Rules As Written Is Back, Baby!
After a few years away, Rules As Written is returning with a full run through the 2024 Player’s Handbook. If you’ve been playing 5e and are a bit 5.5 curious, that question gets answered starting next episode.
What’s Actually Changing
The short version: a lot. The 2024 PHB is substantial enough that the first proper episode back will be a dedicated overview of what changed between 5e and 5.5, and how those changes affect a table that’s already mid-campaign. If you’re thinking about porting an existing campaign over rather than starting fresh, that episode is the one to bookmark.
After that, the show goes back to the beginning and works through 5.5 from the ground up. That means new listeners can jump in without context, and returning listeners get a clean update pass on rules they thought they knew.
The Party Tracker Problem Nobody Has Solved Well
Here’s a scenario every group has lived through: you spend forty-five minutes engineering an elaborate plan to sneak past a guard, burning through skill checks and spell slots, and then someone remembers they had a Potion of Invisibility the entire time. The table goes quiet. You know the look.
The issue isn’t that players are careless. It’s that inventory management in D&D is genuinely scattered. Some people use paper. Some use apps. Some use nothing and rely on memory, which fails at the worst moments. Nobody is looking at the same thing.
The Party Tracker at rulesaswrittenshow.com/party is a free, web-based tool built to fix exactly this. No download required, no account needed to try it. Everyone in the party sees the same inventory, gold is tracked across all denominations (yes, including electrum, if your DM insists on using it), and there’s a neutral shared space for items that haven’t been assigned to a player yet. That last feature is more useful than it sounds. No more one person holding the contested loot and quietly forgetting about it by next session.
It’s still in active development, so feedback from real tables is genuinely useful right now.
New episodes drop Sundays. The newsletter is at the same site if you want updates without having to remember to check.