Back in 2014 I was a new player to the Tabletop Role Playing Game (TTRPG) scene. Despite my nerdy nature, these type of games, and let’s face it back then, modern gaming in general had largely passed me by whilst I focused my gaming time on video games. Meanwhile, across the wide gaming world, a new version of D&D was being published which would soon change both the publishers fortunes, and the course of gaming history in the process.
Fifth edition (2014) and the ten years of the game that followed, launched D&D from that game only a handful of people played privately at a time, to a game which could be played in a stadium in front of a sold out crowd at Wembley.
My experience with D&D started in this boom period like many others did, watching online games like Critical Role, which entranced me enough to pick up a copy of the Players Handbook. I poured over those pages to understand the nuts and bolts of the game I was watching. It was only sometime later that I discovered I wasn’t the only one of my friends doing this, and our own adventures would begin.
Fast forward ten years and that single book of rules became an entire bookcase of content from first and third party publishers across several editions and even several games and rule sets. Now I get to experience another rite of passage for all TTRPG fans; the change of edition. Sort of…
The new 2024 rule books have been released as a halfway house between a new edition and an update to the existing fifth edition you may know. This means that whilst a lot has changed, this time a lot has also stayed the same.
The Players Handbook features reworking of all but one of the core classes (Artificer fans may have to wait until the next Eberron supplement rumoured for later this year), and includes several changes to how each class works, several revised subclasses each, and a new way in which backgrounds, feats, classes and even lineages combine to make up your fantasy persona. As someone who has a OneNote sheet of potential characters made up for a rainy day, this has only added to my potential inspiration, but I do find myself pulling back into past content such as Monsters of the Multiverse, Xanathar’s and Tasha’s expansions and making my own assumptions on how these additional options would fit into the new rule set.
Which brings me to the double edged sword of this new “edition”. As a video gamer I am very used to the term “backwards compatible”, and that was the buzz word being handed out to promote this new update. And largely it is. None of my older official content is off limits to the new edition, and I can easily see how I can tweak things a little bit to make sure that my Echo Knight Fighter or Mastermind Rogue could find their way into a 2024 game with little issue, however time will tell how well they will fare in adventures alongside fully 2024 classes.
The new Dungeon Masters Guide is once again a treasure trove of information for anyone who would like to take the directors chair, so to speak, and provides a wealth of knowledge in much more organised fashion than the one produced in 2014. Whilst I personally believe my own way of creating adventures and encounters, taking notes and prepping sessions is preferable to the one provided here (one gleaned from a combination of YouTube and other third party sources and advice), I still applaud that this DMG is making a far better attempt to show the way for people who like I was back in 2014, complete novices to the game.
Care has been taken across the entire suite of books to cater for the new players and provide these titles as a guide to get everyone up to speed, as much as can be expected for a simple yet complex game of infinite possibilities and imagination. I believe this suite is an improvement on the core set from 2014, and lays the foundation for the wealth of content which will surely follow from both the designers themselves and third party creators, not to mention the unpublished adventures we can all make together around our table.
The Monster Manual is reorganised and contains some of the most evocative art the game has ever produced, and already it inspires me in directions I have never thought before. Whilst my Green Dragons of the past have always been manipulators of the highest order, I had never considered until now a link from their younger selves to real world ambush predators, but one image and already I am considering the possibilities. That is but one example of the self proclaimed largest monster manual ever made, and almost all of the entries within are now stronger and more challenging than ever before, to match up against the even stronger characters players around the world will be crafting.
Whilst I do not always agree with a few of changes and decisions being made in these titles, I can appreciate their intent to iterate, improve and put right past mistakes. I am also now acutely aware, as anyone picking up a TTRPG should be, that these are your foundation blocks only, and once read and understood are yours to freely manipulate and adjust in whatever ways your table will find the most joy from.
That joy for me will come from expanding my own DM and player abilities to new heights in the D&D 2024 edition, whilst bringing in the best flavours from the past. I plan on running campaigns returning to Ravenloft, the Feywild, Eberron, and maybe even a world of my own design. I plan to introduce my partner and other friends who have never seen D&D beyond Stranger Things scenes to the game, and these books will be a fantastic aid to those goals, I can guarantee it.
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