Revisions to Psi Warrior, Soul Knife plus details on artwork, design philosophy and progress update.
Lead D&D designers, Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford, had a lot to say about the revised Player’s Handbook 2024 in their latest fireside chat. Included in there were details around the approach to artwork, core approaches to updating the rules and a couple of additional subclasses not previously revealed for the revised handbook.
You can see the full video embedded below:
Psi Warrior and Soul Knife make the cut
To run alongside the already revealed psionic subclasses of aberrant mind sorcerer and great old one warlock, they revealed that they’re bringing over a pair of subclasses from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything with revised rules. They are the psi warrior fighter and the soul knife rogue. Both use psionics within the subclass to enhance there abilities and perhaps hints at some kind of shared and altered psionic mechanics between these different subclasses.
Both are fun subclasses and psionics has previously been a bit tacked on in 5e so updated mechanics are a welcome addition.
Meaningful artwork
I love the direction of artwork for some of the more recent D&D publications. For all its flaws, Spelljammer: Adventures in Space was a stunning set of books. This looks set to continue in the Player’s Handbook with more beautiful and detailed artwork that’s been shared already.
One new detail emerged from the chat around the philosophy for creating artwork. The idea is that artwork should communicate things about the words on the page. Some of the examples Chris and Jeremy gave were around the artwork for different species telling you about the culture (like halflings eating breakfast together).
They also mentioned that we’ll get artwork of the original spell makers in some instances. This means we’ll see Melf casting his acid arrow, or people like Tasha and Mordenkainen casting their spells. Small touches that tell a little bit about the thoughtfulness behind the book.
Rule change philosophies
A lot of care has gone into the rule changes going into the revised Player’s Handbook. It remains compatible with previous 5e content, but much has been refined.
They have examples of rules being easier to find by keeping certain information together. They also mentioned lots of care around how multiclassing interacts, ensuring certain options are no longer viable (perhaps ones that were seriously overpowered) while ensuring others remained viable (perhaps because they created certain great options).
Unfortunately, they didn’t clarify which options these were.
Revised Player’s Handbook is nearly ready
With it’s release due on 17th September, we’d hope that the book is nearly ready, and Chris and Jeremy confirmed exactly that. They’re busy finalising wording and ensuring everything is watertight before finalising the book. Apparently it’s quite massive and will dwarf other D&D books on the shelf.
While I have some reservations over the need to revise 5e having to learn new rules and whether we could see some unintentional degradation of rules, it does sound like there’s some great design considerations in the revisions. 5e certainly has some issues and hopefully the revisions can plug these and create a more streamlined and interesting game.
Let us know your thoughts on the Revised Player’s Handbook below.