I think this blog has shown that I'm pretty sanguine on the revisions that WotC has brought to the most-popular-ever edition of Dungeons & Dragons. But let's also take a moment to address something:
Is this 6th Edition?
Having never played through the transition between previous editions, I can't really speak from direct experience. How much changed, for example, between AD&D and 2nd Edition, or 3rd, 3.5, and 4th Editions? I know that 3rd ditched THAC0 in favor of the what we more or less use now, which basically says "higher numbers are better."
The promise of D&D '24, or 5.5th Edition, was that everything published since 2014, including, for example, the Cleric and Wizard subclasses from the 2014 PHB that didn't make it into the 2024 one, would still be compatible with the new rules systems, and even modularly mix-and-matchable to a great extent.
I think this is technically correct, but there are some admittedly surmountable challenges and questions to ask when using old content.
As an example, I love the Genie warlock patron, published in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. (I think I've gone on record on this blog talking about how much I love genies/the djinn in fantasy stories.) But one change we saw in the new PHB is that the Fiend, Great Old One, Archfey, and Celestial have gotten a categorical change, transforming their expanded spell lists into patron spells, now granting all of the listed spells to the warlock for free and not counting against their spells known.
It would stand to reason, then, that Genie warlocks using the 2024 version of the warlock, probably should get their expanded spells for free. But this does create an odd wrinkle that was perhaps not as difficult to resolve with the 2014 version because Genie warlocks, unlike others, have a 9th level spell on that list, namely Wish. Do Genie Warlocks then need to have a special system to address whether they can cast one of two spells with their ninth level Mystic Arcanum each day? Or as written, would this allow them to cast two 9th level spells a day?
This isn't a computer game, where everything needs to be logically tied down with only one incontrovertible interpretation, of course. Even using digital tools like D&D Beyond, you can fudge things (indeed, sometimes you have to, whether because of a homebrew magic item or their years-later inability to handle the fact that Armorer Artificers get more infusions than others, and also that their built-in-weapons can be infused).
The point though, is that playing D&D '24 with old content, metaphorically if not literally, requires a bit of white-out to correct some of the places things don't perfectly line up. And in a lot of places, it'll be fine - an old monster stat block that is immune or resistant to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage from nonmagical attacks will still take full damage if your 2024 Barbarian attacks with a +1 Greataxe, even if a similar monster from the 2024 version won't havre such a resistance or immunity. Likewise, a spell-casting monster that has a ton of spell slots to track rather than the modern, simpler design, will still work, even if it'll be more challenging for the DM to run it (some DMs might like the versatility of such design, though if I never have to track monster spell slots again it'll be too soon).
Beyond questions of backwards compatibility, though, what do we think of the system as it is now?
So, this is going to take time. In November I'll have been playing D&D for ten years, and so I have a lot of 2014 D&D under my belt. But I haven't started a brand-new campaign since then (though I had a session zero for a campaign that is there to play when my DM for my Wednesday game is unavailable - we haven't played yet, and honestly, the hope is we play this rarely) and in the one I run, only some of my players have converted their characters to the new system, while others have chosen to keep things as they were.
So, even if I've started to incorporate elements of the new rules, I still don't feel like I've fully delved into the updated system the way I would starting a whole new campaign.
In other words, my impressions remain mostly hypothetical, looking at how I think the game will feel more than speaking from direct experience.
Again, I'm pretty positive on most of what has changed. I think that the revision reflects a lot of feedback from the past ten years, and tightens up a lot of things that needed tightening up. Its flaws, I think, are where it didn't go quite far enough, such as how the Ranger feels, at least, like it needed some kind of combat buff to keep up with other martial classes (though I wonder if some of the Paladin nerfs to Divine Smite were to bring it down a bit, with the argument that half-casters shouldn't be quite as good at weapon-fighting as non-caster martials because of their access to spells - I still think Paladins will probably do better overall damage output, at least outside of scenarios where weapon range is a major factor).
Now, how newbie-friendly will it be?
With ten years of experience, most of how D&D works is pretty second-nature to me. And the greater customization and more features that we see in 2024 is pretty exciting to me, because hey: it's new toys.
Take Weapon Mastery, for example. This imbues weapons, at least for classes that naturally have to focus on using weapons, with greater power. Unquestionably, a Warhammer with Push is better than one that doesn't have it. But, it does mean that new players are going to have one more meaningful choice to make. Previously, if you were making a sword-and-board character, you could take any number of d8 weapons and they'd pretty much play the same: a War Pick, a Morningstar, a Rapier, a Longsword, a Warhammer, or a Battleaxe. I'd generally take one of the latter three because, even if I was never likely to use it, having the Versatile property made them strictly better choices. And, of course, if I wanted to use Dexterity instead of Strength, I'd have to go with the Rapier. Personally, I'd tend to prefer the Warhammer both for aesthetic reasons and because of the sense that more creatures have vulnerability to bludgeoning damage than any other "kinetic" damage type.
But, under this old system, a Longsword and a Battleaxe were functionally the same. Indeed, a Glaive and Halberd were actually 100% identical, with the same damage die, same properties, and same weight and cost.
Weapon Masteries make it so that there's actually a significant distinction between these weapons. And that can be fun for a player who is looking to optimize their character, but it does a couple things that might be less welcome for a new player - mainly that it makes picking the "right" mastery a potential area in which to make the "wrong" decision.
It also, by imbuing the choice of weapon with a mechanical consequence, can clash with aesthetics. For example, as I mentioned, I really like the image of swinging a big blunt weapon - something about the hammer as a tool of creation makes it, in my mind, a kind of ideal weapon for a good-aligned champion tied deeply to some sort of deep, mystical force for good and order. But if we're talking about maximizing our damage output, a Greatsword is going to outperform a Maul, thanks to the power of the Graze property.
Likewise, for a DM rewarding magic weapons, you'll need to consider whether the weapons you offer will even work for a player's build. Giving a dual-wielder a magic handaxe and a magic shortsword will feel kind of bad, because what they need is for one of those to be a scimitar, otherwise their Dual Wielder feat is being wasted.
Another area where the game has become more complex is Feats.
In 2014, Feats were technically an optional feature, which a DM could disallow. However, 2024 D&D is not only built around feats (like making the Fighting Styles a type of feat and giving everyone an Origin Feat) but also strongly encourages players to take on Feats instead of simply boosting their ability scores because each General Feat (and Epic Boon) comes with a single bump to one ability score.
But is this a bad thing?
Honestly, while this is an increase in complexity, I think it's easy for someone like me, who has been marinating in all the minutia of D&D for a decade, to worry about new players (or just less-invested players) struggling with their character builds. But it's not like things weren't complex before - feats already existed, as did multiclassing, which can make a character build a super-delicate dance of configuring things to feel fun to play and effective (personally I'm not a big fan of multiclassing, as nine times out of ten it's a decision that players make purely for mechanical advantages rather than story reasons, but even I can see how taking a single level of Fighter on a character who intends to be a Bladelock solves a huge number of problems for you).
DMs will need to understand these systems to guide their less-versed players through them, but once the decisions are made, there's not going to be a ton of change to them. How often do we swap out which weapon we're using, after all? So, once a player gets used to the fact that their Warhammer can knock enemies back, they'll just keep doing that until they come across a +1 Battleaxe and learn to incorporate that new mastery into their strategy. As long as the DM is there to remind them how it all works, it might not be that hard to overcome.
One thing I'm truly unsure of is how much deadlier the monsters in the new Monster Manual are going to be. Many, of course, will be only slightly different. But even at low CRs, you have Goblins who are getting a little sneak-attack-like bonus, while the high-CR creatures are doing more damage with their attacks or imposing pretty powerful conditions on your players with nothing more than an attack roll. Is your Dwarf Barbarian counting on a high con modifier and advantage on saves against it to avoid getting poisoned? Well, some creatures are going to be able to poison them just by hitting their armor class.
This is, of course, also coupled with the fact that the encounter-building guidance in the DMG is going to make fights tougher, in general. Indeed, using them to build fights for my 17th-level party, I find myself surprised at just how many high-CR creatures I need to throw at them even to make what the DMG claims is a low-difficulty encounter. According to the guidance in Xanathar's Guide to Everything, my six 17th level characters can handle just a single Iron Golem and then a single CR 6, 7, or 8 monster along with it. In the 2024 DMG, a moderate encounter for that party would mean an xp budget of 43,200, which is almost enough to have three Iron Golems.
Player characters have definitely gotten more powerful in the 2024 PHB, though I think the power shift is less in raw damage output than their various ways to control the battlefield (again, like Weapon Masteries,) with perhaps some of the classes that fell behind in raw damage power catching up a bit (this, honestly, is where people felt the Ranger needed more love.) But the balancing question, then, is that if monsters and the encounters in which we fight said monsters are harder, does this buff get cancelled out? Is it even possible that D&D has gotten harder, even as player characters are more powerful?
That's the kind of thing that will require extensive play to get a real feel for.
Of course, there's the mental fallacy that we're ever at the "end of history." We look at the current state of things and think that all of the past led up to this moment, forgetting that the present is the future's past. Much as 5th Edition was shiny and new in 2014, a big transformation that learned from the past (and the failure of 4th edition,) the new Core Rulebooks are the dawn of a new age in D&D, but will also be looked back on as the base upon which many new things are created.
I have my gripes about the new books, even if I'm mostly on board with their revisions. It's more about what was left out.
I like that 2014 D&D spent a lot of pages talking about characters and building a backstory. Backgrounds having their Traits, Ideals, Bonds, and Flaws were all very nice prompts to build out a compelling story for your character. While a video game's gameplay is usually its top asset, RPGs in particular are often remembered for their characters. Some of the most popular computer/video game RPGs, like Mass Effect or Baldur's Gate 3, are notable because of their well-drawn cast of characters. And I think that D&D functions best when we're not just worrying about "winning," but really playing out the internal and external conflicts of fictional people.
The original Ravenloft module was created because the creators wanted to make a vampire who you really felt a strong reason to fight, not one that would just happen to show up in some room of a dungeon. The new books had lots of pages worth of stuff they needed - and I'll never begrudge the decision to spend a big chunk of the DMG telling DMs, you know, what they actually need to do to run the game.
But I do hope that we'll see a continued emphasis on story and storytelling. I love that Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft has a pretty extensive chapter on just exploring Horror as a genre - stuff that could potentially be useful for any horror game, or even horror writing. Again, these books need to get a lot across, and are already quite thick tomes, but we'll see how future books look.
Of all the mechanical things in the system, I think the only true blunder was the way that ability scores were tied to backgrounds. The shift in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything to divorce ability scores from Race (now called Species) was a fantastic change - not only did it resolve some of the problematic cultural issues that arise when you start saying that one group of people is inherently smarter than another group, but it also just opened up class and species options in a way that had been really annoyingly limited - you could play an Elf Barbarian without having to wait until level 4 just to get your Strength modifier up to +3.
The way 2024 handles backgrounds is not as painful as the way that the old species ability score bonuses worked, but I do think that the system as it stands funnels players into a narrower range of options. My Eldritch Knight with a Sage background, for example, would now run into the same issue that that Elf Barbarian would have before Tasha's, because Sages don't get to boost Strength.
There are rules in the DMG to create custom backgrounds, but I think it would have been smarter to have Backgrounds be tied to skill proficiencies and origin feats solely, and to have ability score bonuses just be a separate character-creation step (some systems have you do this according to class, which could also work, potentially, though I think just making it an independent choice is best). Adding in ability scores to backgrounds creates one more factor to triangulate.
What feels so strange about this is that we got the ideal fix in Tasha's, so to see them become more restrictive in these options feels like a step backwards - and one that might require a correction in some future book years from now.
Now, what of the future?
We do have a number of announced books coming later this year - a dragon-themed anthology, a new Eberron book (with an updated Artificer - though no new subclasses, apparently,) as well as a new starter set (with an adventure based on Keep on the Borderland) and two new Forgotten Realms campaign-setting books.
On a meta-level, I have a confession: I bought the Core Rulebooks directly from WotC, rather than my local game store, because I knew I'd want the digital versions for D&D Beyond, and at the time the only way to get those bundled with a discount was to do so via their store. But I prefer to buy my books at my local store, and would really prefer to have a way to get the D&D Beyond version bundled with a book bought at the local store (for one thing, it'd be a way to get the cool alternate covers, which I tend to collect).
But what books do we expect to see, and what books do we want to see?
It's notable that there is not any big "epic campaign" adventure book coming out this year. I wonder to what degree such books remain popular. I have a huge backlog of these that I haven't even tried running or playing in, and so I wonder if players are really clamoring for such an adventure when they still haven't run, say, Rime of the Frostmaiden or Out of the Abyss. Such books are the most "consumable" that WotC can release for the game, of course, but I think the books that I, at least, get most excited about (and the ones that I think most players do) are the broader rules-expansion books that allow for more player options.
In the first ten years of D&D, we got two major rules-expansion books in Xanathar's Guide to Everything and Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. Bringing in multiple new subclasses for each class (only one for the Wizard in Xanathar's, but to be fair, Wizards already had a lot) meant a lot of new ways to play the game, and new prompts for character stories.
I would love to see more books like these.
However, if I were to suggest a general trend I'd like to see, it's this:
I don't want to see too many retreads.
Given the revisions we saw in 2024, there's certainly an impulse to see every subclass get its own 2024-style glow-up. Surely the Cavalier, or the Sun Soul, or the Necromancer, would be fun to see with updated, rebalanced mechanics.
But the worry I have is that it's very easy for WotC to fall into the trap of just kind of re-running the last ten years. Already, the Forgotten Realms sourcebooks are looking a bit like the new version of Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide - hopefully with better-balanced subclasses, but it's notable that two of them are genuinely revisions of subclasses first seen in SCAG.
What I don't want to see over the next ten years is just more of the same. If we're going to be getting revamps of old campaign settings, for example, I want to see ones that we didn't get to in the past decade. Bring on Dark Sun! The only exceptions here, I think, would be in the case of Spelljammer and Planescape. Spelljammer was a huge disappointment because it didn't really give us any "setting" in its setting, and while Planescape was better, doing a decent job of giving us the city of Sigil and the plane of the Outlands, I desperately want updated sourcebooks for all the Outer Planes (and hell, let's look at the Inner Planes while we're at it!)
If we do get more published big adventures, I want to see them looking at different settings. Let's get another Ravenloft adventure to complement Curse of Strahd. Let's get something set in Eberron.
A couple of more recent books I've been pretty happy with were the creature-type-focused Fizban's and Bigby, with lots of lore and material focusing on dragons and giants, respectively. Getting a "book of the dead" all about Undead monsters, or even going into less common creatures like Constructs would be very cool (if they did a whole book on Oozes, I'd be impressed, though I'm fine if they prioritize, say, Fiends over that). These books are, admittedly, more useful if you want a campaign that really centrally focuses on that kind of creature, but they have some very cool ideas in them, and some fun monsters.
Speaking of monsters, much like the rules-expansion books, I'm always happy to have a big compilation of new monsters. Volo's and Mordenkainen's, while kind of folded in together as Monsters of the Multiverse, were really great additions to the game. Monsters of the Multiverse is kind of funny, because it sort of served as the "2024" update to the creatures in those books, even though now some of it is already slightly outdated (like the creature types for many types of creatures now being wrong).
Going back to the subject of campaign settings, there is talk about two brand-new settings being added to the game. We know zilch about what these are actually going to be like, but here's what I'm hoping for them:
A lot of D&D settings are, frankly, pretty similar to one another. Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms are not all that distinct from one another. I think a campaign setting should really make a compelling case for why you'd run something there, in particular. Eberron, for example, moves away from a Late Medieval/Renaissance period in favor of a more 1920s/1930s pulp adventure one. Now, sure, you could argue that D&D itself is built on tropes established in just such genre stuff, like Conan the Barbarian, but Eberron updates the setting to be contemporary with when those stories were written, rather than when they took place.
I think we can go further, though. Ravenloft, of course, is one of the more radical campaign settings, taking place on a separate plane of existence in order to bend reality to function in a sort of nightmare logic. Dark Sun, while I'm less familiar with it because it hasn't had a 5E sourcebook, creates a kind of post-apocalyptic, resource-scarce setting that could foreground the oft-ignored exploration and survival mechanics of the game.
For brand-new settings, here are some ideas of what I'd hope for:
A science-fantasy setting:
I grew up on Star Trek and Star Wars, and particularly given the latter, I've always loved seeing mystical/supernatural elements mixed into a more sci-fi-style setting. Spelljammer was always kind of flawed for me because it ejects a lot of the sci-fi tropes that I'm sad to see go. I don't want to travel through space on a ship that looks no different from a seaborne vessel - give me a rusty, used-future junker that looks like some nerd in 1975 spent weeks painstakingly constructing by kitbashing old WWII model kits. I want to be able to kill the Slaad that has been stalking my crew by knocking it out of an airlock. I want to have a friendly ship computer, as well as killer robots to fight.
A modern urban-fantasy setting:
My first introduction to Dimension 20 was The Unsleeping City, which is a campaign set in a version of New York where there are tons of supernatural things happening there all the time, but most people don't realize it because of the collective power of New Yorkers' ability to ignore weird things around them. Those who are awakened into the eponymous Unsleeping City start seeing things as they truly are, where those big, burly guys in an alley are actually ogres, and where that equestrian police officer is actually a centaur, but it's still a world with all the modern elements like cellphones, subways, the internet, and such.
There was, long ago, a UA with subclasses and spells built for this kind of urban fantasy (in fact, in The Unsleeping City, the party's Cleric uses that UA's "City Domain" for his subclass). While using a modern, real-world setting could work, I'd also be fine with a fictional setting that happens to be more modern in its appearance (actually similar to another Dimension 20 series, Fantasy High - Brennan Lee Mulligan and I must share some tastes when it comes how we do fantasy.)
An ancient setting:
This is kind of the opposite of the other two. Most fantasy settings assume a kind of medieval millieu - I think the legend of King Arthur looms large over the genre, even if we don't often think of it. But I think you could also have a lot of fun with an earlier era, such as one that takes place in a world with some equivalent of the Roman Empire. The Forgotten Realms setting doesn't really have a lot of nation-states, and is more organized around city-states (or maybe that's just the Sword Coast,) but I think a broad empire could make for some interesting stories as well.
I'll concede that the stories you tell in such an environment might feel pretty similar to those in medieval settings, but there could be some interesting wrinkles - the Romans, like us today (though given the state of the world, who knows how long this will remain true) were kind of unprecedented, at least within their geographical region. While human nostalgia is a powerful force, the Romans didn't really have some earlier, "greater" civilization to look back to. In D&D settings, there are often fallen civilizations like Netheril in the Forgotten Realms or the great city-states of the Age of Arcanum in Exandria, which were far more advanced than what exists in the settings' modern ages. This trope, I think, is seen a lot in Western fantasy because of the medieval fascination and bewilderment at the relics of the Roman Empire. But when you are Rome, what does that look like? In some ways, it could be actually kind of akin to the modern or futuristic settings described above. If the general assumption in the Forgotten Realms is that those +1 weapons you find in dungeons are relics of Netheril, and forged with a technique and technology that no longer exists today, then a setting in that earlier era would presumably be one in which powerful magic is being wrought all over the place, perhaps at an industrial scale.
The real question, though, for all of these, is the degree to which you would have to shift the mechanics of the game to allow for the genre to work. What use is a Sending spell when you have a cell phone? And how do you get people fighting with laser guns when only a few classes really allow you to build around ranged weapons?
I'll be honest, I'm a little pessimistic on how much of a departure these new settings will be. But we still don't have any details on them. A classic medieval fantasy world can still be good - Exandria doesn't really reinvent the wheel, but Matt Mercer and his collaborators have done a lot of work to make it a world with rich history and political nuance. But personally, I guess I've always just been someone who feels like we can bend and stretch those tropes to do something more original.
It'll be a few months before we get the first of 5.5's supplementary books, so for now, I think the best thing to do is to play the game with the new rules and start to suss out where it needs expansion and refinement.
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