Evil Lower Planes) varieties. Big tiefling fan here, and the art of a team of seven tieflings hanging out is super fun.
10. Every Warlock Patron from the 2014 PH is improved to one degree or another. Archfey and Great Old One have been reworked from scratch, while the Fiend now has an answer to accidental team killstealing. Archfey leans back to its 4e roots with an extreme focus on combat-range teleportation and extra effects tacked onto teleportation. Great Old One pushes the weird-psychic theme much more effectively, though I think it still misses the mark in a way by not putting together all of the pieces of its intended playstyle by level 3.
    1. Also, every Warlock Patron now grants its additional spells as automatic spells prepared. You don’t have to spend a rare and precious Spells Known slot on these spells that are supposed to be your Patron’s signature.
11. Bonus item: the Monk class as a whole is hugely improved. I particularly like that it has more to offer on a limited or exhausted Focus (previously Ki) budget, so that longer periods between Short Rests aren’t quite as rough on Monks.

Five Changes that Didn’t Go Far Enough

Please, I am begging you in advance, do not reply to any item in this article with “DMs can fix it by [some amount of rewrite].” I know. I really hope I don’t need to explain how every necessary change is a friction moment with both your players and the rules. Many player communities won’t take that well.

1. The rules try so hard to clarify the Hide action and how you keep or lose the Invisible condition. Turning it into the Invisible condition raises a lot of new questions, though, and the text assumes you’ll extract some kind of common-sense meaning from “an enemy finds you” for what breaks your Hiding state. It’s just that these rules are so involved that I, as a reader, don’t have any trust in common-sense interpretations. The direct reading of See Invisibility, where it helps you find Hidden creatures, is bizarre in light of the design history of the spell, but I’ve been taught to seek a ruling rather than trust that I can get the intended meaning from the text, and the design intent is unclear.
2. All of the Conjure spells get rid of managing a huge number of creatures, and get rid of players going shopping in the Monster Manual. That’s great! Okay, but they got replaced with a bunch of variations on Spirit Guardians: some kind of damaging aura, affecting one or more creatures who get close to you and often creating Difficult Terrain for enemies. The problem is that these, fundamentally, aren’t delivering the promise of a Conjure spell. I’m okay with these as effects, but spell effects that don’t do the thing they say is very 2014-Chill-Touch of them.
   1. Most of the ways you could get a creature to cast Planar Binding on just went away, outside of not-yet-updated-to-5e.24 rules spells from XGTE.
3. Magical Cunning at Warlock level 2 is a minor Pact Magic currency fixer: once per Long Rest you can spend 1 minute to regain half of your Pact Magic slots, rounded up. But that’s still one slot for the first ten levels of play. They’ve got to see that restoring all of your Pact Magic slots once a day with a minute (that is, definitely not in combat) of focus just wouldn’t break anything.
4. Alter Self is a spell with serious problems. Here, let me explain. Got all that? It now almost has a use case, because instead of giving you a +1 bonus to attack and damage with your d6 natural weapons, you can use your spellcasting stat rather than Strength or Dex. That’s a lot better! But the spell is still dismally bad, because it’s hard to imagine a situation where anyone able to cast level 2 spells needs to close to melee, risk losing Concentration, and attack once with a d6 + spellcasting stat weapon. The problems with the other two options are unchanged.
5. Unarmed Fighting is a great new Fighting Style and I’m thrilled to see it. Just a couple of problems left… you’re opting out of Weapon Mastery entirely, so it’s just objectively weaker than every weapon and closing yourself off from Fighter class features.
   1. It finally catches up in power when you spend a feat on Grappler (and I like that Grappler is worth the paper it’s printed on now, unlike in 2014). Getting the benefit of both a damaging strike and grappling is a huge help.

Five Changes that I’m Not Sold On

1. Thieves’ tools functions aren’t a Dexterity (thieves’ tools) check anymore. They’re a Dexterity (Sleight of Hand) check where having proficiency with thieves’ tools gives you Advantage. So, 100% of the time. If you have Advantage in 100% of situations, just lower the DC and remove the Advantage, so that gaining Advantage has some value.
2. Same thing applies to the combination of a Vex weapon and Studied Attacks (level 13 Fighter feature). After their first attack against a creature, the Fighter just passively has Advantage on attack rolls. They gain Advantage from hitting (from the Vex weapon) and from missing (from Studied Attacks). I think it takes so much interest out of the game, because there’s no longer any reason for other PCs to help you gain Advantage.
   1. Obviously I haven’t seen enough of the new Monster Manual stat blocks to know, but this creates a strong expectation that PCs of this level will just be untouchable in combat. In the 2014 rules, PCs are incredibly strong compared to “appropriate” CR opponents. These rules are a power increase for every PC, but especially Barbarians, Fighters, Monks, and Rogues, so what I expect is for PCs to feel like bullies demolishing monsters who never posed any form of threat. You know, exactly the opposite of what you want in heroic fantasy adventure.
   2. Which is, in turn, a problem because DMs deserve to have fun too, and a huge part of the fun of DMing is not “trying to win,” but “trying to make opponents and problems that pose enough of a threat that players engage with them seriously and creatively.” If the opponents can’t do that, the victories feel hollow, unearned.
3. The Keen Mind and Observant feats change the action economy of the Study and Search actions. I hate this, to the point that I plan to rewrite those feats. Why? Because players don’t want to spend their action to gain the information they need to act on, since the circumstance might change by the next time they can act. I want to give them information that costs something less than an action (often nothing at all), but now if I do that, I’m undermining those feats and pissing off players that did buy them.
   1. The deeper point, though, is that pushing Search and Study as actions and ways to gain information is teaching new DMs the wrong things for actual best practices. There’s absolutely no suggestion here of how good and useful the information needs to be to balance using your action (hint: needs to be as good as whatever else you can do at-will, like attack or cast a cantrip).
4. When you ask a Legend Lore about something famous that isn’t actually famous, you get a sad trombone sound, and the spell fails. This doesn’t go far enough: the spell should also include the DM kicking you square in the groin, as hard as they can.
   1. This is stupid and cutesy, and a DM that plays that out when you spend a level 5 spell slot to get a failure deserves to have their group walk out. This sounds like a writer who was throwing in jokes because they were bored and burnt-out with their work, and stopped caring.
5. According to the Rules Glossary, every creature controlled by the DM is a “monster,” while only the ones that have a name and a distinct personality are “NPCs.” This is semantics, but it’s an awful move for D&D, and it feeds the “combat is the default/only resolution” narrative that D&D has been trying to get away from for literal decades. This way of using language is not previously attested in D&D other than the fact that NPCs are a section of the Monster Manual. (Those NPCs don’t innately have names or personalities—they just happen to be Humanoids.) The way the rest of the gaming world uses these terms, everything a DM controls is an NPC, and some of those NPCs are monsters.

Two Regrettable Cuts

1. The decision to cut “half”-species—half-elves and half-orcs—can’t help but be massively controversial. The decision to cut them without even a word of mention that there might be options for how to present mixed characters on D&D Beyond at some point should probably be more controversial still. Every possibility here was going to cause problems for WotC, but I can say that my wife, who is mixed-race, is unhappy about this choice.
2. Dungeon Delver is completely gone from this feat chapter. That’s a feat that is bad for most campaigns, but an absolute MVP for others. When my ranger reached 8^th level and bought that feat in Tomb of Annihilation, the whole dungeon unfolded before us, because I was passively hitting all of the secret-door-detection DCs. Also, you know, ToA has a trap or two (I’m gunning for Understatement of the Month here). I wish the feat had been reimagined into some more consistently useful and balanced form.

One Change that Directly Ruins a PC I Play

1. I’ve been playing a githyanki Hexblade for ages now. He has 8 Strength, but up to this point it has mostly not mattered (other than failing Str saves and Athletics checks, which is tough but that 8 had to go somewhere, you know?), because Hex Warrior meant that I could just use Cha for my attack rolls. I even got a Greater Silver Sword, the pinnacle of githyanki-themed treasures. In this rule set, though, there’s one big problem. (Other than the absence of a Hexblade patron – let’s take it as read that my DM is fine with me continuing with the subclass as written.)
   1. The problem is that the function of the Heavy property changed. It used to be “must not be Small,” more or less. Now it’s “must have at least 13 Strength.” Which is a real problem with the 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8 stat array that we used.
   2. I wish they had emphasized interesting benefits to being Small, rather than changing the effects of Heavy to make sure Small creatures can use weapons that are much larger than they are. (Many weapons that don’t have the Heavy tag are a lot bigger than the 2-3 feet tall that this book describes halflings as being. It’s okay if this is your fantasy and what you love, but it really doesn’t work for me. Designers of previous editions learned, by having kids and/or watching Lord of the Rings, that our mental image for halflings is actually about 4 feet tall, and that’s still a plausible Small.)

One Deceptive Not-A-Change

1. Not everything is perfect on that clearer-rules-presentation front. In 2014, every creature gets a free Object Interaction on its turn, and the rule for this is in a sidebar that most people forget about. Secret action economy is, uh, not good. So in 2024, it’s easy to draw the conclusion that they’ve gotten rid of the free Object Interaction, because you look at the Utilize action in the Rules Glossary and it seems like it’s covering this whole concept.
   1. It’s totally not, though! You’ve got to go to Chapter 1, where the rule isn’t mentioned under Interacting with Objects, but is mentioned in Your Turn, in the Interacting with Things in-line header. So yes, you should still engage with the environment and objects in it as much as possible. DMs, look for reasons to be generous and only invoke the Utilize action when the action is critical to goal completion.
   2. I’m interested to see how the DMG teaches DMing best practices, all the way down to looking for reasons to say yes rather than looking for reasons to say no.

Conclusion

I expect I’ll be writing a lot more about this book, and about the DMG and MM when they come out. From what I see here, they’ve made improvements in a lot of small things, added an enormous amount of content in species (aasimar, goliath, orc… no genasi? C’mon!), subclasses, feats, and spells, and generally increased overall PC power while trying to bring some of the worst excesses of mid-to-high-level spellcasters into some kind of balance.

They’ve also done a lot of damage to the underlying engine of the game by strictly presenting things as actions, with little to no discussion of how DMs might step action cost down to Bonus Actions or Free Actions. The term “action” doing double duty as “the main thing you do on your turn” and “any quantum of engagement with the game rules” is part of the problem here.

There are a fair number of mixed-blessing items that I haven’t gone into above. On one hand, it’s great that Artisan’s Tools and Other Tools have clear uses and DCs for setting expectations. On the other, that creates pressure to look it up every time, and the sense of freedom in 2014 to pair any tool with any ability score as appropriate is pretty well dead on arrival. If you get into the nitty-gritty details, players (and some DMs) will treat that is law and push back against any variance.

This is a very well-established trend line. Many of us played 3.x and 4e, editions that tried to detail everything rigorously and eliminate the need for DM rulings in favor of rules. The 2024 rules fundamentally trust the DM’s judgment a little bit less than the 2014 rules, and I regret that direction. We’ll have to see what the DMG brings to the conversation.