Earlier this month, the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) team provided early access to the new 2024 Player’s Handbook to stores who are a part of the Wizards Play Network (for physical copies) as well as those who purchased a digital copy and have a Master Tier subscription to D&D Beyond. I was lucky enough to get a copy a physical copy of the Player’s Handbook when I attended the D&D Press Event at this year’s GenCon. After reading through it, I thought it would be interesting to play a one shot of a 5th edition adventure using these new rules (since the D&D team stated that the new rules are backwards compatible with 2014 source books and adventures).

So I assembled a team of players to create characters using the 2024 rules set. On their own, they all created characters on classes they’ve played before, so they were able to speak about the comparison of the class of their 2024 character vs. the 2014 5th edition version. They created 5th level characters and I ran a one-shot based off of Chapter 5 of Phandelver & Below: The Shattered Obelisk, which is designed for 5th level characters. After we played the one shot, we discussed what it was like playing with the new changes. Here are our biggest takeaways.

Watch us play the D&D one-shot with the 2024 rules.

Special Thanks

Before going into our biggest takeaways, I do want to thank those who participated in this:

• Derek Hoskins as Derk, the Dwarven Life Domain Cleric
• Erika Phillips as Gemma, the Elven Warrior of Mercy Monk
• Erin Kelly as Vasira, the Halfling College of Glamour Bard
• Ryan Schoon as Xelos, the Human Wizard Abjurist

The Player Characters Felt VERY Overpowered

In the one-shot we ran, the characters went through an encounter with an Utyogh and another encounter with three goblins (one of which was a Goblin Psi Brawler). In both encounters, they didn’t take damage at all. This wasn’t the result of bad dice rolls but rather they were able to utilize their abilities to maximize their impact on the villain. This is ideally what you want your players to do. But these creatures were ultimately annihilated by the characters rather than being a nuissance for them. That said, I haven’t ran this adventure before so maybe this is a common experience. But in the encounter with the Utyogh, the Monk was able to utilize their Stunning Fist attack to reduce the creature’s movement to half then the wizard attack with Ray of Frost to diminish its movement by an additional 10 feet, it reduced its movement down to 5 feet and without a long range attack, the creature essentially missed their turn.

When we discussed this, it was the players who brought up how they felt OP. I didn’t mention anything about it and how I struggled with making the encounter more difficult (which I did on purpose – I was trying to play the adventure exactly as is and not adapt to the situation), so the fact that they themselves felt like they could do so much that they couldn’t do before was cool but at the same time surprising to them as well.

Character Creation Felt More Streamlined. Mostly.

In 2014 on D&D Beyond, when you create your character, you started off with selecting the race of your character. For many people, they expressed that this is not their process of creating their character as they usually think of what class they want to play, followed by race, then background. For 2024, the character creation process now reflects this (as does the book). You now start off with selecting your class first, then your species (formerly race), then background.

Some of us had said this felt more strealined; a couple of us said it took a while to get used to since they were so used to doing it the way D&D Beyond does it with starting off with your character species first. But once you get beyond this, it does seem like it was easier to create a character in some ways than it did with the 2014 rule set.

Surprise Rounds Still Feel Off

The 2014 rules on Surprise rounds for Initiative always had some mixed reviews. People either loved it or hate it, and it makes sense why the D&D Creative Team tried to change this to make it more straight forward and flow better for combat. The new rules for Surprise is that if a party is surprised (which is, for the time being, determined by the DM), then they roll for initiative with disadvantage. The problem with this, though, is that those who are being surprised can still roll very high and those who were doing the surprising can still roll very low, which makes it feel like it doesn’t have enough of a consequence to being surprised.

I still appreciate the attempt to make surprise rounds less complicated because the 2014 rules are complicated when it comes to that (roll stealth vs. passive perceptive. Now figure out whose is lower and who gets to attack. Oh don’t forget that the Barbarian can’t be surprised, etc.). I think I would suggest either having those who were surprised to either roll a d12 for initiative instead of d20 or allow them to roll initiative as usual (no disadvantage) but have their first attack be done at a disadvantage since they were caught by surprise.

Games Cannot Be Played Rigidly With Published Adventures

When we ran this chapter of Phandelver & Below: The Shattered Obelisk, it was clear that the DM who is running it needs to be comfortable with thinking on their feet and improvising (or at least having a plan ahead of time). Although this is generally true of all D&D games, this is even moreso important for our current state of the 2024 rules set. As mentioned earlier, I kept to the adventure as written to see how compatible the new rules are with the original 2014 adventures and as is, this is a very tough game to run for new DMs or those who heavily rely on having everything prescripted for them. So if you are planning to run a game with 2024 characters, you must be comfortable with adapting and changing on the fly to make the game interesting, challenging, and fun.

Final Thoughts

I think the biggest factor here is that we do not have the Dungeon Master’s Guide (DMG) or the Monster Manual (MM) out yet. This may make a change in how the game experience with the 2024 characters will be, especially since it seems like there will be significant differences in how previous creatures are able to attack player characters. As a player, these new character options are fantastic and fun! As a DM, you can have fun as long as you are able to think on your feet and adapt to the situation. Otherwise, if that’s not your DM style, you may want to wait until the final two rulebooks (the DMG and the MM) are released (November 2024 and February 2025, respectively).