greetings my name is Monty Martin and I'm Kelly mlin and we are the dungeon dudes and today we are cracking open the 2024 players handbook to discuss 10 huge rules changes coming to the game a lot has stayed the same in the 2024 rules but there are some major differences that you need to be aware of note that in this video we are not going to talk about the major changes to the classes we're going to be doing that in a future video this is changes to the basic and fundament Al rules of the game if you've played fifth edition before the game Flow works pretty much the same but if you're not reading through the entire rule book you may miss some of these changes that could impact the way that you play going forward there's a lot to discuss today so let's get rolling the first big change in this impacts every single character every single class is that everybody chooses their subclass at third level now this is going to affect clerics Wizards Sorcerers warlocks and Druids who in the previous Edition all got their sub classes at first or second level now everybody's getting them at third well all of the sub classes that are included for each class in the player's handbook have been updated to reflect this change you can still use subclasses from prior Source books just that if you choose a sorcerer subass like the shadow sorcerer or for example the Twilight domain cleric just remember that you're not going to get those first level features until level three the second major change is that ability score boosts now come from your background not your species and these ability score boosts you now either get plus two to one score and plus one to another or you can give plus one to three separate ability scores this is a pretty big change for a lot of different species and characters because previously we had things like humans who got plus one to two different stats or some species that got plus two to one stat and plus two to another um whereas everyone's on the same sort of playing field now with their customization and there and while the backgrounds Define you know your choice of three different ability scores that you can boost they're pretty flexible so no matter what species or backgrounds you choose you're pretty much going to be able to get a nice chunky plus two boost to your primary ability you could still use older species in backgrounds you're just going to ignore the ability score boost that you got from your species in the previous Edition and instead look at the background options presented here continuing the theme of changes to backgrounds which are a huge impact every background now gives you a feat at first level this is a in a special category called the origin Feats so it's not any feat in the game it's only a specific subset of the Feats that are available the origin Feats presented in the players handbook 2024 are alert crafter healer lucky magic initiate musician Savage attacker skilled Tavern brawler and tough humans have also been changed instead of getting any feet that they want they get only an extra origin feet so as a human uh you actually get two Origin feets right away at level one but you're not going to be able to Jump Ahead at first level and gain anything like War Caster or great weapon Master you're going to everyone has to wait until fourth level to get those I think that some of these choices are pretty cool you can take skilled multiple times which uh if you're a human means that you can double that up also magic initiate being an origin feet and anybody having access to it uh is pretty amazing way for anyone in your party to get access to spells like Shield or guidance or or a whole bunch of other options especially because magical initiate allows you to choose your which class you want to get the the canr for either Druids clerics or Wizards and it also then lets you change the ability that you cast with so if you want to grab uh wizard cantrips but cast them with Charisma you can with magican isot continuing with Feats the next big change is that all General Feats which are the standard Feats not origin and not some of the other cool options that you'll hear about in other videos but the general Feats they all come with an ability score boost this means that you're going to get plus one to an ability score anytime that you take one of these Feats yeah so it's usually a choice of one to three different abilities um sometimes like it's like your strength or your dexterity or your strength your Constitution or any or for example War cter you can choose any of the intelligence wisdom or Charisma and for many Feats in the game this is a straight upgrade again warcaster for instance is exactly the same as it used to be under the 2020 for under the 2014 rules except it just now has the extra plus one to an ability score on top of that this means for a lot of characters you're going to have some interesting choices because I think that many characters are going to want to start uh with a 15 in their primary ability score add that plus two boost to it and then you're going to have to decide okay at fourth level I'm going to take a feat get a plus one get an 18 and then at eth and 12th level am I going to just go right to the max outing my ability score for my primary or am I going to take two really juicy Feats but wait till 12th level to max out my score I suspect for most characters you're going to want to load up on Feats and Max out your primary a little more gradually here's a big change drinking a potion of healing used to be an action now it is a bonus action this rule was actually a little tucked away you actually have to look at the potion of healing rules under under the specific item and it tells you that it's a bonus action to drink it not only to drink it yourself but you can give it to an ally to drink as a bonus action as well so this was a very popular house rule yeah um so much so that a lot of people never realized that it was a house rule to drink healing potions as a bonus action um and now it's just the rule um it remains to be seen whether all potions can be consumed with a bonus action or just healing potions um because the rule specifically is for the item and there isn't like a drink a potion action described in the rules this one's tough because we were really adamant about drinking potions as an action and we actually have said in so many prior videos that you should either make them an action and give full healing or make it a bonus action and don't give full healing we're going to have to figure out what we're going to do moving forward I think I would still might allow it to be maximized if you spend the whole action this next rule is probably the one that left me floored when I read it because I didn't see this one coming and it is a new rule called one spell with a slot per turn it replaces the old rules surrounding what happens when you cast a spell with a bonus action in your main action which were really confusing and often misapplied and people got it wrong all the time and now the rule is just literally you can only cast one spell with a spell slot per turn so this Rule still means that you can't cast a bonus action spell such as let's say a sorcerer using Quicken spell and then cast another spell on top of that you never could good but now it's crystal clear this also has some other implications though the famous give your wizard a couple levels of fighter to give them action surge is no longer going to work because you still can only cast one leveled spell per turn you used to have that loophole of using action surge to cast two Fireballs on a turn you can't anymore it's also kind of killed from both directions because the Fighter's action surge feature prohibits you from taking the magic action when you action surges they squash so so this this Wizards action surging tasting two spells two Fireballs not going to happen or is it because there's actually a loophole here some game effects allow you to cast a level spell without expending a spell slot for example you can take the the Fay touched feet and Misty step once without using a spell slot and there's actually a couple subclass features and class features that allow you to cast a leveled spell without expending a spell slot interestingly enough none of these are uh available to Sorcerers that I know of but what that does mean is if you somehow have a way of casting a spell on your turn without using a spell slot and then casting another spell using a bonus action or something else you could theoretically cast two spells yeah with fate touched you can Missy step as your bonus action and then cast Fireball yeah uh the other thing that I'm really interested in and we don't have an answer on this yet because we don't have the DMG the dungeon Masters Guide which is probably going to include all the magic items but how is this going to interact with magic items the understanding of magic items currently is that something like a staff of power has charges that it uses to cast spells not your spell slot so my question going forward is how does this interact with magic items can I Quicken a spell as a sorcerer and then use my staff wand or scroll to cast an additional spell yep surprise surprise has changed uh that was a surprise so surprise is always a little confusing a lot of people thought there was a surprise round but it was more an individual condition applied to a creature who was surprised but it's changed here and if you are surprised so if a creature's caught unaware at the start of combat all that happens is that they get disadvantage on their initiative role which uh means that if you equip your player properly you might not care yeah uh and this means also with pure dumb luck a surprised creature that say even with this Advantage rolls 220s um they still could go before their ambushers so in in the 2014 rules a surprise creature just didn't get to do anything on their turn um and they still got a turn but they couldn't act uh now it's possible the other way the other way around so this is a pretty big Nerf to surprise but it does kind of go in line with our theory that things that cause players to not have anything to do on their turn isn't fun it's also the less rewarding for the players to get surprise and less but on the flip side like I've seen many encounters with the players had surprise it's just decisively decided because it's such a overwhelming advantage and so toning it down a lot I I mies a feeling because I like that surprise was powerful and so it rewarded players creativity but it might have just been too punishing um now uh now it's you're still going to get a turn and I unfortunately though I think that we're still going to be telling people there's no priz round in D and D it's it's something that gets applied to you if yous and it can be on an individual basis the other cool thing here though if we look at something like alert alert no longer prevents surprise because surprise has changed but it still gives you that bonus to initiative so if you have the alert feet there's a good chance that you're not going to care if you're surprised I'm also wondering if weapons of warning are going to make a comeback in this update and if they do are they going to work the same because then if you have alert and a weapon of warning people could be surprising you all day and you're not going to care I mean previously if you had aert and weapon of warning you wouldn't be surprised anyway fair so I'm I'm hoping that that still continues yeah this one is more of a clarification but it's still a change it's explicitly spelled out now in the rules that a creature can now always voluntarily fail a saving throw if they want to so this came up when we were talking about the path of the world tree Barbarian teleporting allies because its forc teleport ability has a saving throw associated with it so now if you want to you can teleport your allies and they can be like yeah I'm going to fail that save so I can teleport this actually feels like it's going to interact with several aspects of the game where if something is happening to you that you're like oh this actually would be beneficial or maybe you just don't like your character anymore and want to willingly fail the save and for I I don't know you do you can you voluntarily fail a death save you lose the will live according to the the rules I can be like I just want to this death saving throw see you got my new character ready um so yeah that's it could other other than that uh it could interact with some really interesting mechanics in the game on the other hand if you don't want to fail that saving throw you could reroll it with heroic inspiration inspiration is now called heroic inspiration um and just as before you either have inspiration or you don't uh instead of inspiration the being giving you advantage or disadv advantage on a role heroic inspiration is now very explicitly a full-blown rroll um and so if you get a roll you don't like it inspiration boom fix that role if you have advantage or disadvantage just keep in mind that roll actually only applies to one die you don't get to roll both uh but usually you know if you have disadvantage you roll the I mean either way you're going to reroll the lowest one yeah so yeah yeah you're you're going to reroll the lower one and hope that you know it improves it also really just interesting to note uh humans start their day with inspir so if your DM keeps forting to give out heroic inspiration just play a human and give it to yourself and then take the lucky feet because it's an origin feat yeah and and show halflings who really are the lucky ones exactly okay so if you were following the on Arthur play tests you might have noticed that there was a bit of a ro rocky road over what was going to happen to exhaustion so it has changed but not in the way we thought it was going to change but also kind of in the way we thought it was going to change but also not so exhaustion is still six levels of exhaustion and you still die at exhaustion level six however instead of every level of exhaustion having a different effect you now just have a penalty to all the 20 test equal to twice your exhaustion level you also get a penalty to your speed equal to five times your exhaustion level so I actually think this is really smooth for exhaustion yeah it means that it's going to suck for your movement and everything thing that you try to do uh but I actually think that that that's a really mechanically smooth way of of dealing with exhaustion so this now is one of the few places in the rules where a penalty does exist uh and a penalty that is kind of independent of proficiency or dice or anything like that uh because this Stacks with disadvantage now so it like exhaustion used to be pretty punishing because once you came in at like one or two levels of exhaustion you were now having penalties to all your ability checks um all of your um all of your attack roles and it it got pretty rough the the thing that's actually quite dastardly about exhaustion now is that it's coming in with a penalty to all your D20 tests which is ability scores attack rules and saving throws interestingly enough this doesn't affect death saving throws because the rules don't specify that the death saving throw is a D20 test yes so in the new rules a D20 test is anything that is an attack roll and ability score or saving throw and there are and most of the time when you roll a D20 you are making a D20 test and therefore all the things that apply to D20 tests apply but not all the time apparently because death saving throw doesn't specify and it's kind of unclear where initiative lands on this yeah cuz if if it if a death saving throw was a D20 test then it would be bad yeah for exhaust question but on the flip side if a death saving throw isn't a D20 test then things like bless and Paladin's auras don't apply to it and normally like a D20 test normally so like that means that there's no penalties that could ever happen to it but there's no there's not a lot of ways to add to it either I mean the good news here is it would be so devastating to get exhaustion level five and then get knocked down to zero hit points and then you're just like what do I do so probably for the best that it doesn't affect that because that's just extra punishing yeah exhaustion level five is pretty brutal minus 10 yeah everything that you're doing and also uh your your movement speed is reduced by 25 so you're down to 5et of movement so I'm usually exhaustion to level five on my day-to-day life yeah yeah that's that's just how I live just Shuffle Around Bar anything yeah uh in incidentally enough with removing exhaustion you only remove one exhaustion level on Long rest as well right so uh yeah so keep up with your sleep schedule because if you incur a sleep debt it can actually take weeks to get out of it in both real life and IND D it's true um so I think that those that wraps up our our 10 biggest changes to the rules yeah uh we will be doing another video where we specify each class and what the biggest changes to each class was uh I think that's going to be another exciting look at how things have changed I think most of those are going to be for the better but this was a look at just the core rules we see that even though fifth edition has remained relatively the same when you're playing it at the table you're going to feel hey I'm playing fifth edition D and D but you will want to pay attention to these subtle rules changes that are going to impact the flow and the balance of the game there's also a bunch of changes to many of the Spells and the Feats and other player options that we'll be getting into in future videos as well but if there's another change to the rules of the game so again not a class not a spell not a subass not a species not a feet not a feat player option but the rules that you've happened to find and you think it's even bigger than one of these changes that we've listed out here we'd love to hear about that so let us know if you find any secret uh rules changes that uh it would be really cool if the comment section Below had like people showing other rules changes so that people who are watching this video can then go to the comments and be like oh hey here's some other things I should be aware of in the new book so let us know about any changes you catch in the comments below the videos that we create on our Channel made possible thanks to the incredible generosity of our patreon supporters if you enjoy the work that we do here on YouTube please consider becoming a patron of our show the links are right down below and you can check out our adventures in the world of draim which are Tuesday evenings right here on YouTube you can check out all the previous episodes right up over here and we've got plenty more coverage 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