Wow, people really don’t like this review! I have addressed the many baseless arguments against it in a follow-up post. Feel free to read it after! Or play a fun game: read those comments and my rebuttals first, then come back to the actual review to see if it fits the vibe!

D&D 2024 (5.5e) Review

Part -2: Vibes

I started playing D&D slightly after the launch of the fifth edition. I’ve played earlier versions, but you need to understand what the world looks like when you’re a teenager and the internet doesn’t exist and English is your second language. It was all very exciting and evocative and it completely fell apart at the table. Anyone complaining that modern D&D doesn’t help dungeon masters should travel back in time and play 2e under my circumstances. And this is a group that managed to figure out Magic: The Gathering from those little booklets that came with the starter decks!

In 2015, I was older, and the internet existed. I homebrewed, so I missed the initial modules. But in contrast to my 1995 self, I have a job now, so I can buy and read them all.  I have to admit that, for all their flaws I like them. Through the heavy-handed railroading and wacky (because the Monster Manual wasn’t finished yet) balance, you can see the vision.

There’s this trend, I think it’s visible even if you haven’t lived the last 10 years of D&D, where the first books are bad, but there’s upward momentum. Promise. Ideas. Then they hit their summit with Tomb of Annihilation, and then they start declining again around Descent into Avernus. The badness of those tail-end modules is much more tragic than the badness of the early ones. It’s the painful realisation of a slow decline. 

And that’s kind of where D&D is, or was, or maybe still is. In decline. I remember the excitement on Reddit when modules were released during those early days, or when Wizards of the Coast would hold big streaming events, people lapped that stuff up! Contrast that with the “vibes” of late 5e, just before OneDnD, or during its playtests – people posting about their own campaigns and players, but no buzz for official product. There’s a Vecna one? I guess I don’t actually own all the 5e modules.

Hasbro hasn’t particularly helped. We’ll get to that.

Part -1: Larp

Why do the titles for new chapters look so blurry? Like an upscaled jpeg. And why is the art so off-putting? Pictures of people cosplaying as D&D characters. 

There’s a presentation online, where the 2014 team explains how they spent time designing clothing styles for the different cultures of the world, and used those consistently in the art, so that a connoisseur could say “oh, this is a Turami bard” by just looking at the style of the art.

I’m looking at the new art, and I’m sorry, but did an AI make this? Didn’t Hasbro actually use AI art at some point?

Good art

Bad art

Good art

Bad art.

Spicy topic! But also bad art

I wish I had the vocabulary to explain what rubs me the wrong way with these images. These people do not look like they live in a society. They look like actors. Maybe it’s the anachronisms, or the weird lack of consistency? That designer stubble on the draconic guy? Orc cowboys? Maybe the fact that they’re so posed? 

I might have lost you here. You might like the new art. A lot of people seem to. Taste is personal. But consider this: the 2014 player’s handbook had a vision for its art. The 2024 player’s handbook has comic book panels, 80’s heavy metal-looking “fighting the dragon” panels, one with the guys from the kids’ cartoon. It doesn’t tell a single story with a purpose of thought, but then again, maybe the art mirroring the content has its own poetic elegance.

Part 0: Extratext

Why are we talking about bad art? Because we were talking about Hasbro. And when I see things like blurry titles, I wonder if those exist because of Hasbro.

There is a rich body of extratext surrounding the production of the Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual of 2024 and 2025.

A lot of it consists of Hasbro fuckups. 

In 2023, Wizards of the Coast announced that the new edition of Dungeons and Dragons would not have an Open Game License. The Open Game License, or OGL, is what allows third party companies to publish adventures and rules that are compatible with D&D. They also announced that they were going to revoke the irrevocable existing Open Game License through a loophole that would make even the most ardent rules lawyer cringe: while the license says you can use any authorized version of it forever, Wizards claimed that they could just “un-authorize” those versions. The new license had a monetisation clause so ridiculous it made longtime D&D ambassadors like Critical Role, Dimension20, MCDM, go and create their own systems.

They also mistreated contractors, broke D&D beyond, half-made a VTT then laid off the developers, used some AI art, laid off some more people to the point where mega-hit Baldur’s Gate 3’s CEO says no one he knows is at the company anymore, and messed up shipping so bad that I had to visit my local gamestore like 5 times asking for the books and they were like “I have no idea anymore check back in a week” until they were like “yeah we finally had a shipment and they’re all sold out.” Maybe that last part is more of a “the world we live in” problem than a Hasbro problem, but you bet they managed to ship shitty monopoly boxes to every store in my city.

Releasing a new version of a game with this hanging over you must be something. Even just writing a review is rough – like having a post-it with the WOTC logo captioned “don’t believe their lies” on your monitor.

Todd Kenreck has been the content guy for Wizards for a while now. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I’ve seen the interviews he does whenever new books are released. Fluff pieces where he interviews the designers, hypes up some of the new ideas in the book, and maybe talks a bit about the lore. Very pleasant stuff, a Todd Kenreck video is like a comfortable cup of warm chocolate. He’s a guy you know who’s really enthusiastic about D&D, interviewing the other guys you know who make the game. He just got laid off.

His Twitter has a pinned post reading “I am extremely excited to announce that I am joining Wizards of the Coast” followed directly (at time of writing) by a post that says “I was laid off from Wizards of the Coast”.

The 2024 release of the Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook starts with a piece of text by Jeremy Crawford wherein he expresses his deep gratitude and great honour to be part of this hallowed franchise. Jeremy Crawford does not work for Wizards of the Coast anymore. He left one year later, along with Chris Perkins. Mike Mearls had left the year before.

It’s unsettling reading the intro with that knowledge. I’m not saying there aren’t good people working on D&D, but how many of your favourite television shows got better once their showrunner left?

Part of the success of the 2014 edition of Dungeons and Dragons, and I think quite a large part, was the sense of community around it. It was made by real, interesting, fun people who had blogs and videos and actual-plays and happy fun hours, and they shared their passion with the audience through elaborate playtests and constantly updating rules. This was a game made by real people and not some nameless corporation. And now the nameless corporation (Hasbro) behind them has decided to actually not have things be like that anymore and pretty much got rid of all of those people and replaced them with, so far, nothing.

Maybe new friendly faces will emerge? But man, you laid off everyone, including the fluff interview guy. It’s going to take a lot of stepping forward to fill all those holes. Plus, to really drive home how hard Hasbro has shot themselves in the foot here, Todd Kenreck is now posting videos comparing the 2024 edition of D&D to Daggerheart, the competing roleplaying game headed up by Matt Mercer (who, himself, used to be a massive draw to Dungeons and Dragons and often quoted as the success behind the 2014 edition). Speaking of which, both Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford, shortly after leaving Wizards of the Coast, joined that very Daggerheart team! Not only do you lose your biggest streamer, your lead designer, your story-guy, and your content manager, but they then actively join your competition!

So what does all of this have to do with the game? Well, think of this: do you quit a company to go join a direct competitor if everything at that company is going well and you’re having a great time? And do you, the reader, trust a company that is driving its own people to the competition to create a good product? 

How can we read the 2024 edition of Dungeons and Dragons with an open mind, knowing that all those people have turned their backs on it?

Part 1: Introduction

Unlike the 2014 release of the Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook, the 2024 release of the Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook does not dive straight into character creation. It, instead, explains the general rules of the game. That’s a nice little improvement in a series of nice little improvements.

Actually, that reminds me.

Part 2: We Predicted What Would Change In 5.5

1. The rest system

The rest system in 5e is not great. The books allude to a couple of rules of thumb that you can fairly confirm through reverse engineering. One session of 4 hours equals one adventuring day, equals 6-8 encounters with 2 short rests in the middle. I’ve written about this before, hoping for a beautifully elegant solution in 5.5.

Here is Chris Perkins (no longer at WotC) on the adventuring day in an interview with Screenrant:

“Yeah. Well, I can speak to the Adventuring Day [..]. So, what we’ve discovered is that the Adventuring Day as a concept was kind of bogus. That in a great, great many campaigns, it was just not true. It was not how actual games were running. And so, sticking with the idea that we’re presenting tried and true advice and things that actually work at the table, we abandoned the idea of the adventuring day and instead focused our attention on making sure that when you are building any encounter, once you’ve decided how difficult you want it to be, that the math is actually helping you deliver that encounter.”

But like, the adventuring day had a purpose, right? Ebb and flow, resource management, a way to not make every encounter lethal while still keeping it interesting. The goblins won’t kill you, but will they sap your energy for the dragon?

So in the 2024 release of Dungeons & Dragons, we got rid of all that. Or did we? Long and short rests certainly still exist. What’s changed is that characters seem to recharge more after a short rest. A good example is barbarian rage – you used to get two a day, now you get one back when you take a short rest. It’s not consistent, though; wizards already had a limited short rest spell recovery mechanism, and they still do.

So I don’t know, has the problem we tried to solve with the adventuring day gone away? Or did we just decide that it’ll be fine if we simply ignore it.

Spoiler – foreshadowing!

2. Bonus actions, and probably the entire action/bonus/reaction triumvirate

Mearls (no longer at WotC) talks about this a lot, and I agree with him. Bonus actions seem like an elegant way to have special riders or small abilities while keeping them manageable. Unfortunately, they are gamey, dissociated, and confusing.

They’re still in there. As we will see, revisiting the action economy is wholly out of the scope of the ambition of the 2024 release of Dungeons & Dragons. 

3. Fireball

Fireball is overpowered by design. I can respect that. Balanced game design is not good game design (put a pin in that!). Yet for all my pointing to the 2014 edition of  Dungeons & Dragons as a positive example of vision, I always felt they went overboard here. Making sure fireball is a splashy, cool spell is fine, but I hate working around it as a DM. Single monsters in D&D are easy because of the action economy, and they’re not that much fun, often presenting uninteresting tank & spank combats. So we use multiple monsters, but fireball just wrecks groups. What is a DM to do?

Do I sound whiny here? I’ve legitimately created encounters where I thought, “If they have fireball, this will be a piece of cake; otherwise, they’re in big trouble.” There are probably some of those in my published adventures!

And there are so many ways to tone down the spell a little without losing the wow factor: you could make it more situational by requiring a minimum range or making it blow up allies when used in close quarters, or having it cost more (bonus) actions or reactions or even moves, or fold it into whatever you did to change the action economy when you addressed point nr. 2 of my list.

Anyway, of course they didn’t do any of that. It’s not really a big deal in the scheme of things, but it would have made me happy.

4. The role of tactics in combat

This is such a tightrope, but if you play tactical miniatures boardgames like Gloomhaven, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Combat in D&D is not that deep. What good DMs try to do in their games is add elements to a combat outside of the basic system that add excitement and options – swinging from a chandelier, jumping on top of the gorgon, that kind of thing. Where this hurts the most is that the DM is always pulling their punches. There are few mechanical ways to stop the monsters from swarming the wizard, but we don’t do that because it feels mean.

You know what really feels mean, by the way? A monster, especially one with multiple attacks, can instagib a downed character by attacking them twice. The first hit is an automatic critical hit, which causes two failed death saves, and the second finishes them off. All attacks made with advantage, too. Does anyone do that? Should that be in the rules?

I checked, that’s still in the rules.

So the 2024 edition of Dungeons & Dragons does do a little bit more here. Chiefly through a few more “attack me or suffer disadvantage” abilities and my least favourite solution: tiny movement abilities. They’re all over. Move 10 ft. and do a thing. Move an enemy 15 ft. Move 15 ft. without triggering opportunity attacks.

When I play D&D, the atomic unit of movement is 30 ft. That’s because we play theatre of the mind and don’t use a grid with miniatures. Sometimes we do, for complicated fights, but usually we don’t. If you speak my language, you can listen to recordings of these fights. Anyway, with steps of 30 ft., it’s easy to keep things in my head. If people are moving 5, 10, 15 ft. I will not be able to do anything useful with that. I doubt anyone can. I can’t imagine they playtested these rules.

Have things been improved? I don’t know, it’s definitely not to my satisfaction. In fact, I think we’re slightly worse off than we were.

5. Explicit procedures for dungeon crawling

Does the game need these? Hells yeah. Did it get them? Hells no!

6. Explicit procedures for travelling

Actually… The book has a chapter on travelling now. Recall that the 2014 edition of Dungeons & Dragons had a travel procedure that was weirdly spread across multiple pages? That’s gone and is replaced by a small section in the Player’s Handbook and an expanded one in the Dungeon Master’s Guide.

Is the new system good? Maybe!

It seems like this travel procedure is very similar to the one suggested by the Angry GM in 2021. I wonder if it was inspired by that system – D&D designers read blogs, don’t they? Anyway, what the Angry GM calls wilderness turns, the book calls journey stages, but the idea is the same. For any leg of the journey that has a consistent terrain and travel type (following a road, walking through a forest), you just roll and apply all the skills once. So a single navigation roll, a single foraging roll, etc. And then you simply say how long the party travelled through that terrain.

What the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide omits is how to randomise encounters, how to mechanically resolve them, or how getting lost works or how to deal with hazards. Instead, it just tells you to plan a couple of things in advance. Could be a monster, could be a hazard, up to you. That’s not what I’m looking for.

There’s a good idea here. And that’s what it feels like. A good idea written down. Not a good idea, rigorously playtested, honed and polished and then written down. There should be answers here to questions I didn’t even know I had. Instead, there are questions that I know I have that are unanswered.

Look, I haven’t used this yet, maybe it really shines in play. But there seems to be so much handwaving, so much filling in of the blanks. Like how do these actions work (navigating, tracking, foraging, searching)? Can each character perform only one? Or does everyone roll a forage check? Does foraging slow you down at all? Can I be stealthy to avoid encounters? The book just says, “Consider the possibility of an ambush!”

Part 3: What Happened to the Ranger?

What happened to the ranger? They don’t range anymore!

Remember how the 2014 Ranger had all these travel-related perks?

• Difficult terrain doesn’t slow your group’s travel.
• Your group can’t become lost except by magical means.
• Even when you are engaged in another activity while travelling (such as foraging, navigating, or tracking), you remain alert to danger.
• If you are travelling alone, you can move stealthily at a normal pace.
• When you forage, you find twice as much food as you normally would.
• While tracking other creatures, you also learn their exact number, their sizes, and how long ago they passed through the area.

It had problems! It trivialised exploration even though that’s exactly what rangers like to do! It was either extremely powerful or completely useless, depending on the campaign setting and goals! It didn’t give the player any new interesting options!

Look, we fixed it! Just like we fixed the adventuring day! We made it all go away. The bath water has been drained, and let’s not talk about the baby that used to live here. That baby being the hero fantasy of the ranger being supernaturally skilled at outdoorsy stuff, with unique cool abilities to go with that.

Imagine a system with more robust travel rules. Maybe a random encounter procedure? And maybe the ranger interacts with those rules in ways other characters can’t. Maybe the ranger gets to pre-roll random encounters so they know them before they even happen. I dunno, I literally just made that up. But there’s nothing there now, and that’s a miss.

That’s the second time we used the “we don’t talk about it anymore” hammer, and we haven’t even hit the difficult societal issue yet!

Part 2 Again: More Predictions I Made!

7. Social rules

I read The Alexandrian’s bluesky thread on the new books, and he claimed the social rules were gutted compared to their original 5e form. That’s weird because to me, they seemed slightly improved. Maybe it’s one of those things where no one, including me, reads the actual Dungeon Master’s Guide.

Let’s dig in!

But first, some examination of intent. Mearls has often said that the social rules are light on purpose. We all know how to talk to people; we do it every day. On the other hand, I’ve only stabbed a man to death with a longsword once, maybe two times if you’re generous. So we don’t need a complicated system to simulate talking.

I can get behind that.

But also, when I’m the DM and the bard asks the king to lend him ten of his best men and a superior sailing vessel, I don’t really know how my king should react. The bard has 17 charisma, if that helps? Even if it bores both me and themselves to tears, players will insist on endless haggling, rolling die after die until someone hits a natural 20 and gets their silly demands met. I am in need of scaffolding.

So what happened is the social rules changed from a bunch of tables based on a creature’s disposition to a blanket “influence action” with advantage for friendly and disadvantage for hostile creatures.

Here’s 2014:

Conversation Reaction

DC Friendly Creature’s Reaction

0 The creature does as asked without taking risks or making sacrifices.

10 The creature accepts a minor risk or sacrifice to do as asked.

20 The creature accepts a significant risk or sacrifice to do as asked.

DC Indifferent Creature’s Reaction

0 The creature offers no help but does no harm.

10 The creature does as asked as long as no risks or sacrifices are involved.

20 The creature accepts a minor risk or sacrifice to do as asked.

DC Hostile Creature’s Reaction

0 The creature opposes the adventurers’ actions and might take risks to do so.

10 The creature offers no help but does no harm.

20 The creature does as asked as long as no risks or sacrifices are involved.

Here’s 2024:

Influence Reaction

DC Friendly Creature’s Reaction

15 (or Int) *advantage* The creature does something it is hesitant to do.

DC Indifferent Creature’s Reaction

15 (or Int) The creature does something it is hesitant to do.

DC Hostile Creature’s Reaction

15 (or Int) *disadvantage* The creature does something it is hesitant to do.

I honestly prefer the new version. It’s elegant. And we’re all about elegance here. Has anyone ever consulted these tables from the 2014 edition of the Dungeon Master’s Guide? I am particularly amused by this little line to thwart my eternal hagglers: “On a failed check, you must wait 24 hours (or a duration set by the DM) before urging it in the same way again.”

What’s less elegant, in both editions, but I feel moreso in the latest, is the hand waving. “You decide the extent to which ability checks shape the outcome of a social interaction.” Okay thanks.

Also inelegant is the way these rules are built around the advantage/disadvantage mechanism and, as such, leave little room for DM interpretation. I can’t give you an advantage when you make a case that the king is particularly sensitive to. I guess I could increase his attitude by one step? Similarly, abilities and actions (the text mentions Help) clash in a bad way with the system. The attitude gives advantage or disadvantage, the Help action gives advantage, and charming spells give advantage. As an example, casting Charm on a monster doesn’t actually give you advantage on your influence action, as you also have disadvantage from the monster being hostile towards you.

The final strike against all this is the weird placement of rules. The 2024 edition of the Dungeon Master’s Guide’s section on social interaction is all about doing voices and engaging the players. The 2024 edition of the Player’s Handbook’s section gives players a heads-up that the DM might call for an Influence check (the DM will know what to do!). Where then is the actual meat of the thing? Well in the Rules Glossary of the 2024 edition of the Player’s Handbook, of course! 270 Words spread across four entries. I once again refer to D&D sage Justin Alexander, as this state of affairs prompted him to create an entire article about how much he dislikes glossaries.

So have things improved? I don’t know, they punched it up a little. Bonds and traits are gone from the equation (more on that later), and I could’ve used something a bit more meaty. But maybe Mike was right, and we talk to people all goddamned day, and no rulebook needs to explain it to us.

PS: It’s funny how the nature of the ask has no bearing on the difficulty of the check in the new system. But on the other hand, a creature’s intelligence is a proxy for its stubbornness in conversation. Just a random observation.

8. The role of cash money

What’s the point of gold anyway? In the early levels, you’re saving up for your plate mail, but once you hit level 5 and drop the 1.5k, you’re mostly set, money-wise. Gold is vestigial from the early days, when you needed it to level up. Those versions of the game also had more robust ways of flushing money out of the economy by requiring costs for training and maintaining strongholds.

On the other hand, the system actually works pretty well if you allow parties to save up for magic items. The way it works is that if you save your spoils from one tier of play you’ll make enough money to buy one or two items from the next tier – they’ll feel like cool upgrades when you get them and as you play in the new tier similarly powered stuff will appear as regular treasure, including larger coin piles that let you save for the next tier up. It’s very MMO in that way, but good luck teasing it out of the system. You need Xanathar’s Guide and some tedious accounting to figure it out!

Let’s see how it pans out in the 2024 edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

Magic Item Rarities and Values

Rarity Value

Common 100 GP

Uncommon 400 GP

Rare 4,000 GP

Very Rare 40,000 GP

Legendary 200,000 GP

Random Treasure Hoard

CR Monetary Treasure

0–4 500 GP

5–10 4,400 GP

11–16 36,000 GP

17+ 330,000 GP

So right off the bat, we can easily see that these line up, right? In a perfect market economy with full access to goods, a CR 0-4 treasure hoard has enough money to add one Uncommon magic item to its treasure pool (normally, about half of the expected 1d4-1 items are Uncommon). The hope here is that an ambitious party is going to want to save that gold to get a sweet Rare item, for 10 treasure hoards worth, which equals as many sessions, which translates to about a tier worth of levels.

As an aside, it’s funny that the guidance on sessions per level, treasure per session, that stuff hasn’t changed. But it was broken! I bet it’s still broken!

Part 4: The Adventuring Day

Did I mention how this new edition of Dungeons & Dragons, rather than fixing things, tends to just shuffle them away? Shall we do some quick maths?

Xp values per level are exactly the same. Check.

Xp per adventuring day? Doesn’t exist in 2024. Booh.

Expected encounters per day? Also not in there anymore.

Encounter difficulty? Yes! Slightly different, worse if you ask me, more on that later, but it’s in there. Let’s see.

Party’s Level Low Moderate High

1 50 75 100

2 100 150 200

3 150 225 400

4 250 375 500

5 500 750 1,100

6 600 1,000 1,400

Etc.

Sessions per level? Same as before: level 2 after the first session of play, level 3 after another session, and level 4 after two more sessions. Then spend two or three sessions for each subsequent level.

So, how many moderate encounters does it take for a character of, say, level 5 to hit level 6? Well, 7,500 divided by 750, of course. Which is 10 encounters. Divide that by 2 sessions, and we get 5 encounters per session.

From 2 to 3? That’s 600 divided by 150, so 4 encounters. In one session.

So it’s very similar to what it was before. We used to say 6 per session, now we’ve increased the XP budget for encounters a bit, and it’s 4-5 per session. The numbers are still there; they’ve just been hidden from you. 

I do not like this.

Does it matter? Well, what if you’re one of those DMs who like to have whole sessions without combat, and you average maybe 1 fight per session instead of 4-5. But the book says to try and give the players a hoard of treasure every session (not every 5 fights). You’re giving away 4-5 times the amount of treasure you should be. Is THAT a problem? I don’t know, but why have treasure tables if you’re not going to use them?

Part 2 One Last Time: Final Predictions

9. More on cash money

So the magic item economy works fine with tiers of play and expected monetary rewards. Even if your world is stuffed with ye old magicke item shoppes, things will work just fine.

But most worlds aren’t stuffed with those, and in fact, the book recommends keeping magic item sales rare.

Enter the return of strongholds!

I can write a lot about the new stronghold chapter – called Bastions. And I will. But they do offer a nice way to spend some money. Oh, wait, no, they don’t. You just kind of get them, and the only money you spend is when you want to turn a small room into a large room for no in-game effect.

10. Major class tweaks for Ranger, Warlock, and Barbarian

I can say that these have definitely been tweaked. Have their problems been fixed? Well, I just wrote about the Ranger.

11. Dying and Death Saves

As I said, a monster with multiple attacks can kill a downed character instantly by attacking them twice (with advantage).

There’s this weird emergent property of how death saves work in D&D: the optimal play is for one fighter to tank a monster, and when that fighter goes down, the druid heals them through a force-fed goodberry. One hp is all you need. The fighter goes down next round, but there’s more where that came from.

The death yoyo annoys the crap out of me. It makes me want to do the instagib thing.

I don’t think either is particularly good. And a lot of homebrew creators agree with me and come up with stuff like exhaustion levels, lingering injuries or other hacks.

I’d hoped this was something that would be addressed in the 2024 edition of Dungeons and Dragons (it wasn’t).

12. Spell save DCs

This is a pet peeve, but having them be 8 + stat + proficiency instead of 10 + stat + proficiency just always struck me as so ugly. What a random thing to have to remember.

I’ll admit it was a long shot.

13. Encumbrance

Ah, yes, encumbrance! A key component of old school gaming – but oft forgotten in modern times. The 2014 version of Dungeons and Dragons had some simple rules around encumbrance that were still unwieldy enough that no one ever used them, because they required accounting of all of a player’s gear up to the half-pound. Not to mention that they were also surprisingly punishing at times. Plus, there is not a lot of “must-have” random equipment these days, like torches and oil and scrolls and ropes and ten-foot poles to compete for those slots. So really, encumbrance is not a thing.

Other systems use things like slots or even coins, and I was hoping for something similar. But it looks like the pound-counting is still around; the book just admits that no one uses it: “You can usually carry your gear and treasure without worrying about the weight of those objects. If you try to haul an unusually heavy object or a massive number of lighter objects, the DM might require you to abide by the rules.” Okay, thanks, book.

Here’s my little secret, though. Encumbrance doesn’t really work anyway. I’ve been using it in Worlds Without number and it’s rarely led to interesting gameplay. I understand why this has evolved out of games; it’s just not worth it. Old school gamers will keep pretending it’s pivotal, but it really isn’t.

Having said that, “don’t worry about it, but here are some rules if you have to” is not what I was hoping for.

14. Inspiration (& ideals, bonds, flaws)

Twenty-three years ago, I bought a beautiful coffee table RPG book called Nobilis: the Game of Sovereign Powers. I’ve played very little Nobilis, maybe a hundredth of the amount of D&D I’ve played; it is true to its reputation of being unplayable. But that setting and those rules still haunt me. I wonder if maybe now, with two more decades of experience, I could pull it off… (Quinns gave it a shot here).

Anyway, I think someone in the design team for the 2014 edition of Dungeons and Dragons also read and perhaps even tried to play Nobilis.

In Nobilis, players are miraculous individuals, fighting in a war over reality itself. The currency of their power is miracle points, like spell slots for gods, and they are hard to come by. The way one accrues miracle points in Nobilis is by invoking the Chamomile Law: there is energy in adversity, or when a handicap makes life difficult for a player, they gain miracle points. And just like how D&D characters have bonds, flaws, and ideals, Nobilis have bonds, limits, and virtues. Care for your bonds, gain miracle points. Overcome your limits, gain miracle points. Observe your virtues, gain miracle points. 

And that’s kind of how the 2014 edition of Dungeons and Dragons handles inspiration! Except it waffles around the rules so much that nobody understood this. The 2014 edition of the Dungeon Master’s Guide is all like “oh, you could give it for roleplaying, or maybe when someone does something cool, or makes the other players laugh, or maybe just randomly when you’re in a good mood or you like the song that’s on the radio.”

NO!

Just make it clear that inspiration is the reward for doing something detrimental, risky or suboptimal because of your flaw or ideal. And only when there is an actual choice with a real cost to following your character’s traits. You’re heavily outmatched, but your ideal is “I never run away from a fight”? Well, gain inspiration if you charge in! You’re standing before a T-junction, and your ideal is “I always go left”? Cool. You get nothing. Unless the left path crosses a lake of lava, while the right has free ice cream.

Anyway, that system is beautiful, just like most everything else in Nobilis is beautiful, and all WotC had to do to also be beautiful was clean it up a little bit. Maybe something that’s more of a currency than the on/off inspiration die, so you can give strength values to your bonds and flaws, and clarify the rules so that it’s clear when you get to invoke or change them.

Instead, they just deleted the whole thing. I’m sure the trend is not escaping you, dear reader, of interesting but flawed systems just getting axed as part of this new edition.

By the way, I really dislike that humans get free inspiration now – it reuses a mechanic that was purely created as a roleplaying aid (modulo the waffling discussed above) and slots it into the base mechanics. It feels wrong somehow. It means that humans are actually less bothered by their bonds, flaws and ideals, because they already have the inspiration die anyway.

Don’t put this meta-system into the base, you’re breaking the fourth wall!

Part 5: The Woke Stuff

We gotta spend some words on the woke stuff.

Reading the title of this chapter probably makes me sound like a dickhead, because the word woke is used chiefly by dickheads. I assure you I am not one (I think?).

So, should we remove orcs and drow from the 2024 edition of the Monster Manual?

Man, I dunno. I understand the connotations of fantasy races that are evil by nature. I get racial determinism. Guys, I can see how the Gringotts goblins kind of look like a real-world stereotype of a certain religion, ok? I get it!

I’ll paraphrase Mearls here with a sidenote that the man himself is no stranger to controversy and cancellation, perhaps rightfully so, although I will say it is easy to judge a man in his situation. Regardless of the merits of those accusations, the point he makes seems strong.

Fair warning, I used AI to restructure his original reply, as it was a spoken interview and therefore incredibly rambling. I also took the opportunity to make it sound Gygaxian (himself also not a flawless man).

“Indeed, one must acknowledge that the custodians of Dungeons & Dragons have encountered numerous hurdles, particularly in the realm of representation—exemplified by controversies surrounding Spelljammer and reported grievances from former contributors. Understandably cautious from past criticisms, they have, perhaps excessively, steered clear of daring narrative decisions.

Take, for instance, the treatment of Orcish culture; rather than addressing complexity and nuance, they’ve opted for simplistic removal. Orcish narratives have become shallow, stripped of their substance. While caution regarding sensitive matters is commendable, it deprives the audience of the rich storytelling opportunities inherent to the game. One might have welcomed fresh explorations, such as the introduction of distinctive Orcish deities or detailed cultural frameworks, clearly emphasising behaviour as cultural rather than inherently racial.

Modern games such as Baldur’s Gate 3 exemplify the potential success of nuanced storytelling. This game vividly demonstrates that even hostile beings like goblins can be depicted with complexity and depth, allowing players meaningful interactions beyond mere combat. The resonance and popularity of such an approach among players are undeniable.

Regrettably, recent D&D releases seem to retreat excessively into mechanics at the expense of immersive narrative depth, possibly from uncertainty about audience reception. The contemporary Monster Manual notably eschews unique humanoid creatures, favouring generic archetypes like “thief,” “bandit,” or “pirate.” Ironically, by dehumanising creatures completely, it inadvertently suggests permissible violence based solely on arbitrary labels.”

So how do I feel? Selfishly, I think orcs and drow are cool fantasy monsters, and I hate to see them go. It’s fun to have the caravan be attacked by brutal orcs, everybody fights, and we all feel good about ourselves. I like to imagine myself mature enough to be able to distinguish between fantasy monsters and the real world.

For a while, D&D did not have devils or demons. That was for dumb reasons, though, and this orc thing is not. So maybe I just need to suck it up? It’s hard to let go of things. I live in a country where we still debate whether a little annual blackface is harmless fun for the kids.

I will conclude with some links to other people’s thoughts on the issue and the remark that “the woke stuff” will not negatively impact the final score of this review.

Good articles:

• https://alphastream.org/index.php/2025/02/26/an-alternative-to-removing-orcs-and-drow-from-dds-monster-manual/
• https://www.wargamer.com/dnd/problematic-orcs
• https://therpggazette.wordpress.com/2025/04/07/savage-stereotypes-and-dark-dilemmas-orcs-drow-and-dds-racial-reckoning/
• https://www.theguardian.com/games/2025/jan/01/orcs-elves-and-culture-wars-how-diversity-in-dd-met-a-rightwing-backlash

Part 6: Talking About Travel Some More

I think it’s worth talking about one of these sections in-depth to highlight something.

I’m going to start by saying that even though the travel rules are now much more compact and in a single place, I still feel the need to research them and make notes to really understand or use them in practice. They are not a recipe. So let’s recreate the recipe.

ONE. Split the journey up into stages. A stage represents a part of the journey where the terrain and circumstances are uniform. A stage has a maximum travel time of 10 days (“or so”).

Question: What if I want to follow a long road for three months? Do I split the journey into nine stages that are pretty much the same as each other? I guess in practice it’s incredibly rare to travel for over ten days without hitting some sort of waypoint, but if the rules cap a stage, then they should mention what happens at that cap! And also, who writes “or so” in game rules – what does that even mean? Is it ten or not?

Then, repeat for each stage:

TWO. Determine the weather (temperature, wind, precipitation).

1-14: normal temp

15-17: 1d4 * 10 degrees F colder

18-20: 1d4 * 10 degrees F hotter

1-12: no wind

13-17: light wind

18-20: strong wind

1-12: no rain

13-17: light rain

18-20: heavy rain (or snowfall)

THREE. Note special weather rules that are in effect:

If the temperature is 0 degrees F or lower, a DC 10 Con save each hour to prevent exhaustion

If it’s 100 F or higher: if the party has water, no problem. If not: a DC 5 Con save each hour to prevent exhaustion, and the DC increases by 1 for each subsequent hour. Also armor imposes disadvantage.

If the wind is strong: disadvantage on ranged attacks, and fires blow out. In the desert, sandstorms also cause a disadvantage on perception.

If there is heavy rain, everything is lightly obscured, everyone has disadvantage on perception, and flames are extinguished.

Question: If I have a 10-day stage and I roll poorly, does that mean ten days of heavy rain, strong winds, and intense heat? Seems rough!

Question: What are normal temperatures? Does the book say this? Do I make my own?

Question: How easy is it to get extreme weather? You’d have to have a normal temperature of exactly 50°F to be safe from the + or – 40°F getting you in trouble!

Question: If I am travelling through the mountains for 2 days and I roll for extreme cold, will I make 48 DC 10 con saves? I guess a 5-sp blanket affords me advantage, and a 1gp bedroll negates the test completely, so then it’s just 16 DC 10 con saves with advantage.

Question: Do I need to drink more than normal in extreme heat? The rules for dehydration don’t mention anything like that, so I guess not?

FOUR. Determine pace. Slow, Normal, or Fast. Terrain and circumstances change the maximum pace allowed:

• Someone’s movement speed is reduced by half → Slow is the max
• Following a road → Increase the max by one “level” (e.g. Slow becomes Normal)
• Coastal, Desert, Forest, Hill, Underdark, Urban → Normal is the max
• Mountain, Swamp → Slow is the max

Question: How do roads interact with slow travellers? Can the speed be Normal in that case?

FIVE. Note down special rules that are in effect due to travel speed:

Fast: Disadvantage on Perception, Survival, and Stealth.

Normal: Disadvantage on Stealth checks.

Slow: Advantage on Perception and Survival.

Question: If my speed is limited by factors like terrain or slow travellers, do I get these benefits?

Question: Does moving slowly cancel out the effect of heavy rain?

SIX. Determine the distance travelled per day. Assuming 30’ movement speed:

• Fast: 32 miles
• Normal: 24 miles
• Slow: 16 miles

Question: Wait, a stage was supposed to be 10 days of travel, but we only know how many travel days we need once we determine the pace! Is this the heavy lifting that the “or so” is doing? Is a stage simply up to 240 miles in length?

SEVEN. Determine forced march. The party can increase its travel distance by a few miles for any given day by travelling more than 8 hours. For each extra hour, add 2 (slow), 3 (normal), or 4 (fast) miles to the distance travelled that day. This means the total number of days the trip takes can be reduced here.

Question: When do we roll for exhaustion here? Every day? And when do we choose which days to spend extra time marching, and how much time? Since the system splits a journey into stages, we need to make these decisions up-front before rolling for the stage!

Ok, now we’re getting into “narrate the travel” and “introduce challenges”. To fit these into a recipe, I’ll have to stretch them somewhat – the text just says “hey, you could do this thing maybe!”

EIGHT. Encounters!

Determine encounter distance based on terrain. Determine special circumstances (ambush, attack from above, distant sighting, found by chance, pursuit).

Play out the encounter!

Question: so erm. Do I arbitrarily say that it’s encounter time now? Is there no procedural way to generate these things or their circumstances?

Question: Every group I’ve ever played with wanted to do some sort of reconnaissance or move stealthily through enemy territory. Got any rules for that? Is stealthy travel the assumption (with travel speed imposing disadvantage unless slow)?

Question: What are the rules for stealth (in case of the ambush, or if my players are trying to be stealthy)? What are the rules for the other circumstances? Being surprised imposes disadvantage on initiative, but when are you surprised? I don’t think the book has anything on any of this! It’s funny, there is a section “perception and encounters” which says if one group tries to hide, use the rules in the player’s handbook. What rules?? I can check the rules for hiding and they explain advantages and disadvantages and stuff, and what the perception DC is, but, like, who rolls the perception check and when? Is it just at the start of combat when the ambush springs? Can players spot an ambush earlier and warn their friends?

Question: I’m not done with stealth yet. When it comes to stealth, there is a problem in D&D, which is that the chance of failure reaches a likelihood bordering on certainty as we increase the number of checks made. In other words, does each goblin roll its own Hide check for the ambush? Because one of them will roll a 1 and ruin the whole thing. Does each player roll a perception check? Because one of them will roll a 20 and ruin the whole thing. The 2024 edition of the Dungeon Master’s Guide actually explicitly tells us not to use group checks for either of these scenarios, which is hilarious because they are exactly the scenarios that group checks solve.

NINE. Foraging. Why is this here, in the journey challenges section, right next to monster encounters?! Any and every character can forage. Roll a survival check with a DC based on the terrain (see table) and don’t forget to take your travel speed into account! On a success roll 1d6+WIS for your food and 1d6+WIS for your water, and multiply those by the number of days you’ve travelled and foraged. Yeah, it’s all-or-nothing, baby!

Question: Any downsides to foraging? No?

TEN. Navigation. One player rolls a survival checks and another helps – and don’t forget to take travel speed into account! The DC is in the terrain table. On a failure… You figure it out! I don’t know what to tell you here. As a baseline, the travel time is extended by 10% – 60%.

Question: yeah so what happens exactly? What?

Question: So if I extend the travel time by 40%, what is the procedure there? Do I recalculate the forage results? Add more encounters? Move time forward by an extra day or two?

Question: As with foraging, any reason not to have the best survivalist roll this check and always have another player use the help action? Does this just have Advantage by default?

ELEVEN. Obstacles. I am going to skip obstacles. This paragraph just says “something could happen! Maybe even some damage!”

TWELVE. Searching and tracking. So this is funny. They are very similar but quite different. Note how I went from trying to summarise the rules to just sort of reviewing and talking about the rules. That’s because there isn’t much to summarise and a lot to talk about.

The abovementioned funniness is this: searching can fail, and the rules don’t say what happens if it does. I guess we can’t find the sunless citadel, guys, pack it in and let’s head back! On the other hand, tracking does have rules for failure, and they’re completely inconsequential: a failed tracking test just costs an hour (followed by an automatic success, no less). What’s the point?!

Question: What’s the point?

Question: by the way, what about those daily and hourly rolls for stuff like extreme temperatures?

THIRTEEN. Track food. Reduce everyone’s rations by their needs per day (usually 1 gallon of water and 1 pound of food). This is where we roll for malnourishment and dehydration, I guess?

Question: Rolling for exhaustion here means we’re doing it after our encounters, etc. That’s not really a question, I guess. I think the rules want these stages to be pretty short, rather than the 10 days that were given as a max.

Question: by the way, what about those daily and hourly rolls for stuff like extreme temperatures? I guess we can add them here.

FOURTEEN. Roll for daily and hourly stuff like extreme temperature, and if you decided to do a forced march.

Now go back to TWO for the next stage of the journey!

Is this clear? Is this good? Will this help me play the game? I kind of hate it.

And you know what’s funny, there is this journey encounter problem that’s completely glossed over, which is the long rest reset thing. Since a journey is usually multiple days, and encounters are generally limited to one a day, the party is always at full power (thanks to long rests) for any encounter. So the wild needs to be extremely dangerous compared to things like dungeons in order to be interesting for the players. Let’s not mention it.

Question: Speaking of which, what about being attacked while sleeping at camp? Any rules for generating those encounters? How do watches work? This is basic stuff that comes up all the goshdarn day in dungeons and dragons!

This is what I mean when I say that there is an idea here, but not a playtested and polished set of rules.

Part 7: Weird Words

Is it me, or is there so much clunky wording in the 2024 edition of Dungeons and Dragons?

“You gain the Ability Score Improvement feat or another feat of your choice.”

Why doesn’t it just say you gain a feat?

“Whenever you use Turn Undead, you can roll a number of d8s equal to your Wisdom modifier (minimum of 1d8) and add the rolls together.”

Adding the rolls together sounds like I’m in kindergarten or something. What’s wrong with “and total the results”?

“When you roll Initiative, you regain expended uses of Bardic Inspiration until you have two if you have fewer than that.”

What? Why is this so needlessly complicated? Check this sentence structure: when X, you Y until Z if not Z.

“When a spell you cast with a spell slot restores Hit Points to a creature, that creature regains additional Hit Points on the turn you cast the spell. The additional Hit Points equal 2 plus the spell slot’s level.”

This one I kind of get, it takes care of confusion around lingering or delayed effects. But it’s still clunky.

“As a Bonus Action, you can make one attack with a weapon or an Unarmed Strike”

Another instance of a weird non-choice! You can attack with a weapon. Or you can attack without a weapon. Ok, cool, thanks! I realise that the weapon versus unarmed attack was a whole thing in the 2014 edition of dungeon and dragons, but that was entirely a hell of their own making, and this is not the way out of that hell.

“You can use this feature only if you haven’t moved during this turn, and after you use it, your Speed is 0 until the end of the current turn.”

That is certainly a way to say that you can’t move and use this feature on the same turn.

Part 8: That Which Was Lost

Ok, I’ve been dancing around this issue for a while, so let’s dive into it. The 2024 edition of Dungeons and Dragons attempts to fix a bunch of problems from the 2014 edition of Dungeons and Dragons by excising them from the rules. And look, sometimes it’s good to cut things. Kill your darlings! But in so many of these cases, the thing they removed served a purpose and no replacement is provided.

Dungeons and Dragons once had a concept called “To Hit Armour Class 0”. This was a system where each character had a specific value that they needed to roll on a D20 to hit another character if that character had an armour class of 0, which, unintuitively, was the best armour class, not the worst. If a character had a worse armour class, say 5, the roll could be 5 lower than the required number to hit armour class 0. I’m sure you follow. This was, and is, a bad system, and you can easily remove it from the game. But it has a purpose – you couldn’t just remove THAC0 and replace it with “roll a die, and the DM determines whether the result is a hit”.

Here is a nonexhaustive list of stuff that’s gone:

• Orcs and drow.
• Explicitly optional rules (as a concept, but also some of them have been stripped away).
• The ranger’s exploration-based abilities.
• Rules for creating monsters.
• Random dungeon creation.
• The effect of group size on challenge rating.
• Random encounter rules.
• Ideals, bonds, and flaws.
• Random tables. There are so much fewer of those in the 2024 edition. I counted about 90 in the 2024 edition of Dungeons and Dragons versus 150 in the 2014 edition of Dungeons and Dragons.
• Costs and rules for ships and strongholds (but Bastions).
• Downtime activities.
• Madness (see also: The Woke Stuff).
• Appendix D: DM inspiration.

Some of these upset me more than others. The omission of a way to calculate the CR for a monster is inexcusable for a game that’s all about creativity.

Part 9: That Which Was Gained: Characters

We should get back to the business of reviewing. I may have gone a bit off on a tangent here.

I spent a lot of time talking about Hasbro (irrelevant), the art (minor), what I would put in a new edition (who cares), a minor ranger gripe (insubstantial), the woke stuff (didn’t go anywhere), the travel procedure (sucked in both versions), and the stuff that isn’t in the 2024 edition of Dungeons and Dragons (not what we’re here to review). So why not talk about what’s actually in the book?

I like the berserker barbarian changes.

Regaining one rage on a short rest is a nice touch. Getting rid of that exhaustion clause on frenzy is good; it kinda sucked. Substituting Str for another stat when doing any test sounds fun and thematic. Foregoing advantage to deal more damage and do something cool is more interesting than adding a dice to critical hits.

It’s a shame that something cool involves 15 feet of movement, though, but I promised myself I wouldn’t go back to nitpicking. For now, the barbarian is better, more streamlined. The totem warrior (now called wild heart) also seems an upgrade, where you don’t have to lock yourself into a single benefit but can choose one whenever you rage.

I think this is the real meat of the 2024 upgrade to Dungeons and Dragons: the character classes are better. We played the game for ten years, we figured out what the rough edges are, and we polished them off. And if you weigh the changes by the amount of playtime they get at the table, a tiny tweak to improve a character class is worth a thousand optional rest rules.

That little addition does a lot of work – you regain one use of rage when you finish a short rest. I’ve been in this position, with the barbarian, where I was out of rage, and it sucked. Not being able to do the thing your character does. But it’s interesting how similar the character is in terms of power level to the previous version. Things only really change at level 9, where you do a paltry 1d10 extra damage in exchange for losing the advantage from reckless attacks (where you used to just crit a tiny bit harder, which was inconsequential). People on forums are debating fiercely whether they should use the 2014 or 2024 edition of Dungeons and Dragons, and if they need to rebalance their campaigns. Going by the barbarian, it doesn’t really matter.

But that short rest. I wonder if that’s a fix, since barbarians were uniquely dependent on long rests where other classes always regained some of their power, or if that’s a change in philosophy. The team has stated they wanted to move away from the long rest, short rest resource management; maybe this is how they did it for the barbarian. Still, it seems pretty minor all things considered.

Let’s look at the champion fighter, always our touchstone for balance.

Level 1:

– Fighting style. Pretty much the same in the two versions. Making it a feat is an elegant quality of life improvement, as is allowing a swap.

– Second wind. We get a second Second Wind in the new version. Definitely an upgrade, although only one comes back after a short rest. Interestingly, this goes against the idea of reducing resource management, as it front-loads our fighter more than he used to be.

Level 2:

– Action surge. The same, although magic is now disallowed. Fine, I guess.

– Tactical mind. Similar to how barbarians get a nice skill-related ability, warriors get one too. I like this, but it has very little impact on combat balance.

Level 3:

– Improved critical. Same.

– Remarkable athlete. New, and also a nice addition. Again, similar to our barbarian friend, we gain some movement tech (I will get to the nitpick later), and advantage on initiative is nothing. But as with tactical mind, the direct impact on combat balance is minor at best.

Level 4:

– ASI. Same.

Level 5:

– Extra attack. Same.

– Tactical shift. Some more movement tech. Maybe I should have revised my earlier judgment on the 2024 edition of Dungeons and Dragons addressing the role of tactics in combat? Biting my tongue, though. Also, again, little impact on combat strength. I mean, it’s not nothing; it might help you swing on a monster you otherwise wouldn’t have, or avoid an attack, but it’s not anything that warrants an encounter rebalance.

Level 6:

– ASI again. Sure. It strikes me as funny how similar these two versions of the fighter class really are. Did we need a new book for this? Don’t get me wrong, the changes seem very good. But didn’t Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything do something like this? Could this new edition have been a new instalment in the “of Everything” series?

Level 7:

– Incredibly lame athlete ability that lets you add a few points to skill checks. Thankfully replaced with a second fighting style feat. This is where the 2024 version of the champion outguns the 2014 version, as these feats actually do useful things.

Level 8:

– Oh, look, it’s an ASI. You can, of course, also gain feats for these upgrades, and perhaps the 2024 feats are a lot better than the 2014 ones? From what I’ve seen, they’re on a similar power level, improving weak ones and reducing overpowered ones (I’m looking at you, Great Weapon Specialist).

Level 9: 

– Reroll saving throws. Same cadence, but the new version allows you to add a bonus, which makes a lot of sense because the saving throws you reroll tend to be the ones you suck at, so your reroll would rarely do much. Another upgrade in power for sure, but unless the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, our 2024 fighter seems incredibly similar to its 2014 counterpart.

Level 10:

– Our old fighter finally gets a second fighting style, while our new fighter gets perma-inspiration. Now here’s a change that I actually dislike! Not from a balance or gameplay point of view, I actually think that this seems like a fun upgrade, but from the point of misusing the inspiration system. I mentioned this before, but by downgrading heroic inspiration to a “regular” game mechanic, it loses its ability to be used as a meta-currency to reward good roleplaying. Why “pay” for your heroic inspiration by doing something suboptimal that fits your character, when you can just get a free refresh in combat?

So for the first ten levels, our difference in combat prowess consists of:

– One extra second wind per long rest.

– Advantage on initiative.

– Earlier 2nd fighting style.

– A bonus to rerolled saving throws.

– Permanent heroic inspiration (at level 10).

Is this fighter stronger? Sure! Is he much stronger? Probably not? Would you rather play a 2024 fighter or a 2014 fighter with a +1 weapon?

So, where does this put us review-wise? Looking at the fighter and barbarian, they both got some good upgrades. Bad abilities got reworked, and some quality of life stuff got added. I would say this is a nice patch to the 2014 edition of Dungeons and Dragons.

There are also a few fully new subclasses. These are hard to judge from reading the book, and will need playing to fully grasp. My hunch is that they are not as polished as these upgraded ones but rather fall somewhere between the 2014 original classes and Unearthed Arcana in terms of their quality. Maybe I am not being charitable here, I just can’t see these new classes being miles better than the OG ones from release. The psi warrior seems fine, for instance, the flight stuff sounds like fun; the earlier abilities are just some extra numbers to damage or whatever. Then there’s another movement tech. It’s fine.

Here are some random thoughts about other nice changes that I like: I approve of the new wild shape! Deflecting attacks is cooler than just deflecting arrows! The hunter mark fix is good! The internet seems to have Opinions on this one, but I think it’s much improved from the 2014 edition. Similarly, a lot of the eldritch blast-related traps for the warlock have been fixed!

The warlock pact refactor is a good upgrade!

Yay!

Part 10: That Which Was Gained pt 2: Monsters

There is a persistent myth going around the internet about the 2024 edition of Dungeons and Dragons being wholly rebalanced. Questions on Reddit about “Can I play this 2024 character with 2014 monsters? Can I use old adventures without rebalancing? Will everything fall apart?” 

We’ve already taken a look at the Champion Fighter and concluded that any balance changes were minor; let us now examine the monsters.

First off, a lot of monsters are exactly the same. Aboleth, Shadow Demon, Yeti.

Others look stronger, but aren’t really. Here’s the 2014 Dao:

AC: 18

HP: 187

Attacks: 2 (+10 to hit; 20 damage; save or be knocked prone)

And here’s the 2024 Dao:

AC: 18

HP: 200

Attacks 3 (+10 to hit; 20 damage; knocked prone)

Whoa! One whole extra attack, that’s a massive 50% increase in damage!

But wait! Daos know magic.

The 2014 Dao casts these pells:

Detect Evil and Good, Detect Magic, Stone Shape, Passwall, Move Earth, Tongues, Conjure Elemental (earth elemental only), Gaseous Form, Invisibility, Phantasmal Killer, Plane Shift, Wall of Stone.

Compare to the 2024 Dao’s spell list:

Detect Evil and Good, Detect Magic, Stone Shape, Gaseous Form, Invisibility, Move Earth, Passwall, Plane Shift, Tongues, Wall of Stone.

Do you see the difference? The new Dao has no offensive spells, while the old one does. When you fight a 2014 Dao, you’re not just fighting him; you’re fighting him and his Earth Elemental buddy. Over the course of a three-round combat (the default assumption for calculating monster damage), that elemental adds 6 attacks that deal 14 damage each. Add that to the Dao’s own damage, and the increase is a lot less pronounced: 164 versus 180, just about a 10% damage increase. That earth elemental will also soak up some attacks, accounting for the old Dao’s reduced hitpoints.

Let’s look at another creature. A better illustration of the point is the archmage, 2014’s archmage looks like this:

AC: 15

HP: 99

Attacks: 1 (+6 to hit; 4 damage)

And the upgraded version looks like this:

AC: 17

HP: 170

Attacks: 4 (+9 to hit; 27 damage)

Does that mean the old archmage was a pushover? Of course not, its power lies in its extensive spell list, containing stuff like Time Stop, Glove of Invulnerability, Cone of Cold, Lightning Bolt, and Stone Skin, with the ability to upcast freely. Rather than four bolts (108 damage single target), the archmage spams level 8 cones of cold (50 damage in a 60’ cone). Hitting just two targets evens out the damage.

As for the hitpoints discrepancy, the old archmage takes half damage from spells and nonmagical attacks; the new one has no such rider, although it does have the Shield spell available.

So which one is stronger? I have no idea. Time Stop is the real factor here, allowing the 2014 archmage to dictate the battle, starting from any convenient location thanks to Teleport, with a strategic Wall of Force splitting the party and an alpha-strike Cone of Cold or Lightning Bolt, oh and maybe some Mirror Images for fun. But the party can also just Counterspell that and instantly delete our 99 HP grandpa.

Either way, there is more to it than the default attack property suggests.

Here’s the bottom line: the monsters have not been significantly rebalanced, but instead they’ve been streamlined. They’ve been made less spikey. On average, being immune to nonmagical melee damage increases a monster’s effective hit points. In practice, though, it means the monster is either unkillable or severely weakened, depending on whether I have a sword +1 or not. The archmage is another example of that spikeyness: it gets its Time Stop off, rolls high for the number of free turns, and absolutely demolishes the party, or it’s a low HP pincushion. The 2024 edition has removed these rough edges across the board and, more importantly, simplified things a lot for the dungeon master.

Often this is for the better, like with the intellect devourer, an infamous 2014 monster that would reduce your Int to 0 PERMANENTLY, and then outright kill you with its Body Thief ability. In the 2024 edition of Dungeons & Dragons, the humble intellect devourer merely deals psychic damage rather than wiping out Intelligence, and requires its target to be below 10 HP to use Body Thief. Resistance to nonmagical attacks has been traded for 7 hit points.

But this stabilisation comes at a price. What has no edges leaves no mark. Is there a difference between an archmage who fires four magical bolts (27 damage each) and a skeletal archer who shoots four ethereal arrows (27 damage each)? Would intellect devourers be as infamous as they are now if they didn’t TPK your party out of nowhere?

As a final remark, the Monster Manual for the 2024 edition of Dungeons & Dragons contains more monsters, but at the cost of background information. This may seem like a nitpick, but the old tome was an adventure generating inspiration-machine as much as it was a statblock reference. The new one is less so.

Part 11: That Which Was Gained pt 3: Greyhawk

A quick word now on Greyhawk, deemed worthy of no less than 30 full-colour pages in the 2024 edition of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. A setting that I do not care about, and that you do not care about, and that Wizards of the Coast does not care about.

Are you telling me you had to cut the dungeon and monster creation rules for this? A gazetteer for a setting that isn’t even the official setting of Fifth Edition?

I am perplexed and flabbergasted at the decision to slap this into the DMG. What an absolute waste. Who thought this was a good idea? Why not cut the magic items so we can include a few recipes from the D&D cookbook while we’re at it?

Part 12: That Which Was Gained pt 4: Bastions

I was looking forward to this. Domain management has been conspicuously absent in recent editions of the World’s Greatest Roleplaying Game(™). I think that’s one of the reasons that higher-level D&D tends to fall apart – dungeon delving just isn’t as exciting when you’re a group of world-altering superheroes, while an increasingly large-scale political campaign fits perfectly.

I understand how successfully transitioning from one game to another is an almost unattainable holy grail. Who’s to say that the players who loved a single-character exploration game will equally love a grand warfare sim? Moving from Gloomhaven to Twilight Imperium cannot be anyone’s cup of tea, but by god it would be glorious. It’s particularly funny that this is the reverse origin story of D&D – starting with the war game and applying those rules to a smaller scale, with the natural evolution always having been to end up back at the war game.

So I see how D&D hasn’t really tried it for the last couple of decades.

There are some good attempts out there. I like An Echo Resounding by Kevin Crawford. The one in the 2024 version of the Dungeon Master’s Guide is more akin to Matt Colville’s Kickstarter hit Strongholds & Followers, which I, even though I was an enthusiastic backer at the time, don’t think is particularly good. Things here are too abstracted, too removed from the actual world. It’s a little meta-game that gives you bonuses on your adventures. To be fair, I haven’t played with these rules yet, but that’s kind of their problem. The Bastion section failed to make me excited for domain play. I doubt it will become D&D canon.

Part 13: Conclusion

Which takes us rather abruptly to the conclusion. Where to begin? We’ve gone so deep into the details that it’s hard to see the big picture.

I am an adult with infinite money. When Wizards of the Coast puts out a new version of a product I love, charging me full price for three books that I have to expensively order online because they’ve failed to restock to my friendly local game store, that doesn’t really matter to me.

I’m writing this not to brag, but to emphasise that even within these parameters, the books don’t seem worth it to me. The new classes are cool, I guess, as are the tweaks to monsters and spells here and there, but as much has been lost as has been gained. This should have been an actual new edition, with big, impactful changes addressing all the structural flaws of the 2014 release of Dungeons and Dragons.

It’s not.

That version of D&D is already very good. Fixing its flaws would be hard and time-consuming work. That was never the drive. The drive was corporate interest and putting something out quickly without ruffling too many feathers.

I’m sure the talented folk who created Fifth Edition for Wizards of the Coast can fix this. Too bad they don’t work there anymore.

Appendix 1: Some Other Stuff I Noticed While Reading the Books

PHB

They still haven’t made it so that rolling for HP gives the same average result as taking the average value (all that’s needed is a rule to reroll 1’s).

Extra actions that aren’t bonus actions are beginning to creep in, watering down that concept even more (flawed as it is).

The way tools proficiency is done in the new edition is smart, though the interplay is confusing.

The reroll rules can cause some interesting chains, especially when the reroll has advantage or disadvantage.

I don’t know how I feel about infinite Command spells. Command is strong.

Turn Undead seems rough. Was it always this rough?

Do monsters understand illusions?

Converting spells into wild shape is kinda wild, no pun intended. Especially with Evergreen Wild Shape at 20.

Adding psionics as a specific fighter subclass is interesting, although wouldn’t it be cool if that was its whole own thing? 

I wonder why ki became focus?

Spellcasting focus has always been unclear to me, and this book doesn’t help. How does a Paladin with a shield cast a spell?

The Paladin oaths got a bit weaksauce although that probably matches how people actually treat them in their games.

Foe Slayer seems kinda bad? 2 extra damage per hit?

I think having a specific beast is a thing players like, maybe idk.

Knockout seems crazy.

Does everyone pick locks with sleight of hand? Does that mean rogues get advantage?

Weapon mastery, I dunno, have to play with this. Fun in bg3 but is it adding too much bookkeeping to combat? Is the elegance missing?

Hey, the one spell per turn wording got a great improvement!

Not going to go over all the spells, but good to see Command “nerfed”.

And Leomund’s Tiny Hut is (slightly) fixed.

And the Sleep change is probably for the better, too.

DMG

I love the bit on exploiting the rules, mentioning the peasant rail gun. Solid advice to not tolerate wangrods.

I think it is very good that the DMG has a lot of actual DM advice now about a lot of practical stuff.

DMG confirms sleight of hand and thieves’ tools apply.

Oh, they moved the Xanathar guide item tables here, nice!

But not wealth per level :(.

MM

Not convinced about the mod sav thing. It’s fine, I guess.

Pb in the CR? Sure.

Treasure is interesting, bit of a throwback, need to see how well it lines up with rules.

Says here that monsters don’t upcast spells!

The legendary action boilerplate is improved.

Having more Bandits is good. Much-used enemy.

I like the damage riders to abilities like charm, so even if you fail, you do something.

Bugbear ambush is improved.

Cult fanatic doesn’t have Harm anymore, which is probably fair (that thing was murder).

Demilich was in a weird place; it’s better now, I think.

They fixed the Doppelganger.

And Ghoul paralysis.

Nice touch adding some weaker goblins. Goblins are funny, no racial determinism here, these are fey, so we’re excused!

Rakshasa magic resistance makes sense.

Werewolf damage immunity is gone, as is the curse of lycanthropy (kinda). That did make them feel special, didn’t it? Another example of overpolishing.

Changing the Poisonous Snake into a Venomous Snake is funny and correct. 10/10 best improvement of the 2024 edition of Dungeons and Dragons.

Appendix 2: The New Adventures

Rather than using the opportunity to reset the dwindling quality of their adventure modules, Wizards of the Coast instead seems to have doubled down on bad practices. Not much more to say here.

Final Verdict:

7.1/10