D&D Cheat Sheets for the 2024 Rules: Player and DM Quick Reference

The 2024 Player’s Handbook runs 384 pages. A session uses about ten of them, over and over: what you can do on a turn, what cover adds, what a condition stops. A cheat sheet is those ten pages boiled down to something you can laminate.

I built a set for my own table first. Mid-fight, nobody wants to watch anyone hunt through a rulebook for the grapple DC. The sheet sits next to the dice and answers in five seconds. That’s the whole product.

What belongs on a player cheat sheet

Start with the turn. Move, one action, a bonus action if something grants you one, one reaction per round. Then the actions themselves. The 2024 rules define twelve: Attack, Dash, Disengage, Dodge, Help, Hide, Influence, Magic, Ready, Search, Study, Utilize. Most players can name four of them from memory.

After that comes the fiddly combat math. Cover adds +2 to AC behind half cover and +5 behind three-quarters. An Unarmed Strike grapple is a set DC now: 8 + Strength + Proficiency Bonus. Weapon Mastery is new in 2024, it has eight properties, and it is the rule players forget most. All of it fits on the player sheet, three US Letter pages, along with conditions, death saves, and spellcasting.

What belongs on a DM cheat sheet

A different job. The DM sheet holds the numbers that stall a session when they go missing: the DC scale, encounter XP budgets, travel pace, hazards, what a squalid room costs for the night (1 SP). Mine also carries the magic item price table and the poison rules, because those two send me back to the book more than anything else does.

Your 2014 cheat sheet is wrong now

The 2024 revision moved enough rules that an old sheet gives wrong answers with full confidence. Weapon Mastery did not exist. Influence, Study, and Utilize were not actions. Grapple and Shove were contested checks instead of saves against a fixed DC. Hiding had no set number; now it is a DC 15 Stealth check. Small changes. Wrong calls at the table.

If your group moved to the new rules, the reference material has to move with them. Everything on our sheets is drawn from the 2024 SRD (5.2.1), so the wording matches what your DM reads in the book.

Print it right

The sheets are US Letter, portrait. Print at 100% or “Actual Size” rather than “Fit to Page”, which shrinks the type. Laminated, they last for years. One set per player is overkill; two player sheets and one DM sheet covers a table of five.

Playing Daggerheart instead

Same idea, different engine. We make a player sheet and a GM sheet built for Daggerheart, sold alone or as a pair. If your table runs both systems, the two bundles side by side settle a lot of “wait, which game are we in” moments.

Try a page free

The first page of the 5e player sheet is a free download on our Patreon rewards page. Follow for free, connect your account, and print it. If your table starts reaching for it, the full set is a few dollars.

And if there is a rule you keep looking up that did not make the sheets, tell me. Revisions are free for everyone who already owns them.