Sean Merwin

I thought I read or saw somewhere that they are going to expand the 2024 free rules to include all of the classes, but I don't know where I saw that. It might depend on D&D Beyond, but maybe not.

Yeah. So at the soonest, we're looking for the SRD release in February of 2025. No surprise there.

What can I say? Well... You know how I love art. No, you do not. A picture's worth a thousand words, apparently. So you have to take that into account. You have to do the math. You have to do the math. And last but not least, in our creator corner, you have noted that there is a free D&D 2024 quick reference sheet that has been created by a friend of ours.

With no further ado, we will get into our two main topics today, starting with our 2024 mini review, where rather than doing the deep dive into the 2024 Player's Handbook, we are going to pull out pieces and evaluate them on their own in a short amount of time each. This week, I thought we should look at the character creation chapter.

How does the book teach new players how to do a character and what do they emphasize? So the design goal, I think, for this should be is making character creation more streamlined to help the players understand how what they're doing when they create a character translates into gameplay. So they're not surprised. Would you say that's a good goal, Teos?

It was a fun experiment when I worked on Peril and Pinebrook to try to make a character sheet as compact as possible, but not dense, and say, okay, what do they really, really need to know? Can I pull this out? Yeah, let's pull out ability scores. What else do they really not need? Okay, let's pull that out, pull that out, till I got down to a half page. and it's not a dense half page.

And so that's what I looked at with this going in was what do they emphasize? What do they say, but sort of gloss over, et cetera. So how did they handle it in 2014? Well, chapter one was called step-by-step characters. And so they gave a little segment about this is what you're doing when you build this part of the character.

And then they did so with a build Brunor subsection for each section where they showed you, okay, Brunor is going to be a dwarf. So what does that mean? Et cetera, et cetera. Just for reference, this 2014 chapter called Step-by-Step Characters was five pages long. We'll take that and set that aside and we'll look at 2024 in a minute. But what was in this chapter? There were six steps.

One was called Choose Your Race. You chose your race. Two, choose a class. You chose your class. Three, determine ability scores. Four, describe your character. I'll have you know, nowhere in this step does it mention backgrounds. Backgrounds is briefly mentioned in no great detail under the describe your character section. Even though mechanical rules were delivered via that background.

Five was choose your equipment and six was come together. Again, all of this handled five pages, including no small amount of art. Yeah.

2024 how does it handle it well the first thing is as we mentioned in our previous uh chapter here of of the show the designers have made a big deal about this is the first player's handbook that opens by teaching the game rather than having you make a character or describing the world or doing some other stuff it actually goes through the rules and

what rolling a d20 means and what checks mean etc etc uh so we don't even get to the creating your character uh section until chapter two and it's worth saying just for what it's worth right that that piece on uh the rules is 31 pages long

Yeah, and no matter what order you put the content in, there's going to be some sorts of jumping around. You can't avoid that. But I was happy to see this change

rule section come first for the reason that you just said at least you have an understanding of the basics so when you're making decisions about your character you have a frame of reference yeah you won't know everything but you'll you'll have a frame of reference uh so we get to the chapter two then uh creating your character the very first thing it talks about is get ready

It doesn't say choose class, choose race. It says get ready. And there are subheadings under get ready. And the first one is talk to your DM. And I'm like, yes, thank you. It reinforces for players that this game relies on game masters who are going to be the interpreters and the storytellers and the facilitators. So get to know the DM first because they can help you.

along the way and they may have further instructions along the way so i i really i really like that and i think it helps dms as well by putting dms in the driver's seat and saying dm this is a responsibility and a joy so treat it as both treat it as both of those things yeah and they don't

And then what I hope is in the DM's guide is a matching section I'm sure they won't, but it would be nice if there was a matching list that says, okay, DM says your players create characters. Here are some things you might want to talk to them about. When they come to you before they create their character, here's how you can handle things.

When you talk about session zero, here are some things you can do. When they're choosing a class, here are some things you could think about. That would... That would take too much coordination, but it would be helpful if there was at least some sort of correlation. So step one, choose your class. If we go back to 2014, what was the first step? Choose your race. So already, I'm very happy.

We have flipped the script and said, hey, player, the class is the most important thing you're going to choose. So step one, choose your class. Step two, determine origin. Now, what does origin mean? Origin means four things according to this step. It means your background. which they actually will set aside now and talk more about.

Your starting equipment, which should come from your class and your background, so it flows in order. Your species, which now is like behind class, background, and starting equipment, And finally your languages, which will depend on the things that we've already talked about. So it does follow a more logical flow. And I like how they sort of de-emphasize species.