First Impressions - D&D Fifth Edition Player's Handbook

D&D 5e Player's Handbook.

First of all, I realise that this is five years late. I skimmed the Player's Handbook when it first came out but was still very much in a Dungeon World place. I'd bought Fifth Edition (5e) D&D mainly to mine for ideas for the various OSR and Dungeon World ideas I had at the time. Reading Curse of Strahd encouraged me to look at it again.

Physically, this is a quality book. Full colour throughout, with excellent artwork and set in a clear, easy to read font with good use of space in the layout. It's over 300 pages long and a huge step forward from the 1st Edition AD&D Player's Handbook which is the earliest analogy to this that I read. It's huge compared to something like Holmes Basic or Heroic Fantasy or The Black Hack.

My D&D history went Holmes Basic D&D - Moldvay Expert D&D - Advanced D&D - 2nd Edition AD&D and then ground to a halt. I enjoyed playing in a campaign of 3e D&D when I lived on the Wirral and attended the Chester Roleplaying club, but although I bought the core books it felt too fiddly for me to want to run it. I bypassed 3.5e, Pathfinder and 4e D&D completely. In fact, 3.5e was the trigger for me to offload my copies of the rules. Dungeon World reminded me how much I enjoyed the feel of a good old dungeon crawl, so when I saw all the good comments about 5e, I dived in.

The writing style is very approachable. It's written to take a beginner through the rules, step-by-step, in the clearest possible way. It dives straight into character generation, which is broader than the old core rule sets that I was used to. There are character classes and races that are new to me - Tiefling, Dragonborn, Sorceror, Warlock - but I do like the variance that they give.

Rules take a while to get to. Changes I note include; you have a limit to how many spells you can have 'in mind', but you can cast whichever ones that you have provided you have a spell slot remaining at the right level. Armour Class is ascending (I think 3e D&D may have introduced this but haven't got the references to check). Everything is built around a clean 'roll a d20 and add a proficiency bonus and other modifiers if appropriate' to beat the Armour Class or Difficulty Class rating. Rather than have lots of modifiers you have the Advantage/Disadvantage rules which have spread across gaming over the last five years. If you have advantage, you roll 2d20 and take the best result; disadvantage leads to the worst result standing. Everything looks clean and simple.

The book has the obligatory large spell list to which I confess only skimming and looking at old favourites, most of which were there. There are descriptions of the planes of existence and a very basic bestiary. The index is excellent.

This book is enough for an experienced GM to run without anything else being needed. That said, the Basic D&D rules on D&D Beyond or as a PDF will more than cover an experienced GM.

What it lacked for me was some sharp summaries of the rules; you could get the core down in a couple of pages. I suspect that the DM Screen will address this, but I'm not certain. If the book had presented that as well, then it would have been a five-star rating for me. As it is, mark me as impressed and I'll be rolling this out to play very soon.

2 September 2019

Link: First Impressions 5e - Dungeon Master's Guide