In 2024, Ambiguity Rules

Earlier this year my online ‘London D&D group’ got back together for a new campaign, with my friend Mike taking up the reins as Dungeon Master. The story so far is that our party has been recruited into a dissident faction which is dedicated to fighting slavery in the autocratic, tiefling-run state that constitutes the campaign setting.

In a recent session, we accepted a mission to execute a known slave trader in a foreign city and settled on ambushing the orc in question when he was out on the streets on business with only a couple of bodyguards. A combat ensued, and, winning initiative, our green dragonborn paladin decided that round one was the optimal time to unleash his breath weapon. Given it’s a new character, the player started scrambling around for the precise breath weapon rules. As he manoeuvred his dragonborn on the grid, to line up the potential targets in a neat row of less than 30 feet, he declared that his targets must make a Dexterity save or take 1d10 poison damage. The Dungeon Master, somewhat confused, said he believed it was a cone area of effect and that, if it was poison damage, surely it would be a Constitution save? And he started looking up the rules himself. After a fair bit of toing and froing, the player cleared up that he was citing the ‘new’ dragonborn breath weapon rules from Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons and not from the 2014 Player’s Handbook…. which was the tome the DM was reading from.

At this point, I was tempted to pull out my brand new 2024 Player’s Handbook and read off what these sparkling new rules had to say on the matter… before common sense told me not to prolong the palaver that was had already effectively halted this ‘exciting’ combat before it begun.

While indubitably an issue to be filed in the “1st world problems” drawer, this scene brought home to me that, in 2024, Dungeons & Dragons exists in a state of rules ambiguity.

It’s simple… just check all the editions, and then choose the most powerful option! (Art by WOTC).

We now have two official (and allegedly compatible!) Player’s Handbooks in play, as well as official rules from tomes like Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything and Fizban’s, whose niche updates are considered to supersede 2014 rules (but presumably not 2024’s). While anyone who read all the UA playtest material might also have abandoned rules and misconceptions rattling around in their brain (wasn’t the dragonborn breath weapon a bonus action at some point!?). And these are just the D&D rules released by WOTC, and don’t of course factor in any house rules that have garnered popularity in the community, or specific tidbits DMs might have imported from the ever-increasing number of 5e clones and competing systems.

Playing a swarmkeeper ranger from Tasha’s, in this new campaign, means I have noticed this web of conflicting rules quite acutely… because, in addition to my subclass features, I also gobbled up Tasha’s improvements to the ranger core class, making Tasha’s an important reference for me. But I still have to dip into to the Player’s Handbook for those core class features that remain the same. And which PH should I use by the way…? I would love to start trialling the 2024 rules, but as the only person on the table with them, I guess a) I need my DM’s permission and b) doing so would be unfair on the others, as there’s some unapologetic class power creep when comparing the two rules sets. (To add to my overall confusion, in Mike’s previous campaign a different player had used the Pagnabros ranger fix, championed by Dungeon Coach, meaning I have echoes of unofficial ranger features ringing in my head, as well as the rules from three different official books). Meanwhile, it’s not only my class features that are published in multiple books. Different versions of the hobgoblin racial, sorry species, traits are published in Volo’s Guide to Monsters and Mordenkainen’s Monsters of the Multiverse, creating more ambiguity.

There was a relatively long period of recent D&D history where all the current official rules were included in one book (let’s say 2014 up to 2020, when Tasha’s was published), and, after a bit of getting used to them and interpreting the lauded (but to my mind quite irritating and opaque) ‘natural’ language of the 2014 Player’s Handbook, pretty much everyone I played with was on the same page with regards to how the game worked, with the only difference being a handful of house rules per table.

I would say that’s certainly not the case right now… and I wonder if D&D ever will reach that level of commonality again?

It depends on a few factors I guess… such as the willingness of the vast majority of the 5e D&D playing community to invest in the new core rulebooks, and their subsequent decision on whether to make the 2024 PHB their de facto rules reference, or whether to keep any parts from the 2014 edition they prefer.

For the second to happen, I suspect that the 2024 rules need to prove that they are better overall than the 2014 set. In other words, have they fixed more old broken things than they have introduced new broken things? I have my doubts.

Introducing one universally used reference book…

Anyhow, hopefully I have time to dig into the new PHB a bit more over the next weeks and can perhaps write a little post to see if the 2024 rules managed to address the issues I wanted to see fixed in the latest edition.

Exciting New Project!

The eagle-eyed amongst you might have noticed I’ve been posting somewhat infrequently lately, which given all the stuff going on with D&D is somewhat strange timing. However, I have actually been commissioned by a US publisher to write a 200-page RPG book and naturally that is taking up a fair bit of my time. I won’t reveal much more now, but I will say its a system agnostic toolkit that I think virtually every GM under the sun will be able to get plenty of use from… so stay tuned for more news in early 2025! And, if you don’t see so many posts during the remainder of the year it’s not because I’ve quit gaming or anything. Rather the opposite, I’m going deeper, and with a bit of luck my future involves a lot more RPG writing, chat and product creation! (Ps. I do still plan to keep updating the blog… but there’s a chance it will have to take a backseat for a few months!).