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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Thanks for posting that. That sounds like a fair explanation to me for altering it, but removing it entirely with little notice still feels bad. It's just a shame it's in an AMA somewhere we have to find or rely on the informed kindness of someone else on the forum remembering.
Realistically I think most people would gladly sacrifice the ability to buy a single item if they retained the ability to buy all the items in a book for $5-$10. Same for feats and even classes.
Hopefully they really are looking into bringing it back in some capacity.
Forever wishing they would bring a la carte back... There are so many subclasses I would have paid a few dollars for, but I really don't want to buy a whole book... again... because I already have them as physical copies... I also think it's insane that we would have to buy the books twice to be able to use them on d&d beyond AND to have physical copies. I feel like doing something like they do with the Warhammer codex's would be great. They shrink wrap the codex's and you can put in a code to have access to everything in the app. Just have to buy once.
It's been brought up before: Any copies where the shrink wrap is broken instantly become less valuable and the LGS has to eat the cost. It's risky to even carry those.
a la cart i think won't return, they literally made the class stater packs as an cheaper alternative, but having an access code in the phisikal books I think would not be a so bad Idea, but these books have to be more expensive than the books witout code( bcause both should exist some with code and some without it), you also have to pay VTT of books for other VTT platforms, but a la cart may never retun because of the growiing list of spells, backround, Monster, Magic Items and Feats that make it less useful. This is the reason the Starter Packs are an alternative for is and yes there not all options are in there but it is a compromise.
Agreed, please bring a la carte purchasing back!
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Ahh... I see. That makes sense. :(
I think they're using the new subscription system to drop content as you do it a la carte. With the difference that you can't choose what do you want to buy...
That reason for no a la carte is BS. With everything they've added since removing it, they've added a ton of workload. Site speed and reliability can be handled in much better ways, than just removing content. In the past I even bought feats that I should have had access to in my digital books, but couldn't. Not only is the really frustrating customers, they are losing out on another income stream. I think it would benefit Wizards to do an analysis on the money they are potentially losing due to this change.
The real reason they cut it was because a series of journalists did a stupid by saying A La Carte was exactly the same as video game microtransactions(cutting the context of how these things function on here vs in a video game) at a time where Jimquisition parroting was at an all-time high, & the stock price wobbled in value beyond investors' comfort levels.
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
For those interested, a quote from Brian Perry from his AMA on Reddit
This explanation just doesn’t make sense. They’re claiming the site struggled with individual $2 purchases, but now they want to sell “small packages” made up of the exact same entitlements. How does that solve anything? How long are they going to be blaming bad site code/inherited a bad site until they just get better coders?
Whether you buy a subclass alone or inside a $30 book, the character builder still has to check your account permissions either way. The entitlement system already exists. Bundling things differently doesn’t remove that.
Their own explanation contradicts itself. If granular ownership was supposedly the technical problem, adding a bunch of mini-bundles would still create tons of entitlement combinations to track. And let’s be real: granular digital ownership is a solved problem everywhere else. Steam, Amazon, Epic, iTunes, YouTube, even in house to WOTC; MTG Arena; all of them handle massively more complex entitlement systems without killing individual purchases. It's 2026, we have the power, we have the technology.
This wasn’t about site stability. They killed the $2 entry point because they want people buying full books or curated bundles instead. This is a business decision, not a technical limitation, just a corporate compromise to quiet the backlash while still ensuring we will never spend just two bucks on this platform again.
WOTC constantly falling back on “bad inherited code”/"bad site" is getting old. D&D Beyond has been under WOTC ownership for years now. At some point, you need to stop blaming the previous owners and start owning the platform you paid hundreds of millions for. If the codebase is really that outdated, then replace the systems and people refusing to modernize it so the community stops getting held back by constant “bad code” excuses. Legit, take the site down for two weeks if that’s what it takes to finally clean things up instead of using technical debt as the explanation for every anti-consumer change and point of failure.
Please read & acknowledge the ding-dang roadmap before you post stuff like that last paragraph. It'll save you some mental energy.
Also, it was bad press regarding A La Carte that was the motivator, not simple conspiracy entirely.
A lot of cheesy gaming journalism outlets were copying the Jimquisition method of describing microtransactions as the basis for hell in gaming & grounds for Marxist revolution against big video game companies, and the wrong journalists in the right places saw A La Carte, thought they could Jimquistion an apparent system of untargeted microtransactions for big hits, wrote hit pieces devoid of context shaming customers for buying them, & spooked the stock market.
It's the same reason Totem Barb was changed. A good hit piece with a sliver of truth that hits hard & gets a ton of views can spook the stock market into price wobbles, & the shareholders demand things be fixed so their stock doesn't lose value(& usually, boomers' money used to make said investments).
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
Bad code doesn't go away on its own, and rebuilding a system is its own can of worms.
You are not considering the scale involved. Every single subclass, feat, item, spell, monster, etc., had its own entitlement. Plus there were the package entitlements, plus the full books. That's not a lot in absolute terms, for one user, but multiplied across millions of users, checking all of those things is totally going to be a drag on performance. And drags on performance can cause database timeouts when site load is heavy. And it would only get worse. The permission system is known to be rickety to start with (which is why there's a "fix entitlements" button).
This sort of thing is often solvable by cacheing, but the cacheing itself is complicated enough due to the details of content sharing that I can't even guess whether it helps. (Though I assume that's what fixing your entitlements does -- regenerate your permissions cache.)
Different systems, different usage models, different permission structures. Frankly, I don't think any of those have anything like as complex a model as DDB, even the ones with some kind of content sharing.
And even if one can build a better system that can handle everything, you still have to do that. And then make the substitution without breaking things. That's a non-trivial project.
I mean, I'm pretty sure that the actual decision was "we're building a new marketplace system. Is it worth the time and expense to make it do a la carte?" And that leads to the cost-benefit analysis. And "we are eventually going to have to rebuild the permissions backend before everything explodes" is a pretty big cost.
Comparing a la carte to predatory video game microtransactions doesn't really fit. Video game microtransactions rely on predatory visuals and loot boxes to get players to overspend. A la carte was the exact opposite: a straightforward utility that let you buy a single, permanent mechanic that they otherwise wouldn't have access to for two bucks so you didn't have to pay for an entire book of filler you didn't need. It was pro-consumer, not predatory.
When WOTC designed the new marketplace backend, the decision likely came down to a cost-benefit analysis.
The data probably showed that a la carte was cannibalizing full-book sales; like players just buying the Artificer class instead of the entire Eberron book.
But from a product perspective, that trend should have told WOTC to make better, more well-rounded content where a single option doesn't completely outshine everything else in the book. They have a built-in laboratory for this with Unearthed Arcana; public playtesting gives them the exact data they need to see what players are actually excited about long before a book goes to print.
If their prototyping shows that only 10% of a book is generating all the hype while the rest gets a lukewarm reception, the solution should be to elevate the rest of the content to match that value. Instead, they used the a la carte data to do the opposite: rather than fixing the uneven quality of the books, they just removed the option to buy the good parts individually, using the standout mechanics as leverage to force full-priced purchases.
Rebuilding a complex permissions backend is absolutely a massive project, but companies invest in those fixes when the feature drives the bottom line. They didn't phase out a la carte because it was technically impossible to rebuild; they chose not to rebuild it because forcing users into larger bundles or full books is simply more profitable.
Hiding behind 'bad code' to justify a blatant anti-consumer cash grab is becoming, or already is a corporate tactic, because it'd just be brought up almost at every single opportunity that it can be blamed. It's easier to blame an invisible backend bug (if it even exists) than to admit they are actively squeezing their player base.