With the 2024 Core Rulebooks, Dungeons & Dragons is finally trying to get out of its own way

polygon.com:

The best thing the team behind Dungeons & Dragons has done lately is be honest about the ways in which their game is a pain in the ass. Why, for example, does the Dungeon Master’s Guide hit you with high-level concepts and lore from the jump and save dice rules — one of the things Dungeon Masters do most — until many chapters later? They’ve been thinking about that. They’ve been thinking about classes, and how to rework them. Which has also led them to think about how popular the 5th edition is, warts and all, and how inconvenient it would be if whatever big foundational changes they made were not backward compatible.

So now, after much thought — and more than a few boondoggles — we’ve gotten our first look at the finished products: the 2024 core rulebooks for Dungeons & Dragons.

As previously suggested, the updated Player’s Handbook (2024), Dungeon Master’s Guide (2024), and Monster Manual (2024) are not a “6th Edition” of D&D. In fact, everything in these three books has been engineered to be backward compatible with all existing 5th edition materials — campaigns included. Yet in a press preview for the core books, game director Jeremy Crawford and creative director Chris Perkins also stressed that the new books are a “ground-up” revisions — each featuring appropriately grand new artwork inside and out — in celebration of the franchise’s 50th anniversary. The changes, as described, are substantial, and seem wonderfully geared toward doing something the core rulebooks have been bafflingly bad at for a long time: getting you playing the game.

It’s a bit of an oxymoron, but that’s what being too concerned with tradition can do. Very basic questions like “Why don’t these books start with how to play?” have been asked, and the result is a set of books that seem designed to help players figure out the rules on their own in scenarios that they might actually experience at the table.

The Player’s Handbook (2024), for example, no longer starts with creating a character,