All I want to do is stare at this D&D 2024 art, okay?

9When it comes to Dungeons & Dragons, talking about art and design isn't everyone's cup of tea. But it's certainly mine. When I first picked up a D&D book in the 1980s, it wasn't the gameplay material inside that hooked me—I had no idea there were different dice with different numbers of sides. I couldn't tell armor class from hit points. I couldn't tell you the difference between Strength and Constitution, or Intelligence and Wisdom.

I could tell you about the covers of those early books and boxed sets. I could describe them now, to a certain extent, without googling a thing. Because most of them were in plastic wrap and inaccessible to a grade school boy with an allowance even smaller than the one you're imagining I was given in '84 or '85. That's when I stopped looking at LEGO and Transformers and started looking at D&D: because of the art and design. I could name the legendary artists that graced the front and back covers of those books long before I could afford to buy one, open it up, and start to parse the numbers on a cleric spell chart from the numbers to calculate THAC0.

There was Caldwell, Elmore, Easley, and Brom. There were more, like Parkinson and Lockwood, but those first four are sanctified in my book forever. It's a shame I can't name any one particular artist gracing the pages of D&D 5e. But it's not at all a shame seeing so many artists at work under D&D's roof today.

How many times can a monk use Stunning Strike? Or is the bard is still the most beloved of dungeon masters everywhere? Those might be the topic du jour for some. But I know the first thing I'm doing when I get any new D&D book: I'm browsing the art.

There's also the painstakingly chosen font. The excruciating hours that went into top, bottom, and side margins for each and every column of text. And yes, I'll absorb all of that through osmosis while I'm tenderly turning those pages. Because all of that is 100 percent relevant to design. (An overwrought try-too-hard juvenile design is what makes Pathfinder books so much less attractive to me.)

What I'm mostly looking at—and pausing on—is all the new art. It may be the adventures and the laughs with friends that keep me around. But it's always the art that takes me there first. So it's wonderful in this video to hear about the thoughtfulness that went into the construction of each and every page of the upcoming D&D 2024 Core Rulebooks.