Summary

• D&D's 2024 Player's Handbook largely boosts character power, affecting various classes with new features and tweaks.
• More powerful adventuring parties could affect the balance of encounters in past DnD adventures.
• The 2025 Monster Manual might provide answers to rebalancing the game, but it's too early to say.

Dungeons & Dragons is currently in a very weird transitional state. The 2024 Player's Handbook marks the first major revision to the fifth edition rules established in 2014's core rulebooks, but it's not sweeping things aside in favor of a new edition or even taking up a 5.5e mantle like 3.5e did. Fifth edition has been hugely popular, and publisher Wizards of the Coast is promising that the new Player's Handbook will maintain backward compatibility with all the adventures released over the past decade of play.

It's a nice sentiment, but I've never been convinced that it would be that simple. With a copy of DnD's 2024 Player's Handbook now in my hands (well, digitally), I'm more skeptical than ever. It's true that the book doesn't overhaul things to a degree that would completely break the system, and anyone familiar with the rules from 2014 shouldn't have much trouble adjusting to the changes. When all is said and done, however, it doesn't feel like slotting into the same place that the 2014 Player's Handbook did is the new book's highest priority.

D&D's 2024 Player's Handbook Changes The Balance

Characters Are More Powerful Across The Board

One of the most-talked about aspects of DnD's 2024 Player's Handbook is how it addresses traditionally underpowered classes like the Monk and Ranger, but the new book's approach to balance goes a lot farther than just buffing classes that lagged behind. Everyone has at least a little something to be excited about, whether that's an interesting new feature or a tweak to something that was previously hard to use. There are a lot of changes that affect multiple classes as well, like reworked spells and feats that are often more powerful or require less to use than previous iterations did.

I completely understand why the 2024 Player's Handbook is taking this approach, and I'm not immune to its charms. The first thing I did upon getting the book was check out how some classes I was interested in fared, skipping over the new introductory material to revisit later. Buffs are exciting, and tweaking every class upward to varying degrees in an attempt to maintain balance makes everyone happier than buffing some and nerfing others would. If players saw new versions of their classes that felt like downgrades or even sidegrades, they wouldn't be as motivated to embrace the new rules.

When backward compatibility is part of the equation, however, even minor boosts in power can threaten the maintenance of a decade-old ecosystem. Counting both full-length DnD campaign books and anthologies, over 20 substantial adventures have been released for fifth edition play, to say nothing of various smaller modules from starter sets, promotions, and more. All of these books were designed with 2014 characters in mind (or alternate options from books like Tasha's Cauldron of Everything that built on top of that framework), and they're about to get hit with characters that are more powerful than ever before.

Balance In Dungeons & Dragons Is A Tricky Subject

There's Certainly Some Room For Leeway

I don't want to make a mountain out of what's maybe a mid-sized hill, because balance in DnD 5e has always been a fairly loose concept. Running a campaign with three adventurers is very different from running it with five, and campaigns could be erratic in their difficulty to begin with. Some are intentionally designed to be more challenging gauntlets, while others that aren't particularly threatening can feature random difficulty spikes. Taking the median of all this mess still results in a rough approximation of 2014 power levels, however, not 2024 ones.

Community fixes or tips for campaigns with inconsistent difficulty can typically be found online, so coming up with original reworks isn't always necessary when things don't feel quite right.

The biggest argument to make for the idea that this doesn't really matter is that DnD 5e is fundamentally heroic fantasy, where heroes should feel powerful and capable of consistently triumphing over foes. Over time, a larger percentage of the DnD community has skewed toward telling character stories over long stretches of time, and losing those characters in grueling dungeon crawls can be disappointing. My players tend to fall more in line with this ideal, and I tend to present them with challenges that they can consistently overcome without casualties as long as they make smart decisions.

Even so, I feel like the largely minor buffs in the new Player's Handbook could sometimes snowball into making challenges a bit too trivial. The party gains a good chunk of control over the action economy, with changes like more powerful bonus actions and more opportunities to recharge expendable abilities giving everyone more opportunities to steer the course of combat. Feeling like fights don't present genuine threats is likely to bore even a party that's intent on keeping every character alive, and DMs might need to make more tweaks to published campaigns to avoid this sensation.

The 2025 Monster Manual Could Rebalance D&D

2025 Will Bring Some Additional Answers

There's still one big unknown, which is how the new balance might be affected by the Monster Manual that's coming in February 2025. Wizards of the Coast has made the same promises of backward compatibility for the 2025 Monster Manual, but I don't necessarily know what that means. Although the new monster tweaks are meant to make them more interesting rather than harder, if they end up just a bit more powerful in a way that matches the party, balance might be restored. If they truly are the same level of challenge as before, it won't fix much of anything.

Challenge level is only really one aspect of how tricky backward compatibility is with the 2024 Player's Handbook, as attempting to pull in subclasses, spells, and more that have appeared in past books can complicate things even more. Seasoned DMs shouldn't have much trouble navigating these challenges as they come, and I'm not too concerned about how an adventure I'm planning with the new rules will fare. The 2024 Player's Handbook is supposed to make Dungeons & Dragons less confusing than ever, however, and although I think that's largely true, backward compatibility certainly isn't that simple.