D&D’s revised core rulebooks will help grow better players and more Dungeon Masters

Dungeons & Dragons has gone mainstream. Nearly 50 years after its invention, more people are playing dice with their friends than ever before. Meanwhile, major media crossovers hold Stranger things And Dungeons & Dragons: honor among thieves make even the long-held stigmas associated with the game fall by the wayside. But in many ways, the game’s development team at Wizards of the Coast has fallen a bit behind, and now it’s time for an overhaul. There’s a new set of core rulebooks coming… but be careful not to call it 6th edition.

After launching the game’s 5th edition in 2014, Wizards spent the better part of a decade tinkering with and repeating its winning formula. That process culminated in early 2022 with the Rules expansion gift set: three parts titled Xanathar’s guide to everything, Tasha’s cauldron of everythingAnd Mordenkainen presents: Monsters of the Multiverse. Now, developers say, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and formally integrate what worked in those three new books into a full-fledged update to D&D’s 5th edition. That means new versions of the original three core rulebooks, a triad known to fans as the Player’s Handbook (PHB), the Dungeon Master guide (DMG), and the Monstrous manual (MM). Along the way, Wizards said it will also try to make those books richer and more useful than ever before — all while maintaining continuity and compatibility with any 5th Edition product that’s come before.

“For so many people, those books are their introductory experience with the game,” game design architect Chris Perkins said in a group interview with the press earlier this month. “Those books are more compact than some of our later books, the monsters aren’t as easy or fun to play as some of our more recent books, and finding things isn’t as easy. […] So make sure our gateway to the game is so strong, so beautiful, [and] being as accessible as possible is very important to the longevity of the game, I think – and just for people’s enjoyment.

Here’s what to expect in the updated 2024 editions of the core Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks.

Player’s Handbook

Player’s Handbook (2024) will contain many more pages than the original, which is one of D&D’s largest books, at a hefty 320 pages. But the updated version probably won’t have that many words.

The new PHB designers said they are working hard to streamline the language throughout and provide players with more art than ever before. There will be new images for each of the book’s 12 core classes – barbarian, bard, cleric, druid, fighter, monk, paladin, ranger, rogue, wizard, warlock and wizard – as well as for each of the 48 subclasses included within (four in total for each core class). Most importantly, art will illuminate the full spectrum of human diversity in the real world.

While it is important that potential players can see themselves on the pages of the Player’s Handbook (2024), it is also important that newcomers have the best possible ramp to actually learn how to play the game. For that reason, character creation is pushed back to the most fundamental rules of the game. This new expression of the 5th edition PHB will it really teach you How to play the game before it invites you to roll up your first character.

And, when you Doing decide to create that first character, you’ll have more choices than ever before, thanks to over 144 options for your character’s background. Whether they started life as a soldier or as a scholar will also be more important than in 2014. That is because the new Player’s Handbook (2024) will move key features such as skill score improvements, 1st level achievements, and more from your character’s biological roots to their cultural and socioeconomic roots – similar to what was proposed as a new, optional rule in Tasha’s cauldron of everything.

“The ‘character origins’ chapter will also include alignment guidelines [and] languages,” says game design architect Jeremy Crawford. “But the focus is on species [formerly called race] and backgrounds. How we frame it — and this really builds on the work we’ve done Tasha’s cauldron of everything – takes those two components of the character [and] combining them to get a glimpse of who their character was before they became an adventurer.”

Player’s Handbook (2024) also contains rules for creating custom backgrounds. “We’re actually giving people more tools than they’ve ever had,” said Crawford.

Skill scores such as strength, agility, and wisdom will also be captured much later in the character creation process. Players will of course be able to use existing methods to generate those scores, such as the “standard series” and “point-buy system” of old. But in the future, the classes themselves will recommend which skill scores to take. These and other changes to the PHBare all designed to help people play faster.

“Let’s go to the play,” Crawford said, “while still giving people the adaptability they’re used to. Now you decide, as a player or as a DM: am I going to take the time to build this myself? Or am I going to use one of these quick start options that the book now offers?”

Dungeon Master guide

Image: Wizards of the Coast

While Wizards has repeatedly telegraphed its moves with the changes to come Player’s Handbook (2024), perhaps the most substantial changes to the core rulebooks come with the Dungeon Master guide (2024). That’s because, according to Perkins, it’s been a bit of a mess from the start.

“In 2013, our team was a lot smaller,” said Perkins. “We were pushing through all the core rulebooks at the same time, as well as the Starter setand to say Jeremy and I were overworked and had a lot on our plates was an understatement at the time.

“Now that we’ve been able to turn around eight years of conversations later,” Perkins continued, “we have a number of things we want to do with the DMG what we would have liked to have done years ago.”

At the core of the Dungeon Master guide (2024) will be a newly revised section on creating your own custom campaign, which will include an example campaign setup. Then the book shows novice DMs how to build it out with the needs and wants of their players in mind.

“I don’t want to use the word ‘stripped down,’ but let’s just say it’s very succinct,” Perkins said. “But it’s a complete setting, and you can take this campaign skeleton and add some meat to it. Decide where you want to place your campaign in this setting and then make it your own style. [We] give you a poster card to use for this campaign setting, and give you hooks within the campaign setting to help you decide which parts of the campaign to use, [so that you can decide] what conflicts you think will be important in this game.”

While the order and format of the information within Dungeon Master guide (2024) is still a work in progress, Perkins said it will contain a lot of important information that was overlooked in 2014. For example, what is the purpose of a Dungeon Master screen and how do you use it? What do you do with a player who is disruptive at the table? How do you plan your gaming sessions around other people’s lives? And how much do you really need to know about the rules before playing as a DM?

“Where do I start? How do I get up to speed? How do I become like [Matt Mercer and other now-famous DMs]?” asked Perkins. “How do I ensure that my game actually meets the expectations of the players? […] We can preload all that information so that when we get halfway through the book DMs are willing to talk about other conversations, not dealing with issues in launching the game and discussing things at the gaming table, but now that we can talk about the creative part of DMing.

Monstrous manual

Image: Wizards of the Coast

finally, the Monstrous manual, a book rarely seen by the average D&D player, probably has the most new content of all three books. That is because Monstrous manual (2024) will feature over 500 monsters in total, and for the first time in franchise history, each will have their own unique artwork.

But perhaps the biggest surprise is how many high level monsters will be included, each fully capable of making a group of level 20 heroes run for their money.

“As we looked at filling out the monstrous list in this book,” said Crawford, “we wanted to make sure we had more high-challenge monsters. So you’re going to see a whole bunch of new big bad guys in this book, with the emphasis on creature types that didn’t really have high CR representatives.

For example, Crawford noted that the Monstrous manual (2014) shipped with a bunch of high-level dragons and devils. Monstrous manual (2024) will also feature some, but it will also feature high-level elves, constructs, elementals, and seeps.

“Imagine a mire that could wipe out an entire city just by rolling over it,” Crawford said. “And it’s also important for us to point out that none of the existing monsters’ challenge ratings will be changed. Because we maintain the stability of the current edition and because many existing adventures assume that monsters have a certain CR, we are ensuring that the monsters that continue from the 2014 Monstrous manual have the same CR they had when they were written.

An end to the ‘edition wars’

During the multi-day press event, Wizards of the Coast developers returned again and again to the fact that the 5th edition of D&D will not disappear. The fourth edition of D&D, they said, was something of a slow-rolling disaster that almost spelled the end of the franchise as we know it. The current ruleset for 5th Edition was created with input from hundreds of thousands of players during a multi-year playtest leading up to launch in 2014. There’s no reason to throw that work out in favor of a “new edition” of the game, and the 2024 updates to the three core rulebooks were made with that well in mind.

“We also recognize that what we do is special,” Crawford said. “It hasn’t been done before for Dungeons & Dragons. This is the first time the game has ever done a major overhaul of an edition and then continued that edition – ensuring that you can continue to use the products you already own.

According to Wizards, you don’t have to stop what you’re doing at the table or change anything about your home game to make room for these new, updated rules in your party. Everything written in the original 5th edition books is still valid, still legal to play. It’s just that they hope these new updated versions can better set the table for D&D’s continued growth going forward – creating more player characters and guiding more Dungeon Masters than ever before.

We’ll know for sure if they succeeded when all three books roll off the press sometime next year.