What Xanathar's Guide to Everything Actually Is
It is a 2017 sourcebook for Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition published by Wizards of the Coast. The book contains twelve new subclasses across multiple classes, expanded spell lists, new races including the Aarakocra and Loxodon, a section on roleplaying personalities and backgrounds, tables for generating NPC names and motivations, and rules for skill challenges and downtime activities. The thing most people don't realize about this book is that it functions as two separate products stitched together. The first half is pure mechanical content — subclasses, spells, feats, and races. The second half is organizational fluff: name generators, NPC motivation tables, and lengthy sections on roleplaying. The mechanical half is what matters. The organizational half takes up roughly 70 pages and has very limited reuse value outside of actual gameplay sessions.
5e Xanathars Guide To Everything and the Subclass Bloat Problem
When you look at the subclass distribution, four classes received new options: Barbarian (Path of the Beast), Bard (College of Swords and College of Whispers refinements), Fighter (Battle Master maneuvers expanded slightly), Monk (Way of the Kensei and Way of the Astral Self), Ranger (Beast Master revisions happened later but are related), Sorcerer (Draconic Bloodline variants), Warlock (The Fey and The Genie), and Wizard (Order of Scribes). The real issue isn't quantity, it's balance. A few of these subclasses are genuinely strong — Way of the Astral Self monk and Order of Scribes wizard both exceed the power ceiling of the Player's Handbook equivalents. Others barely break even. I've run campaigns where a player took Way of the Astral Self and by level 5 their tentacle attacks plus the mental armor feature made them outperform the Paladin in survivability while dealing comparable damage. The DM had to either restrict the subclass or accept a party composition where the front line was significantly denser than intended. This happened because the book doesn't do playtesting against the existing subclass ecosystem. It tests in isolation.
How to Use the Skill Challenge Rules Without Breaking Your Game
The skill challenge section in Chapter 5 is the most controversial part of the book. It presents a framework where multiple characters can contribute different skills toward a single obstacle, measured by successes and failures across a threshold system. In theory this is elegant. In practice it requires the DM to track abstract success counters in real time, which slows combat to a crawl. Here is what I actually do instead. I treat skill challenges as a single skill check per character with advantage or disadvantage based on their prepared skills, rather than tracking individual successes and failures. This preserves the collaborative spirit without creating the bookkeeping burden. For a high-skill challenge I might call for DC 20 checks. For a moderate one DC 15. The outcome is binary — succeed or fail — and consequences follow naturally. The book's version works fine for one-off sessions where you want to emphasize the stakes of a particular scene. But if you run weekly games, the overhead adds approximately six to eight minutes per challenge. That compounds quickly over a three-hour session. I've seen entire sessions lost to three skill challenges because the group got bogged down in the counting.
Get the Full Details
Spells Worth Pulling Out and Spells to Skip
The expanded spell lists are where this book quietly improves the game the most. Several new spells solve real design problems that 5e leaves open. Pixie Dust (1st-level enchantment) gives you free flight speed for one minute as an action. It sounds modest. It completely changes how parties approach vertical combat and exploration because it bypasses the need for a flying mount or a higher-level spell slot. Find Greater Steed (4th-level ranger Paladin spell) summons a spectral mount with meaningful combat statistics. It is essentially a free companion that scales with your spell slot. Many parties run through entire campaigns without this spell and never realize what they are missing. The spectral steed's statistics are tied to the caster level — a 7th-level caster gets a different mount than a 15th-level one.
Forbiddance (5th-level cleric) is functionally identical to Globe of Invulnerability's magical boundary function but works as a perimeter ward. It is essential for any DM running planar content or designing fortress defenses. The spells that don't make the cut are mostly utility with marginal utility. Ensnaring Strike variants and several divination school spells feel like padding. Sleet's Death is a 7th-level evocation spell that does mediocre damage compared to existing options like Telekinesis or Wall of Fire.
Races: Aarakocra and Loxodon Practical Assessment
The two new races here have very different problem profiles. The Aarakocra gives you a flying speed of 50 feet and a climb speed of 5 feet. The flight speed is the feature. At any level where aerial combat becomes relevant, having a party member who can fly without expending a spell slot or magic item creates enormous tactical asymmetry. The problem is that many DMs ban Aarakocra at the table because the flight speed at level 1 disrupts early-game balance. This is a common reason for table conflict and it is worth discussing openly before character creation. The Loxodon is heavier but more balanced mechanically. It gives you size Medium, trunks, and the Elephantine feature which adds +2d6 thunder damage to melee weapon attacks. This damage bonus is straightforward and doesn't require conditions or concentration. It is one of the cleanest racial features in the book. I ran a Loxodon Paladin in a campaign where the party faced a group of ettins. The +2d6 thunder damage on every attack meant the Paladin was dealing nearly the same damage as a weapons-optimized Fighter while also functioning as the party's tank. The encounter difficulty dropped noticeably after level 3 because the Loxodon's damage output was consistent rather than spike-dependent.
Feats and Character Creation
The feat section contains twelve options, and most of them are viable at any level. Actor, Charger, Crusher, Dual Wielder, Healer, Observant, Resilient, Skilled, and Telekinetic are all strong choices. War Caster appears again because it is always strong. Moderately Armored is the only feat that feels underpowered unless you are specifically multiclassing into a heavy armor class gap. The feat distribution is better balanced than the subclass section. Each feat serves a clear mechanical niche without overlapping excessively with existing options. Telekinetic is worth special mention because it grants Mage Hand with ranged spell attack capability and can shove creatures, making it viable for characters who lack arcane abilities.
What the Book Gets Wrong About Campaign Design
Xanathar's Guide to Everything includes a substantial section on campaign building that suggests using the random tables extensively. The NPC generation tables, motivation tables, and quirks tables are well-made but they create a false sense of depth. A randomly generated NPC with a motivation score of "Seeks revenge" and a quirk of "Mumbles to themselves" is not a character. It is a prop. Players will see through this within three interactions. The downtime activities section is the other major weakness. It covers crafting, research, and leadership with rules that require weeks of in-game time and gold costs. These systems work for epic-level campaigns where characters have resources and time. They collapse in low-level campaigns where a character cannot afford the minimum gold investment. I tried running a downtime crafting arc at level 4 and the math simply didn't work. The cheapest magic item required 1,000 gold pieces that a level 4 party would take forty-five minutes of combat encounters to earn. The skill challenge rules from the earlier section also appear in the campaign design chapter, but the application is different. In campaign design they are presented as tools for pacing major story arcs. In practice, using them for anything longer than a single session turns your campaign into a series of obstacle checks rather than a narrative experience. The book doesn't clarify this distinction well enough.
Where It Actually Helps
Despite the flaws, this book solves several real problems. The expanded subclass options give players choices that the Player's Handbook lacked — particularly for classes like Monk and Sorcerer that had very limited customization by 2017. The new races add representation without significant balance issues beyond the Aarakocra flight question. The spell lists give spellcasters more tools for specific situations like crowd control and utility. The roleplaying section, while padded, contains some genuinely useful tables for personality traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws that are more detailed than the basic background tables in the PHB. If you are creating an NPC with limited time, pulling from these tables saves fifteen to twenty minutes per character compared to rolling on the standard background tables and then improvising details. The book also includes a section on hexcrawls and pointcrawl travel that is useful for DMs running sandbox campaigns. The movement rules and encounter tables are simplified but functional. A DM running a wilderness campaign can set up a working travel system in about ten minutes using the provided tables.
What to Skip
The monster stat blocks in the appendix are mostly reskins of existing creatures with minor stat adjustments. The new monsters — including the Myconid Sovereign and Gloom Weaver — are interesting but they occupy about thirty pages and most campaigns will never encounter them. The bestiary entries are useful if you need a quick replacement for a standard monster, but they don't replace a dedicated monster manual. The equipment section adds trivial items. A few new weapons and armor variants exist but they change damage dice by one step at most. The real equipment additions are negligible for most tables.
Final Honest Take
Xanathar's Guide to Everything is a 320-page book with roughly 200 pages of usable content and 120 pages of supplemental material that ranges from mildly useful to outright padding. The subclasses are a mixed bag — four are excellent, four are solid, and four are underwhelming. The spells are where the book earns its keep, with several new options filling genuine gaps in the spell list. The races are balanced with the exception of Aarakocra flight at low levels. The skill challenge rules are mechanically interesting but impractical for regular use. The campaign design chapter overestimates how much random generation improves storytelling. If you are building a party and one of your players wants to play an Aarakocra, discuss the flight issue with your DM beforehand. If you are a spellcaster looking for new options, pull out the spell lists and skim them. Don't bother with the downtime rules unless you are running an epic campaign. The best things in this book are the subclasses, spells, and the roleplaying tables — everything else is noise.
