My Thoughts on Dungeons & Dragons 5.5e: The Player's Handbook

Despite what the almighty Wizards of the Coast proclaim, and even though it's kind of backwards-compatible with 5e, the 2024 update to D&D is a new edition. Its changes are significant enough, and the phrase "the 2024 version" is clunky enough, that I'm just going to refer to it as 5.5e. Or "five-five."

Anyway, I got the 5.5e Player's Handbook for my half-birthday this year, and for the most part I'm very impressed. I'll save any further elaboration for the specific points below.

What I Like / Good Changes

These are the changes in 5.5e that I will be gladly adopting into my own homebrew game, and that I approve of in terms of design.

• Book layout. The layout of the new PHB is so much better than the original. I never realized how confusing it was in 5e to start the book explaining how to make a character without even explaining to the reader how to play the actual game. The new one is organized in a much more logical order, and 10 years has given them a lot of time to rephrase things for new players much better. I could go on, but suffice it to say I'm very impressed overall.
• The art. The new art in the PHB is fantastic. It illustrates every section really well, gets you excited to enter a fantasy world, and there's just a lot of it compared to the old one.
• New action: Influence. I wasn't sure how I felt about this in Unearthed Arcana, but I really like it now that I've seen it in action. The book distinguishes an NPC's disposition towards you as Friendly (advantage on Charisma checks), Indifferent, or Hostile (disadvantage on Charisma checks); and whether they are Willing, Hesitant, or Unwilling to be influenced by you. An elegant mechanic that needed to be put into the game.
• New action: Magic. I haven't seen this in practice yet, but it seems good for the purposes of determining what things are magic and what aren't. It may as well be its own thing, sure.
• New actions: Search and Study. Sure, these might as well be actions as well.
• New action: Utilize. A slightly odd word choice for what this does, but it encompasses object interaction as well as tool use. Good to have.
• New condition: Bloodied. When you're at half hit points, you get Bloodied. It doesn't have any mechanics on its own, but other mechanics can interact with it. Really nice to have.
• Origin Feats. It was a brilliant idea to separate Feats into two groups. It just wasn't fair to have the must-have OP Feats right alongside the more RP-driven, fun ones for character development. Now each character can start with a simple Feat to round out their character and get better ones as they level up.
• Most classes. I absolutely love almost every single change they made to the classes. They were streamlined, empowered, and in some cases straight-up fixed. I particularly love the new Monk, Rogue, and Sorcerer changes.
• Weapon mastery. This was a much-needed addition to the martial classes in the game. With all the spells spellcasters have, Fighters and Barbarians were originally limited to just attack, attack, attack each turn. And weapons were basically just piercing, slashing, or bludgeoning damage, which didn't even make that big of a difference. I really like the motivation ot use different types of weapons.
• Races. I love how aasimar are finally getting some love (I'm so glad they tell you the correct pronunciation of AH-sih-mar! It's like aardvark guys!), and I think goliaths fill a niche that needed filled. I also really like the streamlined racial abilities that each one gets. The excessive ribbon abilities were replaced by ones that will actually see play and make good stories. I also noticed that all the resistances (fire for tieflings, cold for goliaths, etc.) were taken out. I wonder if that was deemed too powerful or supernatural to be a racial ability for a humanoid? I'm not sure how I feel about it.
• Most spells. SO MANY spells were either fixed, empowered, or simplified in super clever and fun ways. If you don't like anything else about 5.5e, I bet you'll like the new spells.

What I Dislike / Bad Changes

• Style: Too many capitals. I'll probably get over this in time, but now, as part of the new style guide, every proper game mechanic, spell, item, damage type, creature type, etc., is Capitalized. It gets a bit burdensome to read so many, and I really don't think something like Torches or Rope needs to be capitalized. But I guess as long as things like size were capitalized, they might as well draw attention to the mechanics for easier rule checking.
• Hide action. Now, when you Hide, you make a DC 15 Stealth check as long as you're heavily obscured or behind 3/4 cover or more. That seems dumb to me. If a monster has a passive Perception of 9, rolling a 10 should allow you to hide from it. This seems to have been made to simplify the old rule, but I think it was fine the way it was. I'm not using this rule.
• New area effect: Emanation. This word is clumsy, and I feel like the entire concept is unnecessary. It was apparently invented to distinguish it from a sphere because it's centered on a creature. However, spells like Leomund's Tiny Hut use the term in a way that makes it clearly different from a sphere. I think the effect itself would have been useful, but just call it an Aura and stick tightly with its rules instead of showing it off and breaking it.
• Calling races "species". I will die on the hill that "race" is what this should be called, not species. Not only does "species" sound sci-fi instead of fantasy, but it seems to separate adventurers rather than bring them apart. Rather than being all humanoids of different races, they're all completely different species. Race, and all other differences between humanoids (and humans in real life) should be celebrated, not swept under a corner. This post by the Angry GM sums up my thoughts on it pretty soundly.
• No half-races or subraces. I understand the need of simplicity, and for the most part this change is probably okay. But it's a shame to not have the different cultures of halflings and dwarves to choose from, as well as half-elves and half-orcs. It's a little lame, too, that elves still have subraces, but their normal abilities are dumbed down to just the effects of three spells, like a drow.
• Basic poison. I didn't think it was possible, but somehow the designers made basic poison even more useless than before. Before, it lasted for 1 minute, during which each hit had a chance of doing 1d4 poison damage if the target failed a DC 10 Con save. That was too much rolling, so they changed it to deal 1d4 poison damage on a hit automatically... ONE TIME. How on earth could they have spent time revising the basic poison and never realized that 1d4 poison damage (the most commonly resisted type of damage) on a hit, after using an action to coat a weapon with it and successfully hitting, is a SUPER BAD use of 100 GP?! It's really odd to see them basically make it unusable, especially when it's alongside other items like acid and holy water that deal 2d6 damage. I can't think of a time where anyone at any level, even level 1, would ever find that useful, even if it was more affordable. In my games, basic poison does 1d4 poison on each hit for 1 minute, the first hit has a chance to give them the Poisoned condition (DC 10 Con save), and it only costs 50 GP.