The Player's Handbook: Arcane, Divine, and Marital Heroes is the last of three core rulebooks for the 4th edition of the Dungeons & Dragons, and includes rules for creating and playing characters. This version is a complete rewrite of the third edition, with entirely new art and layout. The book starts with an overview of the game, then moves into an an extensive character creation section covering races (dragonborn, dwarf, eladrin, elf, half-elf, halfling, human, tiefling), classes (cleric, fighter, paladin, ranger, rogue, warlock, warlord, and wizard, including their powers, paragon paths, and the epic destinies), skills, and feats. Equipment (including magic items) is the next section, followed by guidance on adventuring and combat rules, and ends with a section on rituals.

While the core d20 mechanic remains, the 4th edition implementation is radically different. The rules explicitly attempt to address many perceived issues with the previous edition by sustaining the sweet spot where the game is the most fun (levels 5 to 12 in 3.X), reducing the amount of prep time required for a DM, eliminating the prevalence of save or die effects, scaling back the "Christmas tree effect" of magic item dependency, and making the fight-rest-fight cycle less appealing. Many elements of the book were presaged by elements in the Book of Nine Swords, Star Wars Saga Edition, and even Iron Heroes. A number of common elements from the previous edition are missing, including the barbarian, bard, druid, monk, and sorcerer classes, the half-orc and gnome races, and the long spell lists and the Vancian casting system.

The rules support characters from levels 1 to 30, broken into heroic, paragon, and epic tiers. Each of the classes is explicitly labeled with the "role" the class is intended to take in combat: controller, defender, leader, or striker. Instead of prestige classes, characters can take paragon paths or epic destinies when they reach the appropriate tier. Each class has powers drawn from a set of talents trees, tied to the "power source" of the class (arcane, divine, or martial). Each of the powers can be used either at-will, per encounter, or per day. Numerous powers have secondary effects (like attacks that also heal nearby allies) or effects even on a miss. Characters can be Lawful Good, Good, Evil, Chaotic Evil, or unaligned. Feats are less powerful than the class related powers. Racial feats help differentiate the races, and feats allow characters to gain the powers of other classes (the new multiclassing). The rituals include many effects like divinations or raise dead that were spells in previous editions.

Characters have fixed defenses (AC, Reflex, Fort, and Will) that the attacker must roll to overcome, and the classes use the same attack and defense bonus progression. Spells use the combat mechanic likes the attack roll and crits. The system emphasizes tactical combat, terrain, and mobility and action points allow a small amount of dramatic editing. Hit points are a feature of heroism not physical damage, and many abilities can activate healing surges that restore hit points to an injured character. Characters are "bloodied" when they are at half their full hit point total, which can activate certain abilities.

This game is also contained in Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Core Rulebooks. There are 2 editions of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Player's Handbook. Click on an individual title, below, for more information on that edition.

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