The 50th anniversary of D&D, and the 10th anniversary of its most popular edition, 5E, has come and gone. This year, the game will be celebrating its somewhat less momentous 51st anniversary. The 2024 revamp to 5th Edition, with brand-new core rulebooks, was meant to honor this anniversary, at least in part. But it was also an attempt to sand down some of the rough edges of 5E and to address issues of balance and tuning, while also introducing a few exciting new ideas.
We now have two out of three of the pieces of that puzzle fully-released.
"Converting" to 2024's 5th Edition is something you can do right now, pretty much. The "rules" part of the game are actually pretty much entirely confined to the Player's Handbook, which was the first core rulebook to be released. The Dungeon Master's Guide does offer a lot of guidance on how a DM should run the game. I think this new one, in particular, would be a great read for anyone just starting out as a DM, and I'm happy to use it for reference and to even re-think how I structure my games. But once the PHB came out, with all the changes to how classes work and how certain rules work (the Surprise change is probably for the best, though it's definitely one that sacrifices drama for gameplay balance,) you could more or less play the real version of the revamped game.
But only more or less.
This year, and still over a month away, we'll be getting the final piece of that puzzle: the Monster Manual.
Of the core books, the Monster Manual is simultaneously a crucial part of the game and also the most replaceable. It's replaceable because perhaps the most common thing that has been added to D&D is new monsters to fight. In fact, I have several 3rd party books full of monster stat blocks (Tome of Beasts I&II and the Creature Codex, as well as the pdf version of Flee, Mortals!) along with tons of Wizards-released ones like Monsters of the Multiverse and all the bestiaries from the various campaign setting books.
To be frank, I think I only occasionally actually use creatures from the Monster Manual.
But that is, in part, because these are the oldest creatures in the game, with the least amount of refinement based on the developers' experience of playing 5E. Consider, for example, that all the chromatic dragons are... basically the same stat block with minor tweaks (with different variations depending on age). Worse are the Giants, who are mostly just simple melee fighters without any really distinctive abilities.
And yet, because the Monster Manual is the core monster book, it also has all of the most iconic creatures - the core fantasy monsters like the aforementioned dragons and giants, as well as your Hydras, your Zombies, your Golems, your Goblins, etc.
It's also no secret that the monsters in the new Monster Manual are going to be tougher - for a long time, 5E has had this issue where the monsters don't really present the challenge they're expected to based on their CR. Between the new DMG's encounter-building guidance (which I find leans more difficult than just about any previous system, including the one in Flee, Mortals!) and monsters being harder to fight, I think that the general buffs we've seen to most of the classes will probably be balanced or even balanced against the players.
Which is the whole point: people have generally thought 5E has been too easy.
We have gotten a few of these new stat blocks previewed in stuff like the Scions of Elemental Evil free adventure, but it won't be until next month that we truly get the full list, including some brand-new monsters I'm very excited about (there's a high-level vampire monster that could be great as my "final boss" of the Innistrad branch of my Ravnica campaign).
But let's address the other issue:
I've found, generally, that most of my players are hesitant to convert their characters to the new system. I think most of this is simple inertia - while I obsess over D&D more or less every day, my players often don't really give much thought to their characters except when it's time to play, and without the kind of fixation on this stuff that leads you to make regular blog posts about it, it's a lot to actually consider when looking at a 17th level character going from the old version to the new version.
In other words, I think it will be far easier to start using this stuff for real when I start a new campaign. Now, I've kinda sorta done that - I'm putting together a light back-up campaign for when my DM on Wednesdays isn't available. By necessity, I have no real long-term plans for it, though I want to experiment in player-driven adventures. And this does have all the players using the new version of their classes and species and everything (well, to an extent - we have a Shifter using the Monsters of the Multiverse version, but the others are a Dragonborn, Goliath, and Gnome using the new PHB's version).
Still, this is a back-burner campaign. I don't think I'm likely to truly, fully move into the 2024 edition world until I wrap up my Ravnica game, which could honestly go for another year or more (like, we're definitely past the midway point, but I've got the final dungeon of level 17, then six adventures on different Magic planes for level 18, the New Phyrexia chapter for level 19, and then, well, Planescape for level 20). So it could actually be a few years before I fully settle into this new quasi-edition.
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