A new reimagining of the world's most famous RPG is finally rethinking how people play

The best thing the Dungeons & Dragons team has done lately is be honest about how their game is a pain in the ass. Why, for example, does the Dungeon Master's Guide hit you with high-level concepts and lore from the rules for jumping and saving dice—one of the things Dungeon Masters do the most—until many chapters later? They've thought about it. They have thought about classes and how to rework them. Which has also made them think about how popular 5th edition is, warts and all, and how inconvenient it would be if the big fundamental changes they made weren't backwards compatible.

So now, after much thought—and more than a few tinkerings—we've got our first look at the finished products: the 2024 Dungeons & Dragons Core Rulebooks.

As previously suggested, the updated Player's Handbook (2024), Dungeon Master's Guide (2024), and Monster Manual (2024) are not a "6th Edition" of D&D. In fact, everything in these three books has been designed to be backwards compatible with all existing 5th edition material – campaigns included. Still, in a press preview of the core books, game director Jeremy Crawford and creative director Chris Perkins emphasized that the new books are a "fundamental overhaul" — each with suitably grand artwork inside and out — to celebrate the franchise's 50th anniversary. anniversary. The changes, as outlined, are significant and seem wonderfully aimed at doing something that the core rulebooks have been astonishingly bad at for a long time: getting you to play the game.