Summary

• The 2024 DnD Player's Handbook begins with basic rules for better understanding.
• The new Dungeon Master's Guide provides sample adventures and a campaign setting.
• 2025's expanded Monster Manual adds more monsters and NPCs to fill in gaps.

The core rulebooks for Dungeons & Dragons are adding and overhauling plenty of new features, but the biggest selling point of the new books could be their approach to removing as much friction and frustration from the game as possible. DnD's complexity has always been a sticking point for many new players, and even seasoned veterans can find aspects of deg characters, campaigns, and more inconvenient. Although the fifth edition of DnD does a generally good job at being more approachable than past iterations, there's still been plenty of room for improvement.

DnD 5e has been using the same set of core rulebooks for a decade, and time has helped to clarify which aspects of the books tend to trip players up. DnD Starter Sets can be an easier way to jump into the game, but the Player's Handbook frequently serves as the first introduction in practice, and the 2014 version didn't set things up in the most immediately legible way. For dungeon masters, both the Dungeon Master's Guide and Monster Manual had their own issues, with the Dungeon Master's Guide in particular failing to deliver everything a starting DM might need.

The 2024 Player's Handbook Starts With Basic D&D Rules

A Simple Change In Structure Could Help A Lot

One big change should be immediately obvious upon diving into the 2024 Player's Handbook. While the 2014 version began with a brief introduction before jumping into a chapter on DnD character creation, the new Player's Handbook opens instead with a chapter titled "Playing the Game." Although diving right into character creation can be tempting, it's hard to make sense of it without understanding the basic rules, which the book now lays out in advance.

This chapter offers a condensed overview of all the basic rules, while a glossary in the back serves as a more encyclopedic reference. If executed well, this should make both learning and reference easier. The first chapter also includes examples of play with commentaries about how the rules are being put into action, potentially helping to bridge the gap between understanding the rules on paper and making sense of how they connect to imaginative roleplay.

D&D Character Creation Is Easier Than Ever Before

Additional Features & Examples Make Things Clearer

Once players do move onto creating characters in DnD, the second and third chapters include some of their own significant changes to structure and content. Chapter 2 features guidance on how to create characters at higher levels, as it's not at all uncommon for campaigns to skip some of the earliest ones, as well as inspiration questions and ability score array examples for each class. The first page of Chapter 3 briefly summarizes every class and subclass on one page, and although these blurbs don't offer much detail, they do make it much easier to get the initial gist.

Throughout the Player's Handbook, an increased number of illustrations and a focus on what they're offering to players serves to make the text go down smoothly. Each subclass in the 2024 Player's Handbook has its own piece of art, offering another tool for understanding what they have to offer at a glance. Another useful example is a new two-page spread of basic weapons and prices, taking a catalog-style approach to showcasing them in a complete overview.

About 96% of the art in the new core rulebooks is estimated to be new, representing a significant overhaul from the previous editions.

Helpful Changes In The New Dungeon Master's Guide

New Samples Offer More Examples Of How To DM

The Dungeon Master's Guide will take a similar approach to structural reorganization. While the 2014 Dungeon Master's Guide dedicated its earliest chapters to crafting worlds and adventures, the new version starts with the basics of running games before moving to the art of creation. Like the Player's Handbook, some samples of play with commentary will be included for reference, and the third chapter follows the new focus on presenting information in a way that's easy to reference by arranging useful topics in alphabetical form.

When it comes to creating adventures and campaign settings, the new Dungeon Master's Guide puts an emphasis on providing examples. Some sample adventure content in the book is written in a streamlined manner intended to be more reminiscent of how a dungeon master might lay out a campaign than the usual published style. A reference campaign setting is included in the form of the classic World of Greyhawk, which offers enough flexibility to make it work for plenty of custom adventures.

The back of the Dungeon Master's Guide contains two established appendices. A lore glossary fills in the gaps regarding various characters, locations, ideas, and more that have been established in the decades since DnD was first created, and a selection of maps should be useful in play. It hasn't yet been clarified how indexes of monsters will be distributed this time around, with the 2014 books having placed some in the Dungeon Master's Guide rather than the Monster Manual.

D&D's 2025 Monster Manual Fills In The Gaps

An Overall Expansion Addresses Past Weak Points

For the Monster Manual, most quality-of-life changes come from making sure the book will cover as much ground as possible. Various monster groups have been expanded, and a larger selection of high CR foes should make running campaigns at higher levels easier. The selection of NPCs is also getting significantly boosted, with the comparatively small section in the 2014 Monster Manual often proving to be inadequate in campaigns where dropping in humanoid characters and foes is common.

No choices about organization and content will ever cover every possible approach, and it's likely that the new core rulebooks will still have some sticking points of their own. All the changes in approach from the last iteration make a lot of sense, however, and it certainly bodes well for the ultimate usability of the books in practice. Dungeons & Dragons is taking further steps toward becoming more accessible than ever before, and many of the ways in which it's doing so don't seem like they'll compromise any of the game's complexity or depth.