Dungeons and Dragons’ 2024 DM’s Guide is a streamlined, more organized version of the rulebook that came before. Streamlining, by its nature, means cutting and trimming, and Wizards of the Coast has done plenty of this. We recently went through both versions of the D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide to see what optional rules got the chop.
As this book is aimed at DMs, your favorite DnD classes, DnD races, and DnD 2024 backgrounds are untouched. However, the absent optional rules could have made a major impact on how your character interacts with the world around them.
Here’s every missing optional rule we discovered:
Flanking
Flanking gives a creature advantage on melee attack rolls when they and at least one ally are adjacent to a target on opposite sides. Despite how easily it could create advantage in combat (and make classes like the DnD 2024 Rogue feel redundant), flanking was a pretty popular optional rule. And it’s noticeably absent from the new DMG.
Downtime
Arguably, DnD Bastions are the new optional rules for downtime. The 2014 DM’s Guide instead suggested several smaller activities to take part in between adventures – running a business, carousing, sowing rumors, and performing sacred rites. We’re not too upset that these suggestions are gone, as they didn’t add much to a DnD campaign.
Facing
Facing gave every creature a front arc (the direction it’s currently facing), plus side and rear arcs. Your shield could only protect your front arc, and attacking a creature’s rear arc gave you advantage on the attack. Every time a creature ended its turn, it could change the direction it was facing.
Lovers of crunchy combat sessions may lament the loss of this optional rule. However, we can see why it was cut – it’s pretty fiddly, and it diminishes the power of the regular rules for advantage somewhat.
Proficiency variants
The 2014 DMG offered several extra proficiency rules to play with:
- Proficiency dice – Instead of adding a flat proficiency bonus to rolls, characters would roll a proficiency die for d20 tests
- Ability check proficiency – Instead of proficiency in DnD skills, characters had proficiency in two core DnD stats
- Background proficiency – Instead of skill or tool proficiencies, characters added their proficiency bonus to checks where their background would reasonably provide an advantage
- Personality trait proficiency – Instead of skill proficiencies, characters could add their proficiency bonus to any ability check linked to their personality traits
Hero points
With this rule, each character would start with five hero points at level one. At every DnD level up, they’d lose any unspent hero points and gain new ones equal to five plus half their level.
One hero point could be spent on any D20 test, and they let a player roll a D6 and add it to the result. They could also be spent to turn a failed DnD death save into a success.
Perhaps this rule made the DnD 2024 Bard’s Bardic Inspiration feel less inspiring. Whatever the reason, Wizards decided not to carry this variant over to the 2024 rules.
Honor and sanity
Honor and sanity were additional ability scores that measured how devoted characters were to a particular code and their natural mental fortitude. They increased or decreased depending on roleplay rather than level-ups, and characters could make skill checks or saving throws related to these particular abilities.
Sanity was closely tied to fifth edition’s Madness mechanics, which have been absorbed into a new-ish mechanic known as Mental Stress. Mental Stress offers short- and long-term consequences for failing a saving throw – it’s not a separate ability score like sanity.
Healing variants
Various rules in the 2014 DM’s Guide made healing easier or harder:
- Healer’s kit dependency – With this rule, characters couldn’t spend Hit Dice on a short rest without first using a healer’s kit
- Healing surges – This was an action characters could take in combat to spend up to half their Hit Dice
- Slow natural healing – This rule required characters to spend Hit Dice if they wanted to regain HP on a DnD long rest
Epic Heroism and Gritty Realism
Epic Heroism shortened the length of a short rest to five minutes and a long rest to one hour. In contrast, Gritty Realism turned short rests into eight-hour affairs, and long rests lasted for seven days.
These were some pretty popular optional rules, as they could drastically modify how easy or difficult a campaign was. You can still use these if you like (thanks cross-compatible rulebooks), but it’s noticeably been left out of the 2024 rules.
Plot points
This optional rule gave every player a single plot point, which they could spend to influence the campaign. A plot point might introduce a new story element or a story element. A player could even use it to swap places with the DM and start running the game themselves.
Naturally, this would add a lot of chaos to a game. We’re not surprised it’s been left behind – if a DM wants to play some of the campaign or give the party more storytelling agency, they can do this without mechanics.
Initiative variants
The 2014 Dungeon Master’s Guide offered several ways to shake up the standard Initiative 5e rules. Initiative scores did make the cut, but two other options were ignored:
- Side initiative – Players roll a D20 for the entire group rather an individual characters (without modifiers), and the DM does the same for monsters
- Speed factor – Initiative is rolled each round, and the action a creature chooses can modify their initiative roll
Optional actions
The 2024 rules have created new actions (Influence, Magic, Ready, Search, Study, and Utilize) to represent common activities during play. However, many uncommon actions from the 2014 DMG are absent:
- Disarm – A contested Athletics check against a target’s Acrobatics check that makes them drop an item
- Mark – An action taken after a melee attack that gives DnD opportunity attacks against the target advantage
- Overrun – A contested Athletics check to try and move through a hostile creature’s space
- Shove Aside – A shove variant that moves the target to the side rather than away
- Tumble – A contested Acrobatics check to try and move through a hostile creature’s space
- Climb onto bigger creatures – A contested Athletics or Acrobatics check to cling to a big ol’ beastie
Cleave through creatures
This optional rule means that, when you reduce an undamaged creature to zero HP, the excess damage could carry over to another nearby enemy. If your original attack roll beats the second creature’s armor class, the cleave is successful. This can also be repeated if your second attack also reduces a full-health creature to zero HP.
We’re big fans of this optional rule, as it makes attacks against low-level mobs feel like less of a chore. Perhaps it was cut because it didn’t gel well with the new DnD weapon mastery rules.
Hitting cover
This optional rule allows a missed ranged attack to deal damage to a target’s cover instead. The degree of failure decides whether or not the cover is damaged. Since the 2024 DM’s Guide makes it clear what armor class many regular objects have, this rule likely doesn’t synergize well anymore.
Lingering injuries and massive damage
Also missing from the new DMG are two optional rules that made damage more punishing. Lingering injuries would randomly determine what permanent scar, injury, or limb loss a severely hurt creature gains. Massive damage was a random table that would give a character a negative mechanical benefit after they took more than half their HP in damage in one go.
Monsters with classes
The advice for designing your own DnD monsters is way more stripped back in the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide. Among the removed recommendations is the suggestion of giving monsters their own leveled class rules.
Perhaps the monster creation advice in the old rulebook is a bit overboard for a brand-new Dungeon Master. However, the 2024 DMG offers very little value in this department now.
Creating new character options
The 2024 DM’s Guide features rules for creating your own background, but it no longer offers ways to modify your species or class. Again, this might have been a bit too high-level for a brand-new DM, so perhaps that was why it was removed.
For more on the new rulebooks, here’s our thorough 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide review and 2024 Player’s Handbook review. Or, for more on the basics, here’s a reminder of how to play Dungeons and Dragons.
Source: Wargamer
