“Wow, this is pretty hefty,” was my first thought when I picked up the new Dungeons and Dragons 2024 Player’s Handbook (PHB). There’s only about a 70 page difference between the original D&D 5th Edition PHB and the new 2024 version of the PHB, but the new PHB feels more substantial than the former version. Maybe there’s some subconscious aspect in my brain about how “weird” this all feels. This new PHB is definitely going to make a heavy impact on the game moving forward, one way or another.

Wizards of the Coast has spent the past few years bumbling around with D&D and making moves that the player base finds distasteful. These rulebooks were seen by the community as one of those decisions - how many people have been actually looking forward to buying these books? I would wager that while there are probably some people excited for them, it’s not a common opinion. In fact, what do we even call these rulebooks? D&D Beyond calls them the “2024 Player’s Handbook/Dungeon Master’s Guide/Monster Manual”, but the Monster Manual doesn’t even release until 2025! Wizards of the Coast keeps telling us this isn’t a new edition, but yet we’re getting a complete new set of core rulebooks.

Why the insistence that this isn’t a new edition? People don’t like change. When D&D went from 3rd to 4th edition, a lot of people hated the new changes, and it gave opportunities for games like Pathfinder to rise up in its shadow. For newer gamers, this might be hard to believe, but for several years, Pathfinder was even outselling D&D! D&D 5th edition has put Wizards back on top of the RPG world with a significant dominance this time (mostly having nothing to do with Wizards though), and Wizards doesn’t want to lose that top spot again. Releasing a “6th edition” of D&D would undoubtedly cause people to stop buying their products.

Whatever Wizards wants to call it though, make no mistake - this is D&D 5.5. It has all (err most) of the background mechanics that you fell in love with in 5th edition, just with some new features glazed on top. In fact, that’s the ideal position for Wizards, where they can make changes that have been desired by the community, while also printing new adventures and sourcebooks that will still technically work with your old D&D 5e books.

Let’s talk price, as that was the second thing that hit me regarding the new PHB. Recently, I was just talking on the podcast about how I thought D&D Beyond was doing something right and giving you the digital + physical versions of the older D&D adventures for only $10 more than the MSRP for the physical book. Then, Wizards had to go and make a bundle for the new edition that’s $180, apparently a deal compared to buying each book for $240 total. That’s $80 per book! Given my observation about older books, that would put the retail at $70 for the new PHB. Yet, when I flipped over the book, the same $49.99 MSRP was staring at me.

Still with me? Good, because all of that was just the intro. Yep, this is going to be a long one, so buckle up, as when I was racking my brain on how to review this new PHB, only one thing came to mind. I sat down with the new PHB on one knee, the old PHB on the other knee, and went page by page to see what the differences were between the two books. What did I discover?

What have I gotten myself into…?

Oh man, it’s bad. Like really, really bad. No, not the new PHB - I’m talking about the original 5th edition Player’s Handbook. I was able to churn up my original review of the PHB and it’s amazing how much has changed in 10 years. A decade ago, I was still VERY new to reviewing RPG books. In fact, I think other than D&D, I had only probably read maybe 2-3 other RPG systems. So that original PHB walkthrough had a lot of Rose-colored glasses. Many of you reading this are also probably saying “Oh come on, it isn’t that bad,” but when was the last time you read your PHB cover to cover?

Have you ever? Chances are, you had someone else explain most of the rules to you and you just referenced the book whenever you needed to make a new character, look up a spell effect, clarify a rule, etc. If you want to know about how bad the original PHB is, just open up the book to the table of contents. You’ll notice that after an introduction, the book goes straight into learning how to make new characters. How to play the game isn’t even discussed until you get to Chapter 7! This is one of the biggest changes in the new 2024 PHB - they claim the rules have been “streamlined”, which I thought to be making the rules simpler, but what I think they meant is making the rules more readable.

(Note: I always enjoyed the “hidden” disclaimers on the credits pages of each new book. If you don’t know what I mean, go pull any D&D5e book off the shelf and look for the disclaimer at the bottom of the credits page. However, no quirky disclaimer in the 2024 PHB. Sadness.)

After a brief introduction, Chapter 1 starts off by introducing a new player to the basics behind D&D. What ability scores are, how you use dice to resolve things, checks & bonuses, etc. For someone that has never played D&D before, these are pretty crucial things to know before you start making a character. Why does having a strength of 16 vs 15 matter? Why should I have proficiency in this skill vs that skill? Laying out the fundamentals of these concepts early can help players make better decisions when designing their characters.

The first biggest change to the rules I came across was that of “Heroic Inspiration”. In 5e, Inspiration was given to characters under various circumstances by the GM, and you could spend it to have advantage on a roll. The new PHB refers to this type of benefit as Heroic Inspiration, and now it just allows you to reroll a die instead of giving you advantage. Honestly, I don’t know how much of an impact this will have on my gaming, because Inspiration was always something that you had to remind yourself to give to players from time to time. If I had to guess, I would imagine that most groups are going to just continue to occasionally use Inspiration the way it was originally designed and not the new “Heroic” version.

(Note: As someone who has to review and write reports in a professional setting, it bugs me that the first Appendix mentioned in the book is Appendix C, the rules glossary. If it’s the first one referenced, it should be Appendix A. Before you correct me, I know that technically the other appendices are mentioned in the “What’s in this book?” section, but that’s cheating.)

While the new PHB pulls more of the rules forward in the book, it also pulls the rules backwards too. How many times have you gone searching for a specific rule to get clarification on it? Wouldn’t it be nice if there was one place you could go to and reference all (most) of the rules? Check out Appendix C - the Rules Glossary. At first, I thought this was an attempt to replace explaining every aspect of D&D, but the more I read the book I realized that the rules are still explained where needed. The Rules Glossary just repeats those descriptions in a convenient place to reference when you need a quick answer.

(Note: One more thing on the introduction - I’ve seen various videos and posts online about how to interpret rolling “0” and “00” on percentile dice/2D10s, and I’m just glad I have a book to point at now that states the correct answer, which is that it’s a roll of 100. Don’t hate me, and also don’t try to convince me I’m wrong, because it’s not going to happen.)

The origin of species…

The original 5e PHB describes character creation as choosing a race, followed by a class. Then you determine your scores, describe your character, blah blah blah. I don’t think I have ever built a D&D character that way. Usually, I’m skipping over the races chapter to pick my class, then I’ll back up and figure out a race that complements that class and work from there. Clearly, someone at Wizards realized that is probably how most people create characters because now choosing your Class is the number one step in the creation process. I told you the layout was better in this book.

More changes - there are no races in the new PHB. After choosing a class, you determine your “Origin”. Origin is a combination of two things: your Background & your Species. So technically, there are “races” in the PHB, they just now call them species instead. Which really makes more sense to me than calling them races in the first place. When we are talking about gnomes vs dragonborn vs elves vs humans, we are referring to different humanoid species, not differing races of the same species (yes I know I’m bringing biology into a fantasy game, hush you).

While your species gives you special traits like darkvision, breath weapons, lucky rerolls, your Background is now the aspect of your character that gives bonuses to your ability scores. Again, this makes more sense to me - Michael Phelps and I are of the same species, yet we would have wildly different bonuses to our character sheets based on our upbringing. If you are curious what to do about the Backgrounds from the 10+ years of sourcebooks that aren’t included in the new PHB, there is some guidance on how to use those and still use these changes.

One feat in front of the other…

D&D 3/3.5 was my first edition of playing D&D, so naturally you might assume that I stuck with Pathfinder when Wizards moved to 4th & 5th edition D&D. Not really, while I haven’t completely avoided Pathfinder, I’ve always preferred D&D. One reason for that is that I liked how “simpler” the character creation was with 5th edition D&D. In older editions & Pathfinder, there are so many “Feats” that you can pick from to customize your character, I always would get analysis paralysis and worry that I wasn’t picking the “good” feats and would regret my picks later. Especially when the available options go beyond just the PHB and you start having a shelf of books full of different options for your character.

I’m well aware that I’m probably a minority in this view, but I enjoyed that in 5e, feats were just an optional rule you could use. Listed in the character advancement tables was “Ability Score Increase”, and if you used the optional feat rule, you could choose a feat instead of getting said score increase. Why would I worry about min/maxing my character when I could get my ability scores up higher? Now I just realize that decision is just a different type of min-maxing.

The new PHB tackles feats in a different way. Now, feats are a mandatory part of the rules, not an optional rule. However, the first feat listed is the “Ability Score Increase” feat, which when taken acts the same way that it did in the 5e book. So if you want to keep ignoring feats, you can just repeatedly take the Ability Score Increase feat and nothing will change. This doesn’t bother me, however what does bother me is that when you go to the class advancement tables, they STILL say “Ability Score Increase” instead of “Gain new feat” or something similar. It’s a tiny discontinuity within the rules that I thought we were trying to streamline.

Upgrading to first class…

Just like a lot of things in the book, the presentation of the various classes is done much better in this book. I mean this in both senses, as in the starting page that lists “here are all the classes” is formatted a lot better and more digestible. Then when you turn the page and go into detail on each individual class the layout continues to be easy to read and understand.

For example, when I was flipping back and forth through the original 5e PHB, I often found myself going too far and being into another class without realizing it. There wasn’t a clear distinction when you were quickly flipping back and forth to let you know you went into a new class section. In the 2024 PHB, there is a full page art at the start of each class section to separate out the different classes.

Another small addition this time around is information on making characters that aren’t level 1. Level 1 characters are very squishy and easy to kill, which can be a turn off for players or hard for a DM to work around. I feel like that is why there is a trend for written D&D adventures to start with characters being Level 3-5. This way, the characters are a bit stronger and have more of their “tools” that make each class unique. Having information on how to quickly make non-level 1 characters means that if you are starting a new adventure and decide to play a class you don’t normally play, you can quickly get set up and ready to play. While some people enjoy spending hours going over every option to maximize their character, that style of character creation isn’t for everyone.

What about the classes themselves? Are there many changes? This is where a lot of the “streamlining” that they mentioned in the beginning comes into play. Looking at the 5e PHB, there were a lot of things that varied based on which class you were playing. Things like subclasses, when you would “unlock” spellcasting, etc. The 2024 PHB aligns things together across the classes so that if you move from one to another you should still have a reasonable expectation about what you get as you level up.

I’m going to give a broad overview of the changes that I thought were pretty big, but don’t expect a deep dive on individual class numbers/abilities here. There are a lot of websites that go into much more mundane detail on these changes, and I could do a whole month of articles going through the itty bitty details.

Let’s start with subclasses. Every class had a different method of having subclasses that you could spec your character into. For sorcerer’s it was your “origin”, clerics had their different “domains”, druids had “circles”, etc. Now, most of the options are still the same, they are just all called subclasses (while the actual name of the subclass might still be “Circle of the…”). Also, everyone gets their option of 4 different subclasses at level 3 now. In 5e, some would get them at level 2, some at level 3. The 2024 PHB also brings in the extra subclass options introduced in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, meaning this new PHB has a majority of the player options introduced over the years.

Level 1 characters have a couple of differences from their 5e counterparts. First of all, classes that would later get spellcasting at level 2, like rangers and paladins, now start off with Spellcasting at level 1. More martial classes, like barbarians, fighters, rogues, etc. gain access to a new ability called “Weapon Mastery”. If you have weapon mastery for the weapon type you are using, then you can add special effects to your attacks, like pushing enemies, slowing them down, etc. There are also class specific tweaks to weapon mastery, such as barbarians being able to switch their “mastery” between weapon types during long rests.

On the flip side, at higher level play, it appears that a lot of the “unlimited” abilities that classes would get at Level 20 have been removed. For example, barbarians no longer have unlimited rages and druids no longer have unlimited wild shape uses. While not everyone plays their characters long enough to reach these levels, I’m sure the ones that do will be mildly inconvenienced by this. When characters reach level 19, each class across the board gains access to special “Epic Boon” feats. These are special feats that have all kinds of restrictions but offer big power ups to characters, such as being able to teleport 30 feet away after an attack. This new tool means that player characters aren’t kept from evolving after they hit level 20. Whenever a character would “level up” past 20, players can be given a new Epic Boon slot to fill up with a feat that they have all the prerequisites of. Most of these Epic Boons also include abilities score increases along with their special effects.

While I’m sure there are other examples that I missed, I found two big examples of class mechanics getting renamed. These were the barbarian’s “Path of the Totem Warrior” and the Monk’s “Ki” mechanic. The barbarian path is now “Path of the Wild Heart” and monks use “focus” instead of “ki”. I’m assuming in both of these examples that the name change was done to move away from racial connotations & stereotypes. Honestly, I think both of these changes fit better with what the ability was trying to denote and make the mechanics stand separate from any preconceived notions players might have with the old terms.

I’m going to just sleep for a spell…

Once you get through all the class descriptions, the rest of the book flows like you would expect a fantasy RPG to. Since we moved the steps around, after the classes you have the Backgrounds and Species that I mentioned up above. As I mentioned, the racial bonuses are now removed and listed with the backgrounds instead. Aside from that small tweak, the details are mostly very similar between the two versions of the PHB.

There was one minor difference between the two books, and it follows a trend I saw with the classes too. In the 5e PHB, there were charts for personality traits, bonds, flaws, and ideals. These charts were tied to the different backgrounds, and they would help you flesh out your character and give more depth to them. Especially when you rolled for them vs. choosing them directly, it could cause your character to go in a direction that you didn’t even think of. These charts aren’t included in the 2024 PHB. If you look back through the class abilities, there are also abilities in the 5e PHB that have been removed as well, abilities that were more “roleplaying” in nature. Things that said your character was immune to poison, couldn’t be put to sleep, etc. - I couldn’t find them in the 2024 versions of the class listings.

I say “roleplaying” in quotation marks because while there can be some combat implications to these abilities, to me they seem more story driven parts of a character. Areas where players get to stand out in the story and make it their own. When I didn’t see the tables for ideals/flaws in the Backgrounds section, it made me wonder if it was the same train of thought that had Wizards remove both of these items. The only reasoning I could think of is that their position is that having these as mechanical pieces of roleplaying were too restrictive on the Players and the DM. What I mean is that it might be too restrictive to say that “X” character can only have “Y” ideal based on their background when a player may have other ideas.

“But you can easily change that if you think so,” you might be saying, and you are 100% correct. However, printing these types of things in a rulebook gives them a type of authority. Just about everyone knows people who make people play 100% according to the rules so if you are playing in one of those games, removing those tables from the PHB opens up your characters to different suggestions than what was printed previously. Then again, I could be completely wrong on this line of thinking and there’s another reason entirely that they were removed.

Moving into the spells, there are probably a bunch of smaller tweaks and adjustments to all the spells, but that’s outside the scope of this article. I’m sure a quick google search can give you sites that have more information on these kinds of topics. From a top level perspective, there is not much change between the 5e version of the spell list and the new one in the 2024 PHB.

Conclusion

It feels wrong being openly positive about this book, because that’s how I was with the original PHB and reading this book made me realize how wrong I was about the original PHB. But the 2024 PHB is leaps and bounds better than the original one, plus with the inclusion of material from Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, it is a single reference with a lot of player options.
Should you buy this book? Maybe. First of all, I think you’ll need to make sure your DM is okay with using 2024 rules vs the original 5e rules. If not, then there’s not much reason to get this book. Also, how much do you use your existing Player’s Handbook? I think eventually, every D&D5e player should try and get a copy of this new version of the book. But I definitely think it’s not worth rushing out and buying it immediately if you aren’t super excited to read it.
Definitely do not pay inflated prices on eBay from Gen Con scalpers just to get this book early. That’s just bonkers to me.

A Shining Beacon On An Inferior Version? 2024 Player's Handbook Review (D&D5e)