New Beginnings

“Explore ancient ruins and deadly dungeons. Battle monsters while searching for legendary treasures. Gain experience and power as you trek across uncharted lands with your companions.” D&D Beyond

I don’t know about you, but here at Team Chaos, we are rather excited about the upcoming new Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook which is set to be bigger and better than ever before. Building on the previous 50 years' worth of gameplay, the 2024 Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook looks to be a ‘must-have’ for all fans of the role-playing game. Read on to find out more about this highly anticipated release!

The Worlds Greatest Role - Playing Game!

The new variant of the Fifth Edition handbook includes 10 years' worth of feedback from players within the Dungeons and Dragons community. This is great news and really makes this edition of the handbook stand out from its predecessors. It attempts to iron out many of the issues players have encountered in previous years and makes for a refreshing update to the lore of the game.

While the core part of the book stays recognisable to most players, there are a few, much-needed adjustments throughout. In fact, there are approximately 384 new pages to discover! These new pages are all about making the rules fun, faster paced, and hopefully easier to learn. A great upgrade for this new edition is updated ‘learn to play,’ and ‘character creation’ sections. It really seems like they are moving towards making the game more logical and accessible, and that is something that we feel is a timely and welcome addition to the world of Dungeons and Dragons. This version of the handbook even includes handy examples of play which we find rather helpful for the newer player to understand gameplay better.

A big overhaul within this new edition is the ‘character creation’ section. This has been greatly expanded on in the 2024 copy of the Players Handbook. There are the 12 classes, 48 subclasses and 10 species which allow you to further customise your character with 16 backgrounds and 75 feats. This edition appears to allow character creation to be more flexible and fluid, giving the player more autonomy than in previous years. We actually think the new Lego range of Dungeons and Dragons (71047) mini- figures are perfect for complementing the new method of character creation!

Not just a Pretty Picture…

We are particularly enamoured with the immersive new artwork; the 2024 edition contains more illustrations than ever before. The artwork features all classes, subclasses, backgrounds, species, weapons, and armour. The new array of art also helps to set up the framework of the game in a highly effective way – this is great news for those who need an attractive, visual reference in order to understand how things work and like something attractive to be able to refer to consistently.

To sum up

The Chaos Cards team are particularly impressed with the alphabetised rules glossary, which makes looking up rules infinitely easier and ensures there is no time wasted whilst playing your carefully planned out campaign. The changes are well thought out and bring a lot more to the table, so the handbook feels really inclusive. Despite containing these new additions, the core rules of the game remain the same, just a whole lot more accessible. This revised and expanded Players Handbook has specifically been designed to be compatible with previous editions, which is also great news for the majority of players who may not want to upgrade their handbooks straight away.

Are you planning on upgrading to the new 2024 edition of the Player's Handbook? Will you be putting it to use at our Dungeons and Dragons nights at Chaos Cards store in Folkestone? Do let us know what you think in the comments below or on our socials @chaoscards- we love to hear from you!