4e Spotlight: Player’s Handbook
Estimated read time: about 5 minutes
Today marks the start of a new series on the blog in which we pick out some products from Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition and share some thoughts on them. As it’s always great to start from the beginning, we’re taking a look at the first Player’s Handbook. As far as D&D books go, few have affected my personal playstyle and design-brain the way this one has!
(If any of this catches your interest, I encourage you to consider picking up a PDF copy of the Player’s Handbook on the DM’s Guild for about $10. It’s reasonably priced and a quality document. As the book’s long out of print finding a physical copy will be more expensive, but I recommend Noble Knight Games.)
My Introduction to 4e
Although I grew up playing D&D-based cRPGs such as Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights, I didn’t actually know what D&D was until one of my college buddies invited me to play in his 4e campaign. Using pencil and paper, he helped me make a character (a Drow Hexblade), and introduced me to the other players—one of whom later became my wife.
Learning the different dice and how actions worked, as well as living out adventures just like I had read growing up, it was all a blast. Our group roleplayed, delved into dungeons, fought monsters, and munched on snacks weekly.
And then I got sick. While preparing some soup for a dinner date with a special someone, I choked on the tiniest piece of carrot and it got sucked down into one of my lungs, which led to an illness I dubbed “carrot-pneumonia”. Rexburg, Idaho gets pretty cold, and any breath of chilly air led to an irrepressible coughing fit. So I was confined to my apartment for a month or so while I recovered. I wasn’t bored though, because I had plenty of reading material loaned to me in the form of my DM’s 4e books.
And I read the heck out of those books. His entire collection, cover to cover, multiple times. I learned the mechanics, rules, and settings nearly by heart. I designed dozens of characters, and even stepped up to DM a few sessions myself. It was an exhilarating crash course into the worlds of D&D.
The Player’s Handbook is one of the books I read through many times, and it’s still near and dear to my heart. Thanks to my old college buddy’s generosity, I now have that exact copy I spent so much time reading.
Let’s crack it open and take a look at some of the awesome things it offers!
Rich Narrative
I never understand people who claim that 4e abandoned roleplay and just focused on the numbers. From the very first chapter of this book there is excellent, inspiring writing broken up by evocative pieces of art. I’m no true Wordsmith or Scribemaster like our inestimable Caleb Willden at Unraveled Archives, but I’ve always been an avid reader, and there’s hardly any paragraph in this book that doesn’t grab my attention with vivid descriptions of what D&D can or should be.
Even the seemingly-endless pages of features and “powers” include snippets of story and adventure, describing how the spells and exploits might actually look in a real fantasy world. The mechanics are all carefully written to be precise and understandable, but just as much care is taken with the rest of the writing to enrich our understanding of the story being told in our games.
Heroic Fantasy
There is definitely a purposeful push in this book towards a specific kind of fantasy and gameplay. The character abilities are called “powers” for a reason, after all! Each player character is meant to be a competent, dynamic hero a cut above the rest of the populace. It generally doesn’t encourage gritty, grounded stories.
It also puts heavy emphasis on the prevalence of magic. There are many overtly-magical races and classes, but even the more “mundane” ones like the Fighter or Rogue are expected to find and wield powerful magic weapons and armor, and perform feats of such exceptional mortal skill that they might as well be magical effects.
In fact, there’s a lengthy section of this book that lists out the many magic items and their properties—something almost unheard of to see in a player-centric book like this. In most editions such things tend to be hidden away in the Dungeon Master’s Guide or other DM-facing supplement. Including the magical equipment right here in the Player’s Handbook arguably takes away the mystery of magic items, but I think there’s something to be said for how it encourages the book’s super-heroic themes.
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Mechanical Crunch
Included alongside the story-telling aspects is an impressive quantity of character options. Each class entry is about 14 pages stuffed with features and powers. The features are often written in fairly plain language, while each power is detailed in a condensed template that clearly explains what it does. In many ways the concision and clarity are a breath of fresh air after searching through so many 5e feature and spell descriptions for the important bits, like what saving throw is required or which damage dice to roll.
Similarly, there’s a wealth of feats detailed in the book. Some are generally useful for all characters, some are meant for specific classes, and some are there just to support niche, interesting builds. Some give small, always-useful bonuses, while others potentially have a much larger impact on a character’s playstyle. What I most appreciate about them is that although there are many feats, they’re just about all short and understandable. The description does its job and gets out of the way.
There’s also an extensive list of equipment! Every armor and weapon type has its pros and cons compared to the others. The choice between a longsword and a battleaxe is more than just flavor; given the weapon’s properties and any specialized feats you may have chosen, there are clear distinctions between the two in terms of accuracy and damage output.
Tactical Movement and Positioning
4e is different from other editions in that it directly assumes you’re playing with a gridded battlemap, as opposed to theatre of the mind or other ways of representing the battlefield and combatants. Everything in this book is described in “squares” rather than “feet”, for example, from a character’s speed to the range of weapons and powers.
This is part of where the arguments about 4e’s focus on numbers over story comes from. Among the extensive combat rules and actions, most of them are concerned with movement and counting squares—something that’s fallen out of fashion in what seems like the majority of roleplaying games being designed and played today. But while I see where the detractors are coming from, I highly doubt that many of them have actually read or tried 4e; it’s not any less focused on narrative than any other edition of D&D—though it does require more rules understanding than 5e to just jump in and start playing.
I believe there are pros and cons to all of this. For example, in 5e I find it narratively dissatisfying and jarring how defending other characters is. In that system, a Fighter who steps between their Wizard ally and the enemy ogre doesn’t actually have much way to enforce their protection. Depending on the setup, the ogre might be able to simply walk around the Fighter and attack the Wizard without even provoking an opportunity attack. Or, optimally the Fighter might decide to move to the far side of the ogre, opposite the Wizard, to keep the ogre from moving toward the Wizard. Narratively, it’s baffling. The mechanics and narrative are at odds.
4e’s emphasis on tactical positioning actually helps to fuel the narrative that the Fighter can protect the Wizard, rather than literally tying the narrative in knots to fit the mechanics of 5e. The mechanics serve and amplify the narrative, at least in this case. In other situations, I agree that counting every square can be tedious and distracting.
Economy of Gold and Magic Items
There are tons of great things in the Player’s Handbook that I’d love to talk about, but there’s only so much time in the day. The last thing I’d like to discuss today, then, is how this book handles treasure.
As mentioned above, this book has entries for scores of magic items. It also includes prices for those magic items—something 5e has been highly noncommittal about. Now, I am not the Goldmaster of Unraveled Archives, nor do I even really understand how real-world economies work, much less those of fantasy worlds. However, if money and gold are to be given out as rewards for play, it’s nice to have things to spend it on. And just being told how much those things reasonably cost is a lot easier than trying to design it all from the ground up.
So players using this book are given the list of magic items with exact prices for all of them, freeing them pretty much to pick out what they want and pay for it with whatever they’ve earned in-game. Speaking as a player, I love having this extra area of consideration and customization for my characters. As a DM, I find it actually makes my job easier to have my players just tell me which magic items they’d like to come across. They’re happy, I’m happy, and the game doesn’t break. 4e expects the characters to have magic items, unlike 5e where any +1 sword inherently pushes the boundaries of the game’s math.
One last way that the Player’s Handbook handles treasure is through rituals. In 4e, non-combat magical effects are handled through the casting of rituals. It costs gold to learn rituals, and then there’s an additional gold cost each time you cast them. You can use rituals to set alarms around camp, revive the dead, craft magic items, travel the planes, and more so long as you have the know-how and the gold to back it up.
Wrapping it Up
And that’s what I have to say about 4e’s Player’s Handbook. In all, it’s a must-have if you want to learn or play 4e, or even just to get inspiration for anything else you aspire to. Reading this book has fueled endless hours of creative thinking for me, especially at times in my life when I desperately needed entertainment and mental exercise.
If you’re interested in how to steal parts of this book and put them to use in your own 5e games, we’ve got a massive endeavor called “Project 4ever” where we do exactly that, taking the best parts of 4e and rewriting them to work for 5e. If you’d like to learn more about Project 4ever, or even playtest it with us, we encourage you to drop by our Discord server! We’ve got a big playtest packet set up, and we schedule at least a few playtests every month.
Until the next article, happy gaming! And see you in the Archives.
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