The 2024 rules give your turn twelve named actions. Seven are old friends: Attack, Dash, Disengage, Dodge, Help, Hide and Ready. Five are new or renamed: Influence, Study, Search, Utilize and Magic. They cover the things players did all along (talk someone round, remember a fact, look for a trap, pull a lever, cast a spell), and now each one…
In 2014, Inspiration gave you Advantage. You had to say so before you rolled, and if the die came up 19 anyway, you had spent it for nothing. So players sat on it, waiting for a moment that deserved it. The 2024 rules rename it Heroic Inspiration and turn it into a reroll. You roll, you look at the die,…
The 2014 rules called them races. The 2024 rules call them species, and the change is more than the name. A 2014 dwarf got +2 Constitution and walked at 25 feet. A 2024 dwarf gets no ability score increase at all, walks at 30 feet, and sees twice as far in the dark. The free System Reference Document 5.2.1 [1]…
In the 2014 rules, exhaustion was a ladder of six different punishments. Level 1 gave you Disadvantage on ability checks. Level 4 halved your Hit Point maximum. Level 5 set your Speed to 0. Nobody remembered which rung did what, so most tables looked it up every time, or quietly never used it. The 2024 rules replace the ladder with…
In the 2014 rules a greatsword and a maul were the same weapon with different paint: 2d6 damage, Heavy, Two-Handed. In the 2024 rules they play differently. The greatsword Grazes: it hurts even when it misses. The maul Topples: it knocks the target flat. That difference is weapon mastery, the biggest change the 2024 Player's Handbook made to martial characters,…
You have seen it on a spell scroll, in a monster's stat block, scratched in the margin of somebody's house rule: . Four symbols and a promise. Everyone else at the table reads it without pausing, the way you read a road sign. This is how they do it. Dice notation says how many dice to roll, what kind, and…
The DM says "Dex save, with disadvantage, DC 15," and the new player at the end of the table picks up a d6. This glossary fixes that. Nine terms, each with what you roll, what you compare it to, and the odds. Rules follow the 2024 rules as published in the free System Reference Document 5.2.1 (SRD 5.2) [1]. Where…
Advantage and disadvantage are two of the most important dice rules in modern Dungeons & Dragons. They are also two of the easiest to explain badly. The rule, from the System Reference Document 5.2.1 (the free 2024 rules text, "Playing the Game", D20 Tests) [1]: Advantage: roll two d20s and use the higher. Disadvantage: roll two d20s and use the…
