I picked up my special edition cover of the 2024 Player's Handbook yesterday and spent a fair amount of time reading through the book. As many have already commented, this books' single greatest contribution to the game is organization....the book really is incredibly well organized, in a smart way that makes a lot of sense, and leads the reader to wonder why it took this long. I have a few other observations so far....but this is hardly a proper review as of yet, just observations. The real meat of any discussion will have to wait until I've met with my group tonight and we have formulated a plan of attack for when we will start using the new PHB in actual play. But in the interim, here are those observations....
Someone Hates Fluff
This is the least fluff-filled PHB I have ever seen. A single page for most character species (and I like that they are using the term species now) of which half of the page is an illustration seems scant at best. Most of the species and their possible subtypes are getting maybe a paragraph of introduction at best.
Gaucho Orcs
Orcs got a reboot in this book. They have exactly one page, half text and half illustration. Gruumsh is now some sort of orcish analog for Odin or something, and orcs have a penchant for nomadic wanderlust. There's like 1 paragraph of detail, and half of it reframing Gruumsh. All of the other details can be derived from an illustration of an orc family that makes them look like sombrero and poncho wearing gauchos from the old west. In a post World of Warcraft universe I respect the idea that orcs are a thing people want to play but it is insanely weird to see all the core conceits of what it means to be an orc get completely stripped out and replaced by a vague suggestion of form in the example illustration.
Very Clean Class Write-Ups
The classes are all reframed and reformatted, to the extent that even spell lists are now included for each class in the class description proper. Its incredibly efficient and impressively done. There are so many weird little changes to the classes that this part more than any will be where people find the most arguments for this being a D&D 5.5 or even better a 6E.
The Core Mechanics are Still The Same
There are lots of tweaks and bits everywhere, but the way the game plays remains the same. This system is arguably a bigger jump than 3.5 was from 3.0, but it all in the extraneous details such as classes, spells and species and far less in the mechanical core.
A Really Weird Number of Characters in This Book Have Freaky Open Mouthed Eerie Smiles
I don't know what the artistic intent is here,* but the number of characters smiling like they are hopped up on mushrooms or derived from some freaky AI generated model is just a tad on the disturbing side. There are, thankfully, lots of illustrations of D&D characters doing actual D&D type stuff (fighting, spell casting, exploring, investigating, etc.) but possibly better than half the illustrations in this book appear to be of freakishly weird denizens whose exact class and species is up for debate smiling like an amorphous AI generated illustration about to bite your head off, and it's frankly weirding me out, like, a lot.
The Garb of Characters is in Stark Contrast to Equipment Illustrations
Aside from the excessive use of smiling and expressions of sheer, unmitigated and possibly drug-induced joy, the art in the book is pretty solid. There is a moment of disconnect for me when you get to the nice but very mundane sample illustrations of arms and armor, and I then look at the insanely elaborate dress and garb of the sample characters and wonder to myself, "no one is wearing any of the practical gear this book is telling me the average mundane PCs will be using, they are all wearing aristocratic designer garb straight from the poshest corners of Waterdeep, the sort of things you wear to your cousins' wedding and not to a dungeon fight."
There's more yet to be gone in to. I am still soaking up the new stuff, especially weapon stunts and the enormous number of class tweaks, but overall this is a pretty solid book, and still feels very much like 5E in terms of what its accomplishing, so I can accept the interpretation of the 2024 PHB being more of a 5.5 edition than anything else, because its mechanical core remains the same solid nugget we've been using for the last ten years.
*I once watched some Youtube videos where they talked about how adding a open-mouthed, shocked or smiling look to your image in a thumbnail was supposed to dramatically increase clicks (user engagement) with the video. So for a while every bloody Youtube video had someone in the thumbnail expressing delight, surprise and shock with a wide open mouth. Eventually, the novelty of this conceit must have worn off as people got tired of the gimmick and it stopped being useful to most Youtubers except I imagine for Mr. Beast.
I bring this up because I feel like the art team at WotC were told by someone that people love sheer, unrelenting borderline insane expressions of joy crossing people's faces, regardless of the illustrative intent or context of the image, and that became an embedded design imperative. Luckily, as I mentioned, there's enough more conventional illustrations to offset this, but holy cats....either a few more smiling maniacs or a few less illustrations of non drugged up adventurers behaving normally and I think the art alone could have sunk this book just by crossing some uncanny valley line. (EDIT - probably not, and this is probably just me and my preference for characters "fitting the mood" better for the subject....and me being out of touch with the totality of what the mood is for D&D 2024, I suppose. But still! I can't be the only one who finds some of these maniacal smiling adventurers off-putting.....this is probably just a personal extension of why I don't enjoy Disney movies or something.)
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