Player's Handbook (Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition) by Wizards of the Coast LLC
312 pages
Published 2014
Read from April 29 to May 18
Rating: n/a
I continue my glacially slow read-through of the core rulebooks of the current edition of Dungeons & Dragons. This one consists of the nitty-gritty rules and counterrules and exceptions and specifics of play, which made for especially dull reading at times. (There's a reason I've never read these books cover to cover before, even though I've been playing the game since 2016.)
These rulebooks are in desperate need of a quick-reference guide. The Player's Handbook gestures toward this with an appendix detailing "conditions" that your character might be subject to during the game (such as blinded, paralyzed, or knocked prone), but fails at completing even this modest goal; the rules for how to get up from the prone condition aren't in the appendix, but in the section on movement during combat, a hundred pages earlier. When I started DMing my own campaign a couple years ago, I tried typing up my own cheat-sheet of important rules, but it wound up an unwieldy twenty pages or so, and I guessed wrong about what the most important rules and exceptions would be. (Most arguments and deliberate "misunderstandings" of the rules revolve around race and class features in the game. Kind of like in real life, I suppose.)
Fifth edition D&D was my first tabletop game, and I'll always be fond of it and eager to play. The rulebooks could benefit from better organization, though.
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