Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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Getting ready to start our D&D campaign back up, and I was excited to see what new character options are available. It's pretty disappointing to know I'll never get to add any new options to the character creator.
Just out of curiosity, I looked at what it would cost to buy a physical copy of one of the new books I haven't gotten anything from. After all, if I were to splurge on an entire book to get a couple spells and a couple background options, I might as well have something to show for it and obviously it's going to come with the digital stuff too, right?
Wrong.
lol
This feels like some poor director under way too much pressure to hit unrealistic sales goals put some napkin math into a powerpoint deck showing that if just X% of the people buying a la carte options end up buying full books instead, they'll make infinity dollars. They make the change, and a few months later they can't figure out why conversion rate keeps getting worse.
It was pretty cool while it lasted, though. I used maybe 5% of the options I purchased, but spending my money on them was worth every penny to me because exploring the options for its own sake is fun.
Unfortunately, this change effectively amounts to them quintupling their prices, which makes the whole, "I don't use 95% of the options I'm buying" problem loom a lot larger for me.
It's disappointing, but you're right. I don't need all the options and they don't need my money.
Well. I think we now know why they got rid of a la carte: https://www.wargamer.com/dnd/beyond-deleting-content-spells-magic-items
They should have just made a whole new website for 2024.
They could have left the whole of DDB2014 alone and no longer supported by anything except moderators.
The new website for DDB2024. Could have started with just the PHB and a few forums to answer 2024 only questions.
Money saved on updating the old site. They could have even left the individual purchases option just for 2014.
Never let this thread die.
It's nothing more than greed that enticed them to make this change. Getting rid of piecemeal purchases is just another way to force users into spending more money than necessary but force bundling things together. I am 200% more inclined to buy the individual pieces necessary to make a character to my liking, rather than buying one or two books and just making whatever I can from those. DndBeyond always worked and grew overtime because of its convenience for 5e with others online. Being able to whip up a character, change it in real time, have your fellow campaign members see it such, and the main draw of buying the minor aspects for your character piece by piece. This is no longer the case. I would much rather just do the research and whip up the character with a PDF and give my campaign members that to fill in for free, with content that I can access about 5e online for free. When the usefulness of sites like this begin to wane and shift away from that usefulness and more towards corporate greed. I think that is the time we begin to explore other options.
Until positive changes are made like bringing back piecemeal purchasing of content we desire from books. I have no interest in spending money on this site anymore and I likely neither will my friends. As they utilized this feature tremendously too. I will also not be recommended new users to this site either and seek alternatives.
(notice how we have only heard from 1 staff member in this entire thread. also notice how its been since June since we last had any responses... radio silence on the situation is always a great sign lol)
Yeah that would have been nice, and made some sense. Unfortunately they don't actually want people to continue playing 2014 as it makes them no new (big) money. New editions are partially about updating rules and modernising, but mostly it's about renewing the cashflow. They will continue to say that people can play their own way, but they don't actually want that. It's the whole reason they've done this completely nonsense living game thing and claiming that it's not a new edition and they're compatible - even though more and more it is clear they're not.
They want to push people away from 2014 and by making it frustrating is their strategy to bring people over. Slowly gating access to the old stuff until it's simply not worth the hassle, whilst making the 2024 look really shiny and cool. It's a terrible strategy but not unheard of. It's what almost all major tech companies do to get people to update their devices.
If they didn't remove piecemeal for 2014 then it'd continue to encourage people to stay on 2014. Why they didn't keep it around for 2024 I don't know, as it was very useful. But money greed is the obvious answer to that.
DM subscriber since I joined this website. Ended my subscription June 2024 due to the removal of individual purchases. Was the only reason I ever bothered with this website. I use it for character building for my players and occasional referencing. I don't want digital books that can be removed whenever the company sees fit.
January 2025: seems it was a correct move. They're removing 2014 content that we paid for in lieu of their new version of the game. You only rent content on here, never own.
At this point, I own a lot of 5E material, and they have done very little to convince me that the new version is worth the investment. So far, their strategy seems to be to take or break things that worked fine in an attempt to force me to buy new books. All it has done is convince me once again that Hasbro ownership is a terrible steward of the community and push me to invest less into their products.
At some point, our government and individual corporations need to grow a pair and address the unfettered greed of the 10% that owns 86% of all stock. If not, the other 90% of us are just going to stop playing their game and buy the products.
"When truth presents itself, the wise person see the light, takes it in, and makes adjustments. The fool tries to adjust the truth so he does not have to adjust to it." ~ Henry Cloud #ORC #OpenDND
My wife and i just did a disney villians homebrew one shot and she wanted to make ernesto dele cruz. she found a class and a race she liked but DnD beyond would have made her buy 2 books to get both. so she downloaded another app and just did it there.
We have both bough piecemeal content before and would have done it again this time but as it wasnt an option she just went somewhere else.
My wife got me into this many years ago. Monkey king fan. Sneak fan. Storyteller.
Talking to a friend trying to figure out if I should do foundry, roll 20, alchemy, or fantasy grounds
Trying to DM | Lost my party due to removal of A la Carte options | Party no longer wants to use Beyond
They absolutely lied when they claimed previously purchased 'micro transactions' would be available. I bought the class options for a number of books. All gone. If I had realized they were going to do this crap, I would never have purchased the new rules.
This is theft.
I assume you have contacted the police and/or a lawyer. Let us know how that turns out, eh?
This claim is a complete lie.
re comment by Kaemgen
'I assume you have contacted the police and/or a lawyer. Let us know how that turns out, eh?'
You don't have to be a jerk. This is a serious issue. How much purchased content have you lost?
I still have access to all the old content. What exactly are you missing? Check your entitlements. And make sure you have not accidentally created duplicate accounts, and if you did, make sure you logged into the right account.
Check Licenses and Resync Entitlements: < https://www.dndbeyond.com/account/licenses >
Running the Game by Matt Colville; Introduction: < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-YZvLUXcR8 >
D&D with High School Students by Bill Allen; Season 1 Episode 1: < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52NJTUDokyk&t >
In addition to what Gamma said, I will also add that the site has been a bit buggy the past few days as the dev team has been working in the background to prepare for the release of the 2024 rules. They have a major system maintenance planned on 2024/09/03, which you can see in the Announcements forum, which I imagine is in connection to both the bugs and the release.
I myself had trouble getting Travelers Clothes to pop up in the character sheet inventory. A page refresh solved the issue, but I also later had trouble with adding standard arrows and a refresh did not solve the issue. I am sure that these things are largely due to the work being done behind the scenes. Nothing has been taken from you. In all the years I have been on the site, the number of times that things were 'taken' from people has been literally zero. It's always, always user error or a bug.
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Also they've changed the toggles in the character builder. Pretty much everything that's not in the core three books is under "Expanded Rules", even if it used to be available by default.
Thanks for the advice. Now, is there a way to delete comments? I really don't need any more abuse because the system is not working properly for me.
Look at your post you want to delete and at the bottom there should be a Tools button. Click that and you will have the option to delete.
Honestly I have not been paying much attention to this thread but I haven't seen you abused at all. What little pushback I have seen is over your accusation of theft, not because you were having technical issues.
Not only that, but the books pre-price bump will always stay at the lower price. That means if they can force people to buy the new books, they make more money than if people pick up the old ones. Considering how abjectly bad the new books have been with only rehashing old content instead of giving us new options, it's a harder sell unless you force the hand of buyers.
To be honest, I expected the 2024 books to have maybe two of the old subclasses and then do two entirely new subclasses for each class. They are supposed to be backwards compatible (they aren't because of how they retooled classes), so there's minimal point in rehashing more than that when you could instead bring out fresh ideas. If we had a la carte buying, know what I would do? Buy the player options, feats, and spells. Maybe even buy the whole phb. But instead they can watch me spend that money on 3pcs and their much better content.
After they got rid of a la carte purchases I started buying up the books second hand, which means they are much cheaper and my money doesn't go to hasbro. If I get the 2024 books at all in physical, I'll wait for them to be cheaper at the CEX shop on high street. If I can't buy the pieces I want, then I'm not buying more at all from the direct source.
*"Thanks DnDB!"
I still agree with the Ala Carte menu needing to come back. I just play the game, only use the items, races (or whatever they are called now) and char gen content anyway. I spent much more money when I was buying piecemeal because I would do it for CONVIENIENCE to do something cool with a build. Now I weigh the cost of a full book vs the ITEMS and CHAR GEN components. So far the rewards for new books are lacking. No wish to join 2024 either.
Not to mention spells during char gen and spell swapping have doubled, with alot of spells being unchanged but relisted as 2024 versions. If I wanted to scroll for days I'd be on social media.
Used to say "Thanks Blizzard" back in the day when they messed up a popular game I USED to play, but now I find myself saying the same thing about DnDB.