Tabletop GamingDungeons and DragonsNew D&D Player’s Handbook flips character creation on its headWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Tabletop GamingDungeons and DragonsNew D&D Player’s Handbook flips character creation on its headWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)
The 2024 rules revisions for D&D Fifth Edition (5E) comes alongside a fundamental rethink of how Dungeons & Dragons players make their characters in the bestselling roleplaying game.
We’ve known for a couple of years now that the D&D brand wasmoving away from the problematic term ‘race’and embracing a more neutral ‘species’ for the many fantastical creatures – elves, dwarves, tieflings – that you can play in the game. And since 2020’s excellent supplement,Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, players have been able to choose which ability scores (Strength, Intelligence, etc) get a boost from their choice of creature, so that orcs aren’t struck in stereotypes of dim, hulking brutes, and even gnomes have a chance at giving a dragon a black eye.
But the new Player’s Handbook, which got its own series of deep-dive video reveals this week on the official Dungeons & DragonsYouTubechannel, goes one giant step further, flipping character creation in one of thebest tabletop RPGson its head. At the heart of that change is the Character Origin: what casual players might refer to as backstory.
New Feats | Backgrounds | Species | 2024 Player’s Handbook | D&D - YouTubeWatch On
New Feats | Backgrounds | Species | 2024 Player’s Handbook | D&D - YouTube
New Feats | Backgrounds | Species | 2024 Player’s Handbook | D&D - YouTube
In the 2014 Player’s Handbook, character backgrounds are something of an afterthought. They’re listed on page 127, long after you’ve made your way through a choice of races and classes, and consist of a small set of additional skills and proficiencies, maybe another language, alongside minor features – connections to nobility, an affinity with pirates, or more vaguely an epiphany only you have received – that at many tables might not even come up at all, depending on the setting and characters you encounter.
In the new Handbook, you’ll actually choose your class first, and then choose a character background before a species even rears its head – which entirely flips around the order from the 2014 sourcebooks. And there’s a much larger emphasis on what impact your background – your previous profession, location, and community – has on your abilities, rather than the type of species you are.
First, some background…
“Background has far more weight for your character than it did in the 2014 rules,” says lead rules designer Crawford. “In addition to giving you proficiencies, as backgrounds previously did, backgrounds also now give you a feat at level one. They also determine ability score bonuses for you when you create your character.”
Those ability score bonuses are quite different from what we saw in Tasha’s – or even the playtests last year, where backgrounds came with set ability score bonuses, something that Crawford says “hard-locked the backgrounds to specific classes [when] we wanted people to feel free to mix and match.”
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Now, each background comes with a set of three scores you can share those bonuses between: whether you want to put 1 point in each score, or split 2/1 across two options. An Acolyte, for instance, can place points freely between Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma.
(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)
It’s also a big change from the ‘racial modifiers’ seen in the game previously – shifting the focus away from what elves might generally be good at, and towards what you’ve learned in the process of growing up and entering the world: “Not only what you did prior to becoming an adventurer, but where you did it. Were you a sailor, were you a criminal, were you an acolyte in a temple, were you a sage?”
2024 Player’s Handbook | Everything You Need to Know | D&D - YouTubeWatch On
2024 Player’s Handbook | Everything You Need to Know | D&D - YouTube
2024 Player’s Handbook | Everything You Need to Know | D&D - YouTube
After choosing your background, you look even further back to the birth of your character, and what species they are. In the 2024 Handbook, gone are the ‘half’ races (half-elf, half-orc) and in their place are a handful of new fully-fledged options: the orc, the giant-descended goliath, and the celestial-inspired aasimar. And other species have been tweaked to lean more into their specific fantasies: dwarves having tremorsense to feel vibrations under the ground, orcs and dwarves having better low-light vision than other species, and dragonborn being able to sprout wings for short periods.
But while this is still broadly the D&D 5E we know and love, designers seem to have realized how important the character creation process really is, and found a way of putting a neglected system at the forefront of who you are, and how you’ll play the game.
The 2024 Player’s Handbook releases on September 17, 2024. You canpre-order it at D&D Beyond.
Looking for something to play before the Player’s Handbook arrives? You can always try a 5e adventure, and we’ve listed our favorites in this roundup of thebest D&D books. Alternatively, you can take a break with thebest board games.
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1Nemesis review: “A magical sense of tension”
1Nemesis review: “A magical sense of tension”
1
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2Arcs review: “A whole lot of game in a small package”
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3Path of Exile 2 review: “A stellar start to a thrilling and brutal dark adventure”
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4Indiana Jones and the Great Circle review: “The best adventure Indy has embarked on in over 30 years”
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5
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