D&D (2024) New D&D Edition's Player’s Handbook Cover Reveal

Game Informer has revealed the cover to the 2024 Player’s Handbook.

The cover features a gold dragon behind the old-school D&D characters Strongheart the paladin, Mercion the cleric, Elkhorn the dwarf fighter, and Molliver the thief. Ringlerun the wizard is absent (then again he got his showcase on one of the 1E AD&D Player's Handbooks), but a drow mage appears to have joined the party!

 

[Chaosmancer]

LitRPGs make me.feel old and cranky.

Fair, but I am an unabashed massive fan of the genre. It combines things I love like DnD the Game with storytelling, and it tends to be both funny and epic at the same time. There are a lot of poorly written schlock stories out there, but at its best? At its best these stories hit a need in me.

 

[Parmandur]

Fair, but I am an unabashed massive fan of the genre. It combines things I love like DnD the Game with storytelling, and it tends to be both funny and epic at the same time. There are a lot of poorly written schlock stories out there, but at its best? At its best these stories hit a need in me.

I am sure you are right, I just find it...very confusing?

 

[Parmandur]

@Chaosmancer and to be clear, not in a "I don't get it, so it must be bad" way. Just trying to follow along when I've tried it is befeddling and leave me wondering at what I'm missing.

 

[occam]

It never was.

It's Space Opera, a different field than Science Fiction.

It's not differentiated out from the Science Fiction section all that often though, but then, why would it be when retailers places groupings like Fantasy and Science fiction together.

Space Opera is basically fantasy in a Space Like Setting, rather than using any science as a basis or even keeping to the laws of physics and reality.

Other examples would be things like Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and others.

Star Wars is space opera, but the fantasy elements aren't what make it that:

Space opera is a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes space warfare, with use of melodramatic, risk-taking space adventures, relationships, and chivalric romance. Set mainly or entirely in outer space, it features technological and social advancements (or lack thereof) in faster-than-light travel, futuristic weapons, and sophisticated technology, on a backdrop of galactic empires and interstellar wars with fictional aliens, often in fictional galaxies.

There's plenty of straight-up science fiction that counts as space opera. Star Trek is space opera. The Foundation series is space opera, as is the Dune series, Niven's Known Space, Saberhagen's Berserker series, Pournelle's CoDominium stories, Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5, etc. At least some of that is considered hard SF.

 

[Chaosmancer]

@Chaosmancer and to be clear, not in a "I don't get it, so it must be bad" way. Just trying to follow along when I've tried it is befeddling and leave me wondering at what I'm missing.

Nah, I get you.

I know a lot of the ones I read early on were based in MMORPGs so I was lost... quite a few times, since I'm just not up on the lingo. In many ways, I think it is a genre still finding its legs.

 

[Doctor Futurity]

Star Wars existed before midichlorians, they were not mentioned once in the original trilogy. I guess I also disagree about the speculative science part here, there is nothing remotely scientific about m. in Star Wars. They do not get explored in any way, they are just used to handwave away how someone has ‘the force’


I can maybe buy this, even though it certainly stretches the mantle of science fiction, but there is plenty of fantasy literature that does not follow a rational approach to explain its mysticism / magic / ….

And while any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic (an important word you missed there), that does not mean all magic is rooted in science either

People reacted so negatively that they dropped midichlorians, even if they crop up these days stealthily in some shows. Even if they had developed it more, it would still be equivalent to handwavium, as despite suggesting something aligned with mitochondria or something, there's still no scientific basis for it....just an extra lore layer to explaining force powers.

I liked the fact that it showed that there were ways for the Star Wars universe to identify such stuff, but again....handwavium =/= science fiction.

 

[Doctor Futurity]

Honestly, I kind of gave up on the idea of clearly differentiated genres a while ago. Broadly, the categories are useful, but when you start getting to specific works, it can progress down many a strange path.

For example, under the Genre of Fantasy, there is the sub-genre of LitRPG (which is generally characterized by the addition of game elements and numbers into the core telling of the story and world) and within that is the sub-sub-genre of Dungeon Core stories (where the main character is generally the core of a growing dungeon) but even in that you have "person as dungeon" where the "dungeon core" is a monster or person, horror genres within that genre, cozy fantasy genres within that genre, isekai elements...

The deeper you dive, the more everything just... blends.

Everything you just wrote there made me suddenly feel really damned old, and I have to go find a wiki page to understand what you are talking about.....gah!

 

[Reynard]

Star Wars is space opera, but the fantasy elements aren't what make it that:

There's plenty of straight-up science fiction that counts as space opera. Star Trek is space opera. The Foundation series is space opera, as is the Dune series, Niven's Known Space, Saberhagen's Berserker series, Pournelle's CoDominium stories, Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5, etc. At least some of that is considered hard SF.

Any term genre definition that says Star Wars, Star Trek and The Culture are the same genre isn't really much use to anyone.

 

[occam]

Any term genre definition that says Star Wars, Star Trek and The Culture are the same genre isn't really much use to anyone.

Sure it is. I like all three of those, just as I enjoy a lot of other space opera. But a subgenre classification doesn't fully define anything; Star Wars and Star Trek can be very different from each other even if they're both accurately, and usefully, described as space opera. You might as well say that the term "cyberpunk" is pointless if it can include both Neuromancer and Shadowrun, even though it communicates the existence of common elements in both works.

 

[Reynard]

Sure it is. I like all three of those, just as I enjoy a lot of other space opera. But a subgenre classification doesn't fully define anything; Star Wars and Star Trek can be very different from each other even if they're both accurately, and usefully, described as space opera. You might as well say that the term "cyberpunk" is pointless if it can include both Neuromancer and Shadowrun, even though it communicates the existence of common elements in both works.

Neuromancer and Shadowrun are significantly closer together in terms of genre expectations than Star Trek and Star Wars.