As you may have heard, I recently got my hands on the 2024 version of the Player’s Handbook, colloquially known as D&D 5.5e.

As someone who started playing in 2015, my entire D&D career has been built upon the foundation that is fifth edition, so I was obviously eager to see what had been changed, and what remained the same, after a decade of rule tweaking, spell shifting, and class restructuring.

…And we’re going to get to all of that, of course. But in this article I actually just want to touch on something that I found particularly pertinent in the opening address by Jeremy Crawford, the (then) Lead Designer with Wizards of the Coast.

It’s a three-paragraph, italicized note that, with no bolding or sub-headline to speak of, is actually quite easy to overlook upon cracking open a fresh new Players Handbook, but I think it is absolutely worth the read. Those of you with the book will find it on Page 4, and those who have the online version can find it through the link here.

I won’t type the whole thing out here, Mostly because it’s probably best not to copy and paste info stuck behind a paywall verbatim, but also because it’s kind of long. I’ll skip to the part that really stuck out to me, near the end after Crawford took a look back to the origins in the 1970s and the recent popularity of the 2014 edition.

Here’s the last paragraph:

As a teenager, I met with both Gary and Dave. I even spent an entire day with Gary, and we did what all D&D fans do: share stories of our adventures in the D&D multiverse. I invite you to embark on such adventures anew. Share as much laughter as you can with your friends. Use only the rules that serve your fun, and always follow your group’s bliss. So many people have been enjoying the magic of D&D for half a century. Let’s keep it blazing for another 50 years!

I think nestled into that paragraph is an important note that, in my humble opinion, drives the essence of Dungeons and Dragons, but can so often, unfortunately, be overlooked by some of D&D’s most vehement fans: Share as much laughter as you can with your friends. Use only the rules that serve your fun, and always follow your group’s bliss. 

At the end of the day, the Rules as Written are guidelines. Dungeons and Dragons is, now more than ever, an exercise of imagination and improvisation. It’s important to have a framework around it for it to qualify as a game, but I get a kick out of the very creators themselves noting just how important it is that players and DMs alike know that, sometimes, it’s totally fine to do something a little different from what they put in that book.

Check these out: 

• 3 ways to make death saving throws more exciting in D&D 5e
• 13 ways a character can be insta-killed in Dungeons and Dragons 5e
• Here’s everything you need to know about death saving throws in D&D 5e

We’ve got plenty of language around this particular aspect of D&D: “Rule of Cool,” Rules Lawyers,” “Rules as Written,” “Rules as Intended.” And I’m not going to lie to you — when I started DMing, I had a pretty hard stance against homebrew content or erring away from the rule books, because I was worried about balance, and problem players, and slippery slopes. (To be fair, I was working with a party of strangers that I’d met on the internet as a brand new DM, so I’m not exactly beating myself up over it, or saying it’s wrong for others to do).

At its very core, D&D is about collaborative storytelling, imagination, and, as Jeremy Crawford put it, sharing “as much laughter as you can with your friends,” and “always following your group’s bliss.”

If that means throwing away the rulebook and causing some chaos, if that means an entire session of cracking jokes and no one rolls a single dice, and if that means taking your adventure an entirely different direction that the module, I say — so long as everyone is having fun with it — hell ya. And apparently Crawford would agree.