D&D "didn't burn the game down" for the new rulebooks: it's still the RPG you love

Aug. 2, 2024

Interview | D&D creative director Chris Perkins tells us why the rules are changing

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There are plenty of questions you could ask about the new D&D rulebooks. How has my favorite class changed? What subclasses are there for me to try? But the biggest one is a lot simpler: why? Why do these need to exist in the first place?

“The balancing act is we have to keep it in the space of the familiar while also adding stuff that feels fresh and new and exciting,” says Perkins. “Classes that you know, and love, we’ve juiced them up, we’ve given them a bit more flair and flash, and things they couldn’t do before – like Fighters using Weapon Mastery. This property now sort of gloms onto weapons to make them much more exciting and fun to play. We don’t think that those are going to be big lifts for folks, [we believe] they’re going to be super excited to dive in and play characters using these new options.”

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If these books were always envisioned as one massive tome, why split them up and release them so far apart? According to Perkins, “the reason we spaced them out is many fold. One, it’s a 1,000 page book split into three parts. That is a lot of pages for bookstores to take on. It is it a lot of paper for our printers. We already can’t print them all at one printer. We have to do multiple printers. Our distributors are like, ‘please don’t have all of this drop in our warehouses at the same time…’ Spacing them out [also] felt like it was good for people’s bank accounts. It was good for stores, it was good for distributors. It was good for retailers. And because you can use your existing books, the impact on the games at the table happening now is minimal.”

If that’s the case, though, why should players upgrade at all?

“I think there are so many user experience improvements at play here,” Perkins says. As an example, there’s been a lot of emphasis on fixing everything from small stumbling blocks (like health potions using up a full action) to bigger problems such as certain classes being underpowered. The team seems to have also kept the most important goal ofanygame at the forefront – to make sure everyone’s having as much fun as possible.

The new Monster Manual is a good case in point. Its stat blocks are apparently “going to be easier on DMs, and the monsters are going to be doing more interesting things at the table.” According to Perkins, this is true across the board. For instance, “all the [DMG’s] magic items have, just like the classes, had the fun amped up a little bit. Or maybe they’re easier to run.”

Another notable change isn’t quite as sexy, but it’s arguably more useful. As Perkins explains, “it was very important for us this time around to consult with UX consultants and tap their expertise and get them to tell us how we frame information on a page, or on the inside of a DM screen, so that people can access it in the easiest, best way possible, knowing that people don’t generally read anymore. But you know, we’re a text based game. And that’s the way it is. So we can’t get away from no text, we just have to figure out the better ways to present the text that we have. And so everything, even things that seem inconsequential, are hugely impactful, like increasing the point size of our books. At the start of each class, there’s like a little summary box that has everything basically in a nutshell. So you don’t have to read paragraphs or anything, or you don’t have to go digging, or even flip to the next page. [These are] all very deliberate attempts to… help people engage with the game more easily.”

That’s also why the setting in the upcoming Dungeon Master’s Guide was chosen. Even though Baldur’s Gate 3 and the recent D&D movie put more eyeballs on the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk is the world being included here – and it’s thanks to that streamlined approach.

With the enormous success of Baldur’s Gate 3, will we be seeing more from those characters and that world? Absolutely. Perkins says “as D&D creative director, [I’m] working with my team to figure out okay, we’ve got all this lore around the game, and all this lore around the characters. How can we build other expressions, other things, other ways for people to engage with these characters and locations? That’s what we’re driving at going forward… You’ll start to see more BG3 paraphernalia slash engagement slash expressions in the not too distant future. And that’s all I can say.”

“It is, in that respect, a very pure and very distilled experience. And what was magical about it is it didn’t have any point of view. It left it up to the DM to take those names, take those places, and put some skin on those bones… It is that concept that we focused on for the DMG, because we knew we had a finite amount of space. We wanted something nostalgic that will make some fans go, ‘oh my god, wow, that’s unexpected and cool, but not totally out beyond the pale.’ But we also wanted to hold true to this concept of, let’s give you a bare bones skeleton, a setting that you can then make your own, that doesn’t bring in a lot of Greyhawk lore from later editions or installments, and is just inspirational in a non-threatening kind of way.”

This isn’t to say Wizards of the Coast is slavishly recreating Greyhawk as it existed 30-odd years ago. It goes without saying that certain attitudes have changed over the last few decades, so the team has tried to bring it into the modern day.

Fortunately, the venerable setting didn’t need too much tweaking. Once a few names or places had been edited, Perkins and the team felt that it has been able to “present a very exciting world for people to build on.”

“It’s all encompassing, insofar as it covers everything. It’s got all the condition definitions, it’s got how initiative works, it’s got how actions work, it’s got everything… It’s just sort of following the mantra of the book, which is really kind of paying attention to the user experience, and making it as accessible and referential and resourceful as possible.”

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