Dungeons and Dragons is one of the most popular tabletop RPGs but it can seem a little daunting for new players due to its complexity, here is where the Players Handbook guide comes into play.
Players Handbook is the core rulebook for Dungeons and Dragons, equally important for players and Dungeon Masters alike (regardless of the name), and the perfect introduction to D&D, and today we’ll go through the 5th edition of this absolute essential guide.
An Overview
With a stunning cover art featuring King Snurre, a fire giant, in combat surrounded by his hell hounds, this sourcebook clocks in at 320 pages and contains rules for equipment, spells, character creation, backgrounds, and much more. The Player’s Handbook is divided into three sections, the first one is about character creation, the second deals with different rules while the third is mainly about different spells and casting them.
New Editions
The meat and potatoes of this edition are the character options that take up almost half of the guide. WotC put in a good amount of effort into explaining how to create a character along with guiding players on how to choose abilities and classes for the character and it shows. However, the real backbone of the character options, as well as a new edition, is the detail on the character’s personality and background. A hefty portion of the character sheet is dedicated to your character’s ideals, bonds, flaws, and personality.
The new Backgrounds library in the Players Handbook allows players to form complicated and intricate backstories as well as develop a suitable personality for their character, rather than just maximizing stats. This helps a Player create well-rounded characters and answer questions like what did your character do before becoming an adventurer? or what power binds them to the setting?
For instance, a religious acolyte may have ties to their past church while a soldier might have some privilege due to a high rank.
And with the restored focus on character alignments, it is safe to say that it was a well-thought-out decision to adopt a more roleplaying-centric view of play by allowing players to keep track of this information.
Another excellent factor is the two new mechanics given in the Players Handbook called Inspiration and Advantage. Inspiration is basically a one-time reward that the DM gives you for playing according to any flaws, bonds, or traits you had assigned to your character during character creation. The other new mechanic, Advantage, removes the working of creating and going through a checklist of modifiers that you had to go through before attacking in the earlier editions of the game.
Now you only have advantage or disadvantage, which makes calculating success and failures so much, and although its workings are not perfect, just the fact that they speed up the game by a ton makes Advantage the star feature of the 5th edition of Player’s Handbooks.
Final Thoughts
D&D Player’s Handbook 5e
In the end, the 5th edition of the Player's Handbook proves exactly why Dungeons and Dragons are the biggest and most successful roleplaying game in the business and it has climbed its way to the top once again with the 5th edition. The Player's Handbook is an absolute necessity to play and although it's impossible to please every single player, the 5th edition has hit the sweet spot, I can personally say after playing multiple campaigns that this edition is my favorite purely due to its mechanical perfection and just the soul of it.
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