D&D: I Wish I Could Show You My Favorite Thing About The 2024 Player's Handbook

There's a lot to talk about in the 2024, but even though I'm perfectly free to discuss its contents, there's still one thing I wish I could share in a different way. Like a lot of fans, I spent some time over the past couple of years following along with playtests and information leading up to the new core rulebooks. There have been some significant hiccups along the way, especially dealing with license changes last year, but with the biggest storms weathered, my overall personal trajectory has been one of increasing optimism.

Although there's still a bit over a month before the early access release of the new, the book is starting to make its way out into the world, most notably through 3,000 copies distributed at Gen Con 2024. I don't have one of those, but I do have an official digital copy, and that comes with an awkward caveat that makes it hard for me to show off the aspect that I love the most.

Dungeons & Dragons lead designer Jeremy Crawford talks about the upcoming 2024 Player's Handbook and some key aspects of what it will entail.

At a total count of 384 pages, 's 2024 covers tons of new and old rules along with a lot that are somewhere in between. It's also filled with art, punctuating long blocks of text with even more illustrations than the 2014 did. The text is what I'm mostly here for, obviously, but the art is what's making me really enjoy my time with the book. On a basic level, there are a lot of smart decisions regarding the placement of illustrations that help to avoid the erratic nature of the approach taken a decade ago.

The most marketable aspect is the inclusion of an art piece for every subclass, something that I absolutely love. Picking out a subclass can be intimidating and disorienting, especially for newcomers, and having that frame of reference makes it a lot easier to immediately imagine what a subclass could be like. Another section that gets a big leg-up is the chapter on spells, which largely avoids the text-only spreads that