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There are plenty of questions you could ask about the new D&D rulebooks.
How has my favorite class changed?
What subclasses are there for me to try?
But the biggest one is a lot simpler: why?
Why do these need to exist in the first place?
For D&D creative director Chris Perkins, it’s all additive rather than reductive.
“It is, at the system level, the same game.
So we’ve made some tweaks to things here and there.”
Naturally, it’s not all familiar.
This property now sort of gloms onto weapons to make them much more exciting and fun to play.
Amping up the fun
It feels as if this revamp has been a long time coming.
It just looks like a fantastic, fantastic glow-up of the 2014 Player’s Handbook.'
Little goodies, some new stuff, some little little bits of added lore."
According to Perkins, “the reason we spaced them out is many fold.
One, it’s a 1,000 page book split into three parts.
That is a lot of pages for bookstores to take on.
It is it a lot of paper for our printers.
We already can’t print them all at one printer.
We have to do multiple printers.
It was good for stores, it was good for distributors.
It was good for retailers.
Thanks to those near-400 pages, there’s certainly enough to draw from.
“Well, that’s the weird thing.
We don’t find ourselves in this space too often where we’re not building a new edition.
They are perfectly valid.
If that’s the case, though, why should players upgrade at all?
“I think there are so many user experience improvements at play here,” Perkins says.
The new Monster Manual is a good case in point.
According to Perkins, this is true across the board.
Or maybe they’re easier to run.”
But you know, we’re a text based game.
And that’s the way it is.
[These are] all very deliberate attempts to… help people engage with the game more easily.”
That’s also why the setting in the upcoming Dungeon Master’s Guide was chosen.
And that’s all I can say."
It was like, ‘here is a map.
Here are some place names with some rulers’.
“It is, in that respect, a very pure and very distilled experience.
And what was magical about it is it didn’t have any point of view.
This isn’t to say Wizards of the Coast is slavishly recreating Greyhawk as it existed 30-odd years ago.
“We’re also thinking, this can’t be Greyhawk 1978 or 1980,” Perkins says.
“This has to be Greyhawk 2024.
So is there anything that is problematic [about the original version]?
That is something we will have to address.
And we do.”
Fortunately, the venerable setting didn’t need too much tweaking.
That last point feels very true to the spirit of these new D&D rulebooks.
“It’s all encompassing, insofar as it covers everything.
