D&D's Revised Player's Handbook 'will be the biggest Player's Handbook that D&D has ever had', and like all the Revised core books will be compatible with the current edition

pcgamer.com:

At this year's PAX Unplugged—a special edition of PAX dedicated to tabletop games—Wizards of the Coast's designers presented a panel celebrating the upcoming 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons. At the end of that panel they looked ahead to 2024 and the upcoming Revised editions of the core rulebooks, previously codenamed OneD&D.

The focus was on the first of the three, the Player's Handbook. «This Player's Handbook will be the biggest Player's Handbook that D&D has ever had,» said game design architect Jeremy Crawford. «Not only is it the biggest in terms of number of pages, it will have more subclasses than Player's Handbooks have ever had. It has new spells, new feats, new weapon rules—including the weapon mastery options that many of you have playtested in Unearthed Arcana. And also mountains of brand new art.»

The Revised Player's Handbook will have 48 subclasses, with four for each of the 12 classes. Each will get their own illustration this time, as will each of the backgrounds players can choose from. The art for those is a series of literal backgrounds representing places you might have come from, with the mock-up page shown depicting a carnival for the charlatan, a temple topped with a giant sun disc for the acolyte, a peaceful valley for the hermit, and a workshop for the artisan.

Those four backgrounds show off some more of the rules changes. «It's now your background that affects your character's starting ability scores,» Crawford said, «and also your background gives you a special feat at first level that gives you a mechanical benefit that will remind you of where you came from as a character throughout your adventuring career. So if you have felt in the past, 'My background is cool from a backstory