Argyle King
Legend
By now, there are plenty of people giving reviews of the D&D 5th Edition Player's Handbook, so, in that regard, this thread is likely nothing special. I, like others, have access to the finished product of the Player's Handbook, and I, like others, have opinions on it. What I feel is likely very different is how my feelings toward the D&D product have changed with the release of the Player's Handbook.
There are more than a few who I feel would have completely loved whatever WoTC decided to release. The system could have been completely horrible and broken with a foreword written by Hitler, and they still would have purchased it. They likely pre-ordered it a long time ago and felt completely confident in doing so.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are also more than a few who would have bashed whatever WoTC released. The Player's Handbook could have been gold plated and included a free ticket to Vegas, and those who fell into this category would have still found some way to express that the product was complete garbage. Some of them would have likely had this opinion even if they knew nothing of the product.
In the beginning, I feel somewhere in between. Various things along the way caused me to fluxuate one way or the other. Some things improved my attitude to something more positive; others made me feel more negative. Though, if I'm being completely honest, my attitude toward 5th Edition had been progressively worse and worse as time went on. My experience with the playtest and Encounters -while occasionally good- made me feel negative toward the game. Likewise, I started to feel negative because I didn't come away from the various playtests and surveys feeling as though any of the feedback I gave was meaningful or in any way impacted the evolution of the game. I had a lot of reasons to dislike the game despite having fun spending time with people I gamed with. In short, I found myself starting to hate the idea of spending money on D&D.
So, with that in mind, I was extremely surprised to find that I wanted to purchase the D&D 5th Edition Player's Handbook. I had told myself that I had no interest in buying the product, and that was true until I decided to look through the book at the local gaming store. To my surprise, I felt very positive toward the finished product. After a few minutes of skimming through the book, I decided to buy it.
At this point, I began to have buyer's remorse. I considered that maybe I allowed myself to be caught up in the thrill of buying a new book, and that maybe I really didn't want to spend the money I did on it. I was torn. The book seemed really cool from the quick skimming I did, but was my decision too hasty? A small amount of fear crept in as I sat down to give the book a more thorough read.
I suppose the best place to start giving my opinion is with the cover of the book. I was unsure what exactly I felt toward the artwork on the front or the style. I certainly thought the artwork was very good, and I still do feel it's very good, but it took a little while for it to grow on me. I suppose I had no strong feelings one way or the other beyond feeling that the artwork on the front of the book was very good. In my mind, I tried to compare it to past PHBs. It didn't exactly scream 'Player's Handbook,' but I'm not even sure what would. I felt neither positive nor negative at this point; perhaps a little hopeful.
More thoroughly looking through the first few pages than I had previously, the next bit of artwork intrigued me; the fighter battling the goblins was a picture that I feel evoked adventure and action and what playing D&D is like in my mind while also presenting a very different look for a fighter than I had expected. It was a good mix of familiar and new. Based on just artwork, I felt pretty good at this point, and I felt better about having purchased the book.
I soon came across the preface which was written by Mike Mearls. Normally I would breeze right past this section of a rpg book, but the "Once upon a time..." grabbed my attention, and I read it. The preface spoke to me in a way that I did not expect it would. I had not encountered the rules of the game yet, but I found myself feeling pretty good about the fact that I now owned the book. I pressed on; anxious to explore the book. I gave the 'Introduction' section a very brief skimming; it was the type of things that seems to be at the beginning of most rpg books. Eventually, I came to 'Part 1.'
While the illustration which begins Part 1 is a nice piece of artwork, it never really spoke to me even when I was exposed to it some time ago. I remember it being used for something previously. It's in no way bad, and I'm sure many people like it a lot, but -for me personally- the piece never spoke to me. It was here that I closed the book for a moment and looked at the cover again. I found myself appreciating the choice of cover artwork more. I was glad that the art piece used to beging Part 1 of the book was not used for the cover. Again, there's certainly nothing wrong with the Part 1 picture. It's a fine piece of artwork which is well crafted and far beyond anything I could even dream of drawing, but -on a personal level- something about it just never really spoke to me or grabbed me or made me excited about it. I cannot explain why; that's simply the feeling I have toward it.
Part 1 includes the first six chapters of the book. Chapter 1 gives step-by-step guidelines for character creation. Chapter 2 is about the races found in the game. Chapter 3 details the classes. Chapter 4 helps flesh out the personality and background of a character. Chapter 5 is the equipment chapter. Chapter 6 includes rules for multiclassing and feats.
While Chapter 1 is very short (I think it was around 6 pages,) it does an excellent job of giving the reader a quick walkthrough of the character creation process while also prompting the reading to begin using their imagination and getting them ready to go into the next two chapters. Chapter 1 clearly gets information about the character creation process across while also asking a few thought provoking questions and providing an example which is easy to follow. I found the Ability Score Summary to be a very nice touch.
Chapter 2 is all about Race. Each entry gives what I feel is a good mix of fluff and crunch, and the organization of the presented material manages to be very clear without coming across as dry. The two prior editions of D&D that I am most familiar with are 3rd and 4th; to me the 5th Edition Player's Handbook seems to do a good job of providing 4th's to the point clarity without being a dry read. Likewise, it flows and is as enjoyable to read as many of the 3rd Edition books I own without being overly wordy and making it difficult to find relevant crunch when I need it. Chapter 2 of 5th Edition's PHB is filled with high quality artwork. Though I did find the Halfling to be a little creepy, and I never realized that Drizzt had such a prominent nose before. From a mechanical perspective, I found myself particularly happy with how Dark Vision is now handled; it's still a very nice trait to have, but there is also still plenty of reason to carry a light source.
Chapter 3 is all about Class, and I'd say that this is where I started to really feel good about having purchased the book. Right away, page 45 gives a nice breakdown and brief overview of what each class is generally about and the highlights of what they get. The style of page 45 is similar to how 3rd Edition splatbooks had a brief overview of Prestige Class selections at the beginning of chapters about prestige classes.
Following page 45 is page 46 which has artwork featuring an axe-wielding barbaric Kenny Rogers, and the beginning of the Barbarian class entry. The barbarian section of Chapter 3 ends on page 50. Between that beginning and end is a plethora of information which gives everything you need to know to build a character from a crunch perspective while also giving enough fluff to give some feel to the entry and avoiding being a dry read. There are also two subclasses (which are called Primal Paths for the Barbarian) which are the Berserker and the Totem Warrior.
There are a lot of reasons that this section made me feel more positive about the game. To me, the organization of the class entry and subclasses and all of the stuff in between encompassed many of the things I like from many other editions and games. Presenting more than one subclass reminded me of 4th Edition, but I also found myself seeing a few aspects of what I like about GURPS Dungeon Fantasy template entries that I like as far as giving a base option and then presenting customization options without being overwhelming. Each class entry in the D&D 5th Edition PHB clearly describes the large list of elements that every member of a particular class gets while still managing to give options so a player doesn't feel straight-jacketed by class. As best as I can tell at this point in my experience with the product, there is a good mix of structure and flexibility.
The rest of Chapter 3 details the other available classes. The other class options are the Bard which has two different bardic college choices; the Cleric which has several choices of domain; the Druid which has multiple druidic circle choices; three different styles of Fighter; three different monastic traditions for the Monk class; three varieties of Paladin which offer a much broader range to the class; the Ranger entry which has two different paths available to it; a trifecta of Rogue archetypes; two styles of Sorcerer; several rather interesting choices for Warlock, and the Wizard class with several schools of specialization to choose from. While that's quite a list, it does not fully convey the actual amount of options because each class provides choices along the way which are independent of your subclass choice. For example, a ranger a can choose a fighting style (archery, defense, dueling, or two-weapon,) and that choice is not at all tied to my choice of subclass (which is called archetype in the case of the ranger.) For many of the classes, the subclass choice comes at 3rd level, but that's not the case for every class.
Thinking back on the choices, the ones that I personally found most interesting were the Battle Master Fighter, the Paladin with Oath of The Ancients, the Paladin with Oath of Vengeance, and the Warlock dedicated to The Great Old One. The Battle Master is something I liked because I was a huge fan of 4th Edition's Warlord, and I like the idea of a martial character who can think as well as fight. In the case of the two Paladin subclasses I liked, Oath of The Ancients was interesting to me because it created a Paladin which has a connection to Druids, and Oath of Vengeance has a thematically cool capstone ability. When it came to the Warlock, I quite simply had a geek/nerd moment over realizing that the rules supported a Warlock dedicated to Cthulu.
Chapter 4 is titled "Personality and Background." It discusses adding some personality and background (as you might well expect) to your character. A table to determine height and weight randomly is provided. There is a brief discussion of alignment which I found good enough to introduce what alignment is, but potentially more vague than some people might like.
There is also concept known as Inspiration introduced, and I found that to be intriguing. While I am aware there are people who dislike attaching mechanical benefits to roleplaying, I liked the concept. I'm familiar with similar concepts from some of the other rpgs I play. Inspiration is a nice carrot with which the DM can reward a player for engaging the world from a character perspective while also being a simple enough rule that it's easy to implement and does not clutter up the game rules.
The rest of the chapter details backgrounds to help flesh out your character. The backgrounds are a mix of fluff and crunch. They give you some idea of where your character came from while also offering some mechanical benefits. While the mechanical benefits are certainly nice, none of them seemed so overwhelmingly good that they'd be obvious choices or break a game. However, I did come away from this chapter with some small amount of concern that backgrounds might become one of the new ways to push splat books or possibly begin to introduce power creep in future products. I hope that does not turn out to be the case.
Chapter 5 is the equipment chapter, and it is pretty much what you would expect, so I won't spend a lot of time on it. There were a few minor things that bugged me. In particular, there seems to be little reason to choose either the flail or the morningstar as a weapon. Even if you're not an optimizer, it is hard to ignore that you're paying the same cost and carrying the same amount of weight for weapons which have less options and features. It's nothing game breaking, but it sticks out that they are among the very small handful of weapons which have no special features.
Chapter 6 presents Multiclassing and Feats. The rules for Multiclassing have a few minor changes from what I remember during the playtest. In particular, you must meet the stat requirements for the class you already are before you can multiclass. Feats seem simple enough to understand that I don't feel they require lengthy discussion. A small complaint I have is that the rules for multiclassing do not make it clear whether or not you can multiclass back into the same class in hopes of gaining a second subclass. While I am assuming you cannot do so, I feel that should be clarified.
That concludes part 1 of the book. I plan to review the rest of the book in a later post. For now, I'm taking a break, but not before I offer a few closing thoughts.
The Player's Handbook has made me feel (at least for the time being) enthusiastic about D&D again. My experiences with the playtest were not always good, and I would in fact say that some were pretty bad. The finished product seems to have fixed a lot of things I did not enjoy about the playtest rules. I'm more optimistic than I have been in a while. Though, to be completely fair, I also have to say that I have not yet seen the game in action with the finished version of the rules. I also have not yet seen the DMG or the MM. In my mind, there are still some question marks and things I am unsure of about 5th Edition as a whole, but my opinion of the Player's Handbook is very good. It surprised me.
There are more than a few who I feel would have completely loved whatever WoTC decided to release. The system could have been completely horrible and broken with a foreword written by Hitler, and they still would have purchased it. They likely pre-ordered it a long time ago and felt completely confident in doing so.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are also more than a few who would have bashed whatever WoTC released. The Player's Handbook could have been gold plated and included a free ticket to Vegas, and those who fell into this category would have still found some way to express that the product was complete garbage. Some of them would have likely had this opinion even if they knew nothing of the product.
In the beginning, I feel somewhere in between. Various things along the way caused me to fluxuate one way or the other. Some things improved my attitude to something more positive; others made me feel more negative. Though, if I'm being completely honest, my attitude toward 5th Edition had been progressively worse and worse as time went on. My experience with the playtest and Encounters -while occasionally good- made me feel negative toward the game. Likewise, I started to feel negative because I didn't come away from the various playtests and surveys feeling as though any of the feedback I gave was meaningful or in any way impacted the evolution of the game. I had a lot of reasons to dislike the game despite having fun spending time with people I gamed with. In short, I found myself starting to hate the idea of spending money on D&D.
So, with that in mind, I was extremely surprised to find that I wanted to purchase the D&D 5th Edition Player's Handbook. I had told myself that I had no interest in buying the product, and that was true until I decided to look through the book at the local gaming store. To my surprise, I felt very positive toward the finished product. After a few minutes of skimming through the book, I decided to buy it.
At this point, I began to have buyer's remorse. I considered that maybe I allowed myself to be caught up in the thrill of buying a new book, and that maybe I really didn't want to spend the money I did on it. I was torn. The book seemed really cool from the quick skimming I did, but was my decision too hasty? A small amount of fear crept in as I sat down to give the book a more thorough read.
I suppose the best place to start giving my opinion is with the cover of the book. I was unsure what exactly I felt toward the artwork on the front or the style. I certainly thought the artwork was very good, and I still do feel it's very good, but it took a little while for it to grow on me. I suppose I had no strong feelings one way or the other beyond feeling that the artwork on the front of the book was very good. In my mind, I tried to compare it to past PHBs. It didn't exactly scream 'Player's Handbook,' but I'm not even sure what would. I felt neither positive nor negative at this point; perhaps a little hopeful.
More thoroughly looking through the first few pages than I had previously, the next bit of artwork intrigued me; the fighter battling the goblins was a picture that I feel evoked adventure and action and what playing D&D is like in my mind while also presenting a very different look for a fighter than I had expected. It was a good mix of familiar and new. Based on just artwork, I felt pretty good at this point, and I felt better about having purchased the book.
I soon came across the preface which was written by Mike Mearls. Normally I would breeze right past this section of a rpg book, but the "Once upon a time..." grabbed my attention, and I read it. The preface spoke to me in a way that I did not expect it would. I had not encountered the rules of the game yet, but I found myself feeling pretty good about the fact that I now owned the book. I pressed on; anxious to explore the book. I gave the 'Introduction' section a very brief skimming; it was the type of things that seems to be at the beginning of most rpg books. Eventually, I came to 'Part 1.'
While the illustration which begins Part 1 is a nice piece of artwork, it never really spoke to me even when I was exposed to it some time ago. I remember it being used for something previously. It's in no way bad, and I'm sure many people like it a lot, but -for me personally- the piece never spoke to me. It was here that I closed the book for a moment and looked at the cover again. I found myself appreciating the choice of cover artwork more. I was glad that the art piece used to beging Part 1 of the book was not used for the cover. Again, there's certainly nothing wrong with the Part 1 picture. It's a fine piece of artwork which is well crafted and far beyond anything I could even dream of drawing, but -on a personal level- something about it just never really spoke to me or grabbed me or made me excited about it. I cannot explain why; that's simply the feeling I have toward it.
Part 1 includes the first six chapters of the book. Chapter 1 gives step-by-step guidelines for character creation. Chapter 2 is about the races found in the game. Chapter 3 details the classes. Chapter 4 helps flesh out the personality and background of a character. Chapter 5 is the equipment chapter. Chapter 6 includes rules for multiclassing and feats.
While Chapter 1 is very short (I think it was around 6 pages,) it does an excellent job of giving the reader a quick walkthrough of the character creation process while also prompting the reading to begin using their imagination and getting them ready to go into the next two chapters. Chapter 1 clearly gets information about the character creation process across while also asking a few thought provoking questions and providing an example which is easy to follow. I found the Ability Score Summary to be a very nice touch.
Chapter 2 is all about Race. Each entry gives what I feel is a good mix of fluff and crunch, and the organization of the presented material manages to be very clear without coming across as dry. The two prior editions of D&D that I am most familiar with are 3rd and 4th; to me the 5th Edition Player's Handbook seems to do a good job of providing 4th's to the point clarity without being a dry read. Likewise, it flows and is as enjoyable to read as many of the 3rd Edition books I own without being overly wordy and making it difficult to find relevant crunch when I need it. Chapter 2 of 5th Edition's PHB is filled with high quality artwork. Though I did find the Halfling to be a little creepy, and I never realized that Drizzt had such a prominent nose before. From a mechanical perspective, I found myself particularly happy with how Dark Vision is now handled; it's still a very nice trait to have, but there is also still plenty of reason to carry a light source.
Chapter 3 is all about Class, and I'd say that this is where I started to really feel good about having purchased the book. Right away, page 45 gives a nice breakdown and brief overview of what each class is generally about and the highlights of what they get. The style of page 45 is similar to how 3rd Edition splatbooks had a brief overview of Prestige Class selections at the beginning of chapters about prestige classes.
Following page 45 is page 46 which has artwork featuring an axe-wielding barbaric Kenny Rogers, and the beginning of the Barbarian class entry. The barbarian section of Chapter 3 ends on page 50. Between that beginning and end is a plethora of information which gives everything you need to know to build a character from a crunch perspective while also giving enough fluff to give some feel to the entry and avoiding being a dry read. There are also two subclasses (which are called Primal Paths for the Barbarian) which are the Berserker and the Totem Warrior.
There are a lot of reasons that this section made me feel more positive about the game. To me, the organization of the class entry and subclasses and all of the stuff in between encompassed many of the things I like from many other editions and games. Presenting more than one subclass reminded me of 4th Edition, but I also found myself seeing a few aspects of what I like about GURPS Dungeon Fantasy template entries that I like as far as giving a base option and then presenting customization options without being overwhelming. Each class entry in the D&D 5th Edition PHB clearly describes the large list of elements that every member of a particular class gets while still managing to give options so a player doesn't feel straight-jacketed by class. As best as I can tell at this point in my experience with the product, there is a good mix of structure and flexibility.
The rest of Chapter 3 details the other available classes. The other class options are the Bard which has two different bardic college choices; the Cleric which has several choices of domain; the Druid which has multiple druidic circle choices; three different styles of Fighter; three different monastic traditions for the Monk class; three varieties of Paladin which offer a much broader range to the class; the Ranger entry which has two different paths available to it; a trifecta of Rogue archetypes; two styles of Sorcerer; several rather interesting choices for Warlock, and the Wizard class with several schools of specialization to choose from. While that's quite a list, it does not fully convey the actual amount of options because each class provides choices along the way which are independent of your subclass choice. For example, a ranger a can choose a fighting style (archery, defense, dueling, or two-weapon,) and that choice is not at all tied to my choice of subclass (which is called archetype in the case of the ranger.) For many of the classes, the subclass choice comes at 3rd level, but that's not the case for every class.
Thinking back on the choices, the ones that I personally found most interesting were the Battle Master Fighter, the Paladin with Oath of The Ancients, the Paladin with Oath of Vengeance, and the Warlock dedicated to The Great Old One. The Battle Master is something I liked because I was a huge fan of 4th Edition's Warlord, and I like the idea of a martial character who can think as well as fight. In the case of the two Paladin subclasses I liked, Oath of The Ancients was interesting to me because it created a Paladin which has a connection to Druids, and Oath of Vengeance has a thematically cool capstone ability. When it came to the Warlock, I quite simply had a geek/nerd moment over realizing that the rules supported a Warlock dedicated to Cthulu.
Chapter 4 is titled "Personality and Background." It discusses adding some personality and background (as you might well expect) to your character. A table to determine height and weight randomly is provided. There is a brief discussion of alignment which I found good enough to introduce what alignment is, but potentially more vague than some people might like.
There is also concept known as Inspiration introduced, and I found that to be intriguing. While I am aware there are people who dislike attaching mechanical benefits to roleplaying, I liked the concept. I'm familiar with similar concepts from some of the other rpgs I play. Inspiration is a nice carrot with which the DM can reward a player for engaging the world from a character perspective while also being a simple enough rule that it's easy to implement and does not clutter up the game rules.
The rest of the chapter details backgrounds to help flesh out your character. The backgrounds are a mix of fluff and crunch. They give you some idea of where your character came from while also offering some mechanical benefits. While the mechanical benefits are certainly nice, none of them seemed so overwhelmingly good that they'd be obvious choices or break a game. However, I did come away from this chapter with some small amount of concern that backgrounds might become one of the new ways to push splat books or possibly begin to introduce power creep in future products. I hope that does not turn out to be the case.
Chapter 5 is the equipment chapter, and it is pretty much what you would expect, so I won't spend a lot of time on it. There were a few minor things that bugged me. In particular, there seems to be little reason to choose either the flail or the morningstar as a weapon. Even if you're not an optimizer, it is hard to ignore that you're paying the same cost and carrying the same amount of weight for weapons which have less options and features. It's nothing game breaking, but it sticks out that they are among the very small handful of weapons which have no special features.
Chapter 6 presents Multiclassing and Feats. The rules for Multiclassing have a few minor changes from what I remember during the playtest. In particular, you must meet the stat requirements for the class you already are before you can multiclass. Feats seem simple enough to understand that I don't feel they require lengthy discussion. A small complaint I have is that the rules for multiclassing do not make it clear whether or not you can multiclass back into the same class in hopes of gaining a second subclass. While I am assuming you cannot do so, I feel that should be clarified.
That concludes part 1 of the book. I plan to review the rest of the book in a later post. For now, I'm taking a break, but not before I offer a few closing thoughts.
The Player's Handbook has made me feel (at least for the time being) enthusiastic about D&D again. My experiences with the playtest were not always good, and I would in fact say that some were pretty bad. The finished product seems to have fixed a lot of things I did not enjoy about the playtest rules. I'm more optimistic than I have been in a while. Though, to be completely fair, I also have to say that I have not yet seen the game in action with the finished version of the rules. I also have not yet seen the DMG or the MM. In my mind, there are still some question marks and things I am unsure of about 5th Edition as a whole, but my opinion of the Player's Handbook is very good. It surprised me.
