Exactly. Pangurjan nailed it. It's just not business feasible.
Like I said - the best you could possibly get, and even this is asking a god damned lot, is archived, read-only versions of pre-errata books. Nothing usable in the tools, nothing that can ever remotely be confused with current books. Remember - Adam Bradford had to fight tooth and nail just to allow DDB to make any form of homebrew a thing on the service, Wizards originally wanted it locked to nothing but what was in the most-current books. Wizards has seen what happens with uncontrolled digital databases in the form of the various fan-run D&D wikis - they get choked to death with ten trillion people's worthless homebrew, and people bounce off the game in disgust because they see terrible shit designed by complete nitwits and think "THAT'S what they want me to spend hundreds of dollars on? No thanks!"
You're not gonna get opt-in errata here on DDB. Wizards wouldn't let you "opt in" to the errata in older physical print books if it was physically possible for them to change it - they'd change existing print copies if they could. Yes, that means they would Come For Your Books(C), so fine. They came for your books. Sorry about that. Y'all knew they would though, and since you all know all the old pre-4e lore you want to preserve forever by heart anyways...why is it such a nasty deal?
I do not like the removal/replacement of Established Lore.
Changing the Established Lore makes our knowledge of the settings wrong, true = false. All the time and effort to learn the Established Lore, is now pointless waste. It feels like WoTC is saying, I should feel stupid for knowing the "old" Established Lore, and it emotionally hurts.
The Established Lore that I have learned is, the evil races are evil because of their evil promoting cultures or biological needs.
I actually thought about this today in depth and one solution, I came up with was using routed URLs. Which are already utilized in the current site. The book urls are listed as such
With my suggestion You would see a drop down in the upper left on desktop view that defaults to Current
That would be the extent of the front end work.
Now for the back end. You would have a git server (git does not mean github, you can run a private git server since that is how linus torvalds built it) and an array that links the selector and the commits, so for selector entry 0 which for the drop show shows Initial, the array would have [initial_commit_id, update_1_id] and the in entry 0 for the array would be the commit id for the initial release.
You would go to the first revision of the PHB or first edit after that initial release and see the chapter as it was
The back end would load the commit for the 1st revision via the git show REVISION: /path/to/file as the content for the page.
This would remove the need to reformat the book files as they are stored, as the path to file would be the same file, and the only changes would be listed would be in the revision history and they wouldn't need to store multiple copies for each file, as with git, everything is built from the first file and just updated with the differences between the diffs. Like having a snapshot of your windows install vs a full system backup.
Now this may not be a fully scalable solution or one ready for production as there may be some latency hit that needs to be worked out.
This is all well and good, but it's not simply a problem for D&D Beyond.
D&D Beyond and their license with Wizards is to faithfully represent the current iteration of the books. Not historical revisions. When you purchase a product on D&D Beyond, you are not purchasing a specific instance, you are purchasing whatever Wizards deems the current iteration. If Wizards were to publish an errata tomorrow saying all Humans got a +5 to all stats on level 1? Well, that'd be bloody stupid BUT D&D Beyond would faithfully amend that. That's how their license works. A lot of the complaints here seemingly stem from a fact of not knowing that before getting into bed with D&D Beyond and their toolset. That's an end-user problem. If you don't like it, take your business elsewhere because the only way D&D Beyond will have the ability to petition Wizards for a change is if they lose the ability to pay for the license specifically due to issues like this.
I do not like the removal/replacement of Established Lore.
Changing the Established Lore makes our knowledge of the settings wrong, true = false. All the time and effort to learn the Established Lore, is now pointless waste. It feels like WoTC is saying, I should feel stupid for knowing the "old" Established Lore, and it emotionally hurts.
The Established Lore that I have learned is, the evil races are evil because of their evil promoting cultures or biological needs.
Kingdom Hearts had to retcon the fact of Mickey not having a shirt in Kingdom Hearts 1 by adding lore to Kingdom Hearts 2.8. This happens all the time in lore. We don't have to like it, NOR do we have to use it. That's the beauty of D&D as a product. EVERYTHING given is at liberty for the DM to create a story of their own choosing.
No one can 100% faithfully go that there aren't things in D&D History that aren't inherently racist. They just can't. A lot of the changes are in an attempt to address blanket stereotypes, but anyone with an iota of intelligence can read between the lines and go "Wizards isn't trying to say that certain beings/instances of them AREN'T a stereotype, but that exceptions CAN and DO exist and we shouldn't blanket stereotype them." If you want your games to keep saying all female drow are misandrists? That's your table's prerogative. I personally think its a shitty one, but that's your table(just don't invite me). Wizards are trying to say that it isn't the ONLY thing they are capable of, that an intelligent being isn't a one-dimensional caricature of their upbringing/birth/etc.
Now, here is the issue people conflate. More so for older players. Just because there were inherent things that could be considered racist/misogynist/misandrist, does not mean that the PEOPLE PLAYING THE GAME WERE TRYING TO DO THESE THINGS. We see this very often when someone goes and goes "WELL, X THING WAS RACIST" and the kneejerk is to go for some people "WELL, I'M NOT RACIST". Great, thanks, it's not about YOU, now move on. What this move for is to continue to be more inclusive to those who DO see these things are hurtful.
Is that each setting should have its own individual monster manual. Or have a blander that covers a more saying agnostic approach but is in essence kind of bland, you would get only stat blocks with no fluff and no other information. Besides stats, spells attacks
I absolutely do not want a return to what AD&D 2nd was, in the 11 year run having released OVER TWO HUNDRED SOURCES OF MATERIAL. I do want more material for sure, I do not think we need this.
The Established Lore that I have learned is, the evil races are evil because of their evil promoting cultures or biological needs.
And the simple fact of the matter is that individuals of said races will, when steeped in that culture or having that biology, almost certainly still be evil. The Established Lore is what it was before. This isn't some Spellplague retcon or recreation of a setting's cosmology or something. These races are pretty much the same. Just because it doesn't say "EVIL" in bright red letters anymore doesn't mean their cultural background or biological makeup just up and vanished.
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Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
Erriku, honestly I was reading your posts as your opinion on the topic and points made not necessarily what is being offered or what the current status is on things. I guess I wasn't being clear enough on that and I ended feeling like I wasn't being listened on a personal level but just heard with to be responded to with standard this is how things are.
Do you(at a personal level) think it would be bad for people to have access to and use the version of any book they have on a digital platform?
Ah, in that case, I apologize for the confusion.
I do not think it would be bad necessarily. I think it is more work than it is worth even if WotC was agreeable to allowing it. If they allowed this older content, which content should they focus on offering? How would it be organized? There has been quite a bit of content that received an update over the years. How would players know which content they are looking for without reading through all of it first? Can they toggle off specific paragraphs or would only specific versions of books be allowed and those who want individual sentences retrievable be left in the wind? When you start offering pre-errata content again, it can become a hot mess very quickly. This would be a resource-heavy endeavor that frankly, not enough people are willing to pay for.
WotC isn't going to go for allowing multiple versions of their rulesets because giving old versions legitimacy is a bad idea. It's really that simple. It sends the wrong message about the errata process and it's a slippery slope. Right now they present a unified (stress on the uni- part) ruleset with the rule zero addendum that, of course, you're free to change what you want. Legitimizing a dozen versions of the rules pretty much screams "we don't know anymore, figure it out for yourselves". 'Here's a complete ruleset: use it as is, change it, add to it, delete from it, whatever you want - it's a complete ruleset ready to use out of the box for your convenience' is a good proposition to their customers. 'Here's a bunch of versions of a complete ruleset because we can't make up our mind about what makes the best standard, so you guys are going to have to do some work up front to figure out what you want' is a terrible proposition to their customers. It's not going to happen. One set of core rulebooks + sourcebooks with optional rules - that's a yes; a bunch of fuzzy sets of core rulebooks nobody really knows exactly how, where or why they differ from all the others + sourcebooks with optional rules - that's a no.
As a lifelong Star Trek fan, I feel like I am experiencing déjà vu here. People who demand that lore be left alone really plan to be the last fan an IP has. When they die, they hope the IP also dies so they can be buried with it - that is exactly what happens to fiction that cannot remain relevant to a modern audience. I came into ST when TNG started and the TOS zealots wanted nothing more to destroy TNG and cursed the existence of those who loved it, just like TOS and many TNG fans now want DSC to die, just like "oldguard" D&D players, who cut their teeth on AD&D, want the new direction of D&D to die. It is deeply saddening that this entrenched devotion to outdated and harmful ideas and misplaced sense of ownership forces people to choose to kill the thing they love, rather than let it grow and evolve, and allow it to be attractive to newcomers. Change is coming. It must. Change with it.
I do not like the removal/replacement of Established Lore.
Changing the Established Lore makes our knowledge of the settings wrong, true = false. All the time and effort to learn the Established Lore, is now pointless waste. It feels like WoTC is saying, I should feel stupid for knowing the "old" Established Lore, and it emotionally hurts.
The Established Lore that I have learned is, the evil races are evil because of their evil promoting cultures or biological needs.
They are NOT changing/removing/replacing the lore... AT ALL. They are making the core books more setting agnostic, likely because they are releasing several new/old settings within the next few years. What is true lore-wise for one world may not be true for others. The lore for each individual setting, however, is 100% unchanged.
Also, they removed the alignment from player character race options, because player characters can be whatever alignment the player wants them to be. Having cookie cutter character design dictated by what is generally true lore-wise is not interesting in the slightest. While halflings may generally be lawful (in a particular setting), a player character halfling can be anything. There's no reason to even mention alignment in the player character options.
If you'd like, you can read more about the unchanged established lore of various settings at fandom.com subdomains. For example:
I absolutely do not want a return to what AD&D 2nd was, in the 11 year run having released OVER TWO HUNDRED SOURCES OF MATERIAL. I do want more material for sure, I do not think we need this.
In fact, that was one of the things that contributed to TSR's bankruptcy: producing lots of different books for a multitude of different settings was expensive and reduced the appeal of each book to individual gamers, hurting sales. Which was further compounded by the company gaining a reputation for creating settings that they would then not support, further discouraging gamers from investing in the books.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
New players simply aren't interested in the Forgotten Realms. The Forgotten Realms are simply too dense, too impossible to break into, and everyone who plays games steeped in the Forgotten Realms is enormously hostile to new players. They can keep supporting the Forgotten Realms as the only setting they want anyone to play in - which Wizards has openly stated they're not going to do, they want to switch to a more versatile structure with multiple concurrently supported settings - or they can release books that people say nobody will buy because they're not Forgotten Realms books.
What's the solution? You can't hook new players into the Realms, and you can't get old players to not play in the Realms. How do you reconcile that?
So a few pages back someone posted a link to a psychology article, and looking at the post after it no one seems to have read it. Which is a shame because it raised some good points one of them being when Wotc remove devils and demons in 2e because of the satanic panic. Meanwhile many players still kept using them which cause Wotc to bring them back. Which to mean means that so long as enough people believe that Wotc are being less than intelligent with the new direction there taking, then they will eventually go back to the way things were. Another part of the article I believe was help full was when it said "And the D&D game encourages flexibility. If a player wants to play a happy, peaceful, non-violent, well-intentioned lesbian orc wizard, they can." and this is true. This is probably where Yurei will come in and bring up those two people who had bad experience's. And to that I say for the once who was put off by the -1 to intelligence they now have the option to pick a different ability score because of tashas and if they complain about how the lore paints the majority of orcs just tell them they can make up some orc tribe somewhere that renounced the ways of their brethren and took up a life of farming or something. And for the player that was gay or something(I'll be honest I tend to skim Yurei post at this point as they tend to rehash the same thing) there was not and is not any thing in the mechanics or lore that I can think of that would be affected by whether they themselves of their character was gay. It could have been the other players causing the issues and if so leave because and I cant believe I have to say this but people are allowed to their beliefs if they had an issue with it talk to them and if they refused to change their minds then leave. you are not responsible for them only yourself.
and for those curious here's a link to that article.
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If I can't say something nice, I try to not say anything at all. So if I suddenly stop participating in a topic that's probably why.
So for the people who are saying the evil societies are bad because saying all members of a race are evil, do remember every account of these societies that we do have are from outsiders. Just like I'm sure the poor schmuck getting sacrificed by an Aztec priest thought all Aztecs were evil, or The villages being raided by Vikings that all Vikings were evil, or how about the native Americans thinking all Europeans were evil. You are given a single point of view for the societies as a dungeon master, as a world builder it is up to you to flush out said societies.
*Edit and before anyone says that the nuances of all these societies should be included in the books that introduce them I question your comprehension of just how monumentous a task that would be for Wotc to implement.
Anyone else notice the article "WotC's New Lore Chanages Raises Questions Among Players" doesn't cite one actual player perspective besides those presumably held (but maybe just entertained) by the author J.R. Zambrano? From the volume of the posters in this thread, at least in this player community the number of people who are truly "raising questions" by the recent "lore" errata are a definite minority in the playerscape. Just sayin'.
Per usual when it comes to interpreting WotC editorial decisions, BoLS is Chicken Littling. Where in actuality. The sky is not falling. No one is telling anyone they are playing their game wrong.
It seems a lot of folks in this forum's arguments have shaped the article around BoLS's* interpretation of the rationale for the changes, focusing strictly on frankly reactionary interpretations of the Diversity and Dragons statement from a year or so back. Making D&D broadly accessible, the market goal of that statement, sure, that does require some rethinking of essentialist notions and unintended offense aspects deep baked into what "D&D is" ... a reexamination almost every aspect of culture does on a fairly regular basis. No art or pastime has ever been "ruined' or really even upset by becoming more inclusive. However, it is a sad fact of the politics of culture that whenever such a move is made, noise is made by reactionaries who feel they are "losing something," which is laughably ironic in the age of archives and wikis (bros, to those wiki suspicious types out there, D&D Beyond bro, is owned by a company that got the money to buy D&D Beyond by ... running wikis, bro, with nary a take down notice from an IP holder).
What gets me is among the specific passages we're talking about in this week's errata, only three of them are truly being made out of "sensitivity" concerns. One on Fire Giants addresses a paragraph on slavery, which followed several paragraphs that discuss slavery , just that the set off and not excised paragraph dives in further into the slave economy and a joke about broken backs that a reasonable person could construe may push the topic a bit too far by conventional play sensibilities ... nothing saying you can't go there if you want to go grim dark on your representation of slavery replete with heartless jokes from your NPCs or even your "anti heroes" if you're running that sort of game, but it's more on you to do that rather than claiming your playing in a tradition that's still presently supported. Cannibalism and the Yuan-Ti same thing. It's grim stuff that transgresses past the sensitivities of many adults let alone the children and young adults the games are really marketed after. And the passage on Half Orcs being products of an essentializing "rapaciousness" and/or an Orc eugenics program? Utterly unnecessary and very incompatible with some game world presentations of Orcs. These are the hills over which some people are planting their flags on? Yes, slavery, cannibalism, treating sentient beings as "breeding stock" these are forms of violence that cross the line of many folks who are otherwise comfortable with iterations of hack and slash and death by arcane kablooey. They can be incorporated in a game, like any theme, but are not necessary to make Fire Giants, Orcs, or Yuan Ti your bad guys. You can go there if you want, heck make a trifecta of it, but it's WotC's prerogative to no longer draw the general D&D player a map to "go there." It's just not the broad base they're trying to reach at this point in the game's growth, so the grimmer legacy notes of the game are now a niche and is something WotC wants to move past to broaden enjoyment of the game. These subject matters like every other theme with no rules guidance are matters a table can engage if it's agreed upon.
The rest of Volo's most recent edits are striking away "Roleplaying a X" which consists of a sort of dictate for how the monster is to be played, striking it in favor of the tables that were already in the book that give the DM a broader array of basic options to use out of the (text) box, or as inspiration. It's liberating for the game, that's all. I mean, all you all fighting in defense of these lost words, you all know the rest of the book too, right? Or are you here because BoLS ignited you? I mean looking at the errata section for Volo's, were your games really harmed by the ability score modifiers when WotC got rid of negative mods? When that sort of stuff comes up, there's a common refrain by complainants that such moves are homogenizing character options with a note of something to the effect of "why be any species" etc. I never actually hear those posters actually corroborating how their games have been ruined or otherwise hampered by these mechanical changes.
Don't presume I'm some sort who wants D&D with "play nice" as a requisite. I can play very dark. We have discussions at my table to make sure we're all on board with my portrayals of undead and aberrations (informed by a mix of vocational and intimate familiarity I have with physical trauma and the entropy just beyond the barriers imposed by the neurochemical phenomenon we call rationale thought). It's a way I can play, but not a mode I unleash on players without discussions of boundaries. Moreover, I want D&D to be a rule set that serves as the foundation of play for a broader player community than just me. I got no problem mining the history of game lore to find an "edge" if I want to. Heck, my favorite present game I'm running is basically mining 2E's Planescape mixed up with a mix of pop and actual philosophical nihilism (sorta think Into the 'Spiderverse meets True Detective with a liberal dose of Twin Peaks). I don't need a 5e manual granting me the authority to play that way. Nor should any complainant demand it. The "established lore" of any edition has always been nothing more than a simple foundation, not the architecture. To use an old Plato analogy, more to be cute than anything else, get out of the cave and see that folks are discovering great forms of play beyond the shadows to which you're clinging.
*Or at least J.R. Zambrano's, I don't know whether the views of BoLS beyond that one writer are really represented in his article, just as I find suspect Zambrano's presumption of interpreting what "D&D players" in general feel about these edits without qualifying what segment of the player base he's actually talking about.
postscript: oh those assertions about the integral mechanical role of alignment? Do tell me how Detect Evil and Good work in 5e rules. Yes Evil and Good in some sort of default cosmology offered by WotC (though also explained as an option and not essential for play ... look at some of Coleville's extraplanar entities S&F to see how things can go off the script if you just do your own build) are "elemental" in that the planes and their alignment positioning sort of "give shape" to the multiverse (if the DM wants to follow those suggestions). However, just because you have extraplanar entities who take an alignment absolutely, that in no way mandates world building where a given wordly entity that includes such an entitiy in their creation narrative also be absolutely positioned in that alignment. I mean, come on, all the logic chopping posing as philosophical rigor in that vein is readily defeated by actual theologies that pose good and evil as "real things" in the world but grant that human souls or psyches or being or what have you are not "essentially" one or the other. One shouldn't have to go there in discussing fantasy, but I guess sometimes such reality checks are warranted when absolutism, even in fantasy, is asserted.
So a few pages back someone posted a link to a psychology article, and looking at the post after it no one seems to have read it. Which is a shame because it raised some good points one of them being when Wotc remove devils and demons in 2e because of the satanic panic. Meanwhile many players still kept using them which cause Wotc to bring them back.
First of all, Wizards of the Coast didn't even exist as a company when the Satanic Panic occurred. That was TSR. And they didn't remove demons and devils from 2nd Edition, they just changed their names to tanar'ri and baatizu and said that those were the names that they called themselves while "demon" and "devil" were the words ignorant mortals used for them. So they were never brought back to the game because they never left.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
So for the people who are saying the evil societies are bad because saying all members of a race are evil, do remember every account of these societies that we do have are from outsiders. Just like I'm sure the poor schmuck getting sacrificed by an Aztec priest thought all Aztecs were evil, or The villages being raided by Vikings that all Vikings were evil, or how about the native Americans thinking all Europeans were evil. You are given a single point of view for the societies as a dungeon master, as a world builder it is up to you to flush out said societies.
*Edit and before anyone says that the nuances of all these societies should be included in the books that introduce them I question your comprehension of just how monumentous a task that would be for Wotc to implement.
Sourcebooks are supposed to be unbiased third-person omniscient perspectives on the beings that live in a D&D world. They need to provide accurate information, not present some sort of in-universe bias that's written by a whiny basement dweller who's still bitter that his ex got sick of his passive aggressive BS and dumped him in favor of an orc so now he's going to make their whole race look bad in revenge. If a sourcebook is "just someone's perspective," it's a useless source.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
New players simply aren't interested in the Forgotten Realms. The Forgotten Realms are simply too dense, too impossible to break into, and everyone who plays games steeped in the Forgotten Realms is enormously hostile to new players. They can keep supporting the Forgotten Realms as the only setting they want anyone to play in - which Wizards has openly stated they're not going to do, they want to switch to a more versatile structure with multiple concurrently supported settings - or they can release books that people say nobody will buy because they're not Forgotten Realms books.
What's the solution? You can't hook new players into the Realms, and you can't get old players to not play in the Realms. How do you reconcile that?
It's what they've been doing: releasing Realms content in small packages, and washing their hands of anything remotely looking like a comprehensive FR setting sourcebook. There's the SCAG and a couple of adventures ostensibly set in the Realms, I'm sure there'll be an Underdark book at some point and maybe others, but there's no Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting book anymore and I'm thinking there won't ever be one for 5E.
New players simply aren't interested in the Forgotten Realms. The Forgotten Realms are simply too dense, too impossible to break into, and everyone who plays games steeped in the Forgotten Realms is enormously hostile to new players. They can keep supporting the Forgotten Realms as the only setting they want anyone to play in - which Wizards has openly stated they're not going to do, they want to switch to a more versatile structure with multiple concurrently supported settings - or they can release books that people say nobody will buy because they're not Forgotten Realms books.
What's the solution? You can't hook new players into the Realms, and you can't get old players to not play in the Realms. How do you reconcile that?
It's what they've been doing: releasing Realms content in small packages, and washing their hands of anything remotely looking like a comprehensive FR setting sourcebook. There's the SCAG and a couple of adventures ostensibly set in the Realms, I'm sure there'll be an Underdark book at some point and maybe others, but there's no Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting book anymore and I'm thinking there won't ever be one for 5E.
FR suffers from extreme bloat. Main npc's die and get resurrected through cloning more than marvel heroes, leading to complete lack of caring on my part. You can't kick a tree without an Arch Mage falling out of one, deities die every few minutes to be reborn a few modules later. This setting needs a hard reset. I used to love it, but now I can't make myself care. And while I can only applaud WoTC finally entering the twenty-first century I wish they had done this not by removing lore but by rewriting it in a manner I don't want to start an argument with myself. But lets wait and see what next year brings.
snapping at people for "calling him racist" when he argued that orcs were orcs, not people, and orcs being evil had nothing to do with real-world stereotypes. He leaned hard on that bad-faith argument.
It's not a bad faith argument. D&D Orcs are not an analog for real world people, but some people keep trying to make it so.
This is from an old D&D sourcebook for the long-abandoned setting of Mystara.
If you can read that post and still say that "orcs [were] never an analog for real world people in D&D", you're lying. Yes they were. Yes, they continue to be through the existence of those products and the racist stereotypes that were attached to them.
There have been depictions of Orcs and Half-Orcs in D&D that have been undeniably racist. Those products are proof. You are wrong. You may have been ignorant of this before, which isn't your fault, but there are a ton of people denying the history of the game because they don't want to get their feelings hurt over a hobby they have attached their own self-esteem to.
That depiction (and others) of Orcs in an official D&D product was racist. Orcs have been a stand-in for many different groups of real-world peoples in D&D worlds for decades. Denying that is a flat-out lie.
snapping at people for "calling him racist" when he argued that orcs were orcs, not people, and orcs being evil had nothing to do with real-world stereotypes. He leaned hard on that bad-faith argument.
It's not a bad faith argument. D&D Orcs are not an analog for real world people, but some people keep trying to make it so.
This is from an old D&D sourcebook for the long-abandoned setting of Mystara.
If you can read that post and say that "orcs [were] never an analog for real world people in D&D", you're lying. Yes they were. Yes, they continue to be through the existence of those products and the racist stereotypes that were attached to them.
There have been depictions of Orcs and Half-Orcs in D&D that have been undeniably racist. Those products are proof. You are wrong. You may have been ignorant of this before, which isn't your fault, but there are a ton of people denying the history of the game because they don't want to get their feelings hurt over a hobby they have attached their own self-esteem to.
That depiction (and others) of Orcs in an official D&D product was racist. Orcs have been a stand-in for many different groups of real-world peoples in D&D worlds for decades. Denying that is a flat-out lie.
*cough* *Lich* *phylactery and tefillin* *cough*
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Exactly. Pangurjan nailed it. It's just not business feasible.
Like I said - the best you could possibly get, and even this is asking a god damned lot, is archived, read-only versions of pre-errata books. Nothing usable in the tools, nothing that can ever remotely be confused with current books. Remember - Adam Bradford had to fight tooth and nail just to allow DDB to make any form of homebrew a thing on the service, Wizards originally wanted it locked to nothing but what was in the most-current books. Wizards has seen what happens with uncontrolled digital databases in the form of the various fan-run D&D wikis - they get choked to death with ten trillion people's worthless homebrew, and people bounce off the game in disgust because they see terrible shit designed by complete nitwits and think "THAT'S what they want me to spend hundreds of dollars on? No thanks!"
You're not gonna get opt-in errata here on DDB. Wizards wouldn't let you "opt in" to the errata in older physical print books if it was physically possible for them to change it - they'd change existing print copies if they could. Yes, that means they would Come For Your Books(C), so fine. They came for your books. Sorry about that. Y'all knew they would though, and since you all know all the old pre-4e lore you want to preserve forever by heart anyways...why is it such a nasty deal?
Please do not contact or message me.
I do not like the removal/replacement of Established Lore.
Changing the Established Lore makes our knowledge of the settings wrong, true = false.
All the time and effort to learn the Established Lore, is now pointless waste.
It feels like WoTC is saying, I should feel stupid for knowing the "old" Established Lore, and it emotionally hurts.
The Established Lore that I have learned is, the evil races are evil because of their evil promoting cultures or biological needs.
I actually thought about this today in depth and one solution, I came up with was using routed URLs. Which are already utilized in the current site. The book urls are listed as such
https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/$Book/$Chapter#$Header
which to include revisions it would be changed to this
https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/$Book/$Revision/$Chapter#$Header
Currently when you go to a book, the backend will run a function to locate the book and then put you on the landing page
https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/$Book/
With my suggestion You would see a drop down in the upper left on desktop view that defaults to Current
That would be the extent of the front end work.
Now for the back end. You would have a git server (git does not mean github, you can run a private git server since that is how linus torvalds built it) and an array that links the selector and the commits, so for selector entry 0 which for the drop show shows Initial, the array would have [initial_commit_id, update_1_id] and the in entry 0 for the array would be the commit id for the initial release.
When you go to say https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/PHB/1/$Chapter#$Header
You would go to the first revision of the PHB or first edit after that initial release and see the chapter as it was
The back end would load the commit for the 1st revision via the git show REVISION: /path/to/file as the content for the page.
This would remove the need to reformat the book files as they are stored, as the path to file would be the same file, and the only changes would be listed would be in the revision history and they wouldn't need to store multiple copies for each file, as with git, everything is built from the first file and just updated with the differences between the diffs. Like having a snapshot of your windows install vs a full system backup.
Now this may not be a fully scalable solution or one ready for production as there may be some latency hit that needs to be worked out.
PR style responses are considered hostile intent.
This is all well and good, but it's not simply a problem for D&D Beyond.
D&D Beyond and their license with Wizards is to faithfully represent the current iteration of the books. Not historical revisions. When you purchase a product on D&D Beyond, you are not purchasing a specific instance, you are purchasing whatever Wizards deems the current iteration. If Wizards were to publish an errata tomorrow saying all Humans got a +5 to all stats on level 1? Well, that'd be bloody stupid BUT D&D Beyond would faithfully amend that. That's how their license works. A lot of the complaints here seemingly stem from a fact of not knowing that before getting into bed with D&D Beyond and their toolset. That's an end-user problem. If you don't like it, take your business elsewhere because the only way D&D Beyond will have the ability to petition Wizards for a change is if they lose the ability to pay for the license specifically due to issues like this.
Kingdom Hearts had to retcon the fact of Mickey not having a shirt in Kingdom Hearts 1 by adding lore to Kingdom Hearts 2.8. This happens all the time in lore. We don't have to like it, NOR do we have to use it. That's the beauty of D&D as a product. EVERYTHING given is at liberty for the DM to create a story of their own choosing.
No one can 100% faithfully go that there aren't things in D&D History that aren't inherently racist. They just can't. A lot of the changes are in an attempt to address blanket stereotypes, but anyone with an iota of intelligence can read between the lines and go "Wizards isn't trying to say that certain beings/instances of them AREN'T a stereotype, but that exceptions CAN and DO exist and we shouldn't blanket stereotype them." If you want your games to keep saying all female drow are misandrists? That's your table's prerogative. I personally think its a shitty one, but that's your table(just don't invite me). Wizards are trying to say that it isn't the ONLY thing they are capable of, that an intelligent being isn't a one-dimensional caricature of their upbringing/birth/etc.
Now, here is the issue people conflate. More so for older players. Just because there were inherent things that could be considered racist/misogynist/misandrist, does not mean that the PEOPLE PLAYING THE GAME WERE TRYING TO DO THESE THINGS. We see this very often when someone goes and goes "WELL, X THING WAS RACIST" and the kneejerk is to go for some people "WELL, I'M NOT RACIST". Great, thanks, it's not about YOU, now move on. What this move for is to continue to be more inclusive to those who DO see these things are hurtful.
I absolutely do not want a return to what AD&D 2nd was, in the 11 year run having released OVER TWO HUNDRED SOURCES OF MATERIAL. I do want more material for sure, I do not think we need this.
And the simple fact of the matter is that individuals of said races will, when steeped in that culture or having that biology, almost certainly still be evil. The Established Lore is what it was before. This isn't some Spellplague retcon or recreation of a setting's cosmology or something. These races are pretty much the same. Just because it doesn't say "EVIL" in bright red letters anymore doesn't mean their cultural background or biological makeup just up and vanished.
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I agree on all counts.
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As a lifelong Star Trek fan, I feel like I am experiencing déjà vu here. People who demand that lore be left alone really plan to be the last fan an IP has. When they die, they hope the IP also dies so they can be buried with it - that is exactly what happens to fiction that cannot remain relevant to a modern audience. I came into ST when TNG started and the TOS zealots wanted nothing more to destroy TNG and cursed the existence of those who loved it, just like TOS and many TNG fans now want DSC to die, just like "oldguard" D&D players, who cut their teeth on AD&D, want the new direction of D&D to die. It is deeply saddening that this entrenched devotion to outdated and harmful ideas and misplaced sense of ownership forces people to choose to kill the thing they love, rather than let it grow and evolve, and allow it to be attractive to newcomers. Change is coming. It must. Change with it.
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They are NOT changing/removing/replacing the lore... AT ALL. They are making the core books more setting agnostic, likely because they are releasing several new/old settings within the next few years. What is true lore-wise for one world may not be true for others. The lore for each individual setting, however, is 100% unchanged.
Also, they removed the alignment from player character race options, because player characters can be whatever alignment the player wants them to be. Having cookie cutter character design dictated by what is generally true lore-wise is not interesting in the slightest. While halflings may generally be lawful (in a particular setting), a player character halfling can be anything. There's no reason to even mention alignment in the player character options.
If you'd like, you can read more about the unchanged established lore of various settings at fandom.com subdomains. For example:
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com
https://eberron.fandom.com
In fact, that was one of the things that contributed to TSR's bankruptcy: producing lots of different books for a multitude of different settings was expensive and reduced the appeal of each book to individual gamers, hurting sales. Which was further compounded by the company gaining a reputation for creating settings that they would then not support, further discouraging gamers from investing in the books.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Then what's the solution?
New players simply aren't interested in the Forgotten Realms. The Forgotten Realms are simply too dense, too impossible to break into, and everyone who plays games steeped in the Forgotten Realms is enormously hostile to new players. They can keep supporting the Forgotten Realms as the only setting they want anyone to play in - which Wizards has openly stated they're not going to do, they want to switch to a more versatile structure with multiple concurrently supported settings - or they can release books that people say nobody will buy because they're not Forgotten Realms books.
What's the solution? You can't hook new players into the Realms, and you can't get old players to not play in the Realms. How do you reconcile that?
Please do not contact or message me.
Make most of the material setting-neutral so that it's useful regardless of what setting someone wants to run.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
So a few pages back someone posted a link to a psychology article, and looking at the post after it no one seems to have read it. Which is a shame because it raised some good points one of them being when Wotc remove devils and demons in 2e because of the satanic panic. Meanwhile many players still kept using them which cause Wotc to bring them back. Which to mean means that so long as enough people believe that Wotc are being less than intelligent with the new direction there taking, then they will eventually go back to the way things were. Another part of the article I believe was help full was when it said "And the D&D game encourages flexibility. If a player wants to play a happy, peaceful, non-violent, well-intentioned lesbian orc wizard, they can." and this is true. This is probably where Yurei will come in and bring up those two people who had bad experience's. And to that I say for the once who was put off by the -1 to intelligence they now have the option to pick a different ability score because of tashas and if they complain about how the lore paints the majority of orcs just tell them they can make up some orc tribe somewhere that renounced the ways of their brethren and took up a life of farming or something. And for the player that was gay or something(I'll be honest I tend to skim Yurei post at this point as they tend to rehash the same thing) there was not and is not any thing in the mechanics or lore that I can think of that would be affected by whether they themselves of their character was gay. It could have been the other players causing the issues and if so leave because and I cant believe I have to say this but people are allowed to their beliefs if they had an issue with it talk to them and if they refused to change their minds then leave. you are not responsible for them only yourself.
and for those curious here's a link to that article.
If I can't say something nice, I try to not say anything at all. So if I suddenly stop participating in a topic that's probably why.
So for the people who are saying the evil societies are bad because saying all members of a race are evil, do remember every account of these societies that we do have are from outsiders. Just like I'm sure the poor schmuck getting sacrificed by an Aztec priest thought all Aztecs were evil, or The villages being raided by Vikings that all Vikings were evil, or how about the native Americans thinking all Europeans were evil. You are given a single point of view for the societies as a dungeon master, as a world builder it is up to you to flush out said societies.
*Edit and before anyone says that the nuances of all these societies should be included in the books that introduce them I question your comprehension of just how monumentous a task that would be for Wotc to implement.
If I can't say something nice, I try to not say anything at all. So if I suddenly stop participating in a topic that's probably why.
Anyone else notice the article "WotC's New Lore Chanages Raises Questions Among Players" doesn't cite one actual player perspective besides those presumably held (but maybe just entertained) by the author J.R. Zambrano? From the volume of the posters in this thread, at least in this player community the number of people who are truly "raising questions" by the recent "lore" errata are a definite minority in the playerscape. Just sayin'.
Per usual when it comes to interpreting WotC editorial decisions, BoLS is Chicken Littling. Where in actuality. The sky is not falling. No one is telling anyone they are playing their game wrong.
It seems a lot of folks in this forum's arguments have shaped the article around BoLS's* interpretation of the rationale for the changes, focusing strictly on frankly reactionary interpretations of the Diversity and Dragons statement from a year or so back. Making D&D broadly accessible, the market goal of that statement, sure, that does require some rethinking of essentialist notions and unintended offense aspects deep baked into what "D&D is" ... a reexamination almost every aspect of culture does on a fairly regular basis. No art or pastime has ever been "ruined' or really even upset by becoming more inclusive. However, it is a sad fact of the politics of culture that whenever such a move is made, noise is made by reactionaries who feel they are "losing something," which is laughably ironic in the age of archives and wikis (bros, to those wiki suspicious types out there, D&D Beyond bro, is owned by a company that got the money to buy D&D Beyond by ... running wikis, bro, with nary a take down notice from an IP holder).
What gets me is among the specific passages we're talking about in this week's errata, only three of them are truly being made out of "sensitivity" concerns. One on Fire Giants addresses a paragraph on slavery, which followed several paragraphs that discuss slavery , just that the set off and not excised paragraph dives in further into the slave economy and a joke about broken backs that a reasonable person could construe may push the topic a bit too far by conventional play sensibilities ... nothing saying you can't go there if you want to go grim dark on your representation of slavery replete with heartless jokes from your NPCs or even your "anti heroes" if you're running that sort of game, but it's more on you to do that rather than claiming your playing in a tradition that's still presently supported. Cannibalism and the Yuan-Ti same thing. It's grim stuff that transgresses past the sensitivities of many adults let alone the children and young adults the games are really marketed after. And the passage on Half Orcs being products of an essentializing "rapaciousness" and/or an Orc eugenics program? Utterly unnecessary and very incompatible with some game world presentations of Orcs. These are the hills over which some people are planting their flags on? Yes, slavery, cannibalism, treating sentient beings as "breeding stock" these are forms of violence that cross the line of many folks who are otherwise comfortable with iterations of hack and slash and death by arcane kablooey. They can be incorporated in a game, like any theme, but are not necessary to make Fire Giants, Orcs, or Yuan Ti your bad guys. You can go there if you want, heck make a trifecta of it, but it's WotC's prerogative to no longer draw the general D&D player a map to "go there." It's just not the broad base they're trying to reach at this point in the game's growth, so the grimmer legacy notes of the game are now a niche and is something WotC wants to move past to broaden enjoyment of the game. These subject matters like every other theme with no rules guidance are matters a table can engage if it's agreed upon.
The rest of Volo's most recent edits are striking away "Roleplaying a X" which consists of a sort of dictate for how the monster is to be played, striking it in favor of the tables that were already in the book that give the DM a broader array of basic options to use out of the (text) box, or as inspiration. It's liberating for the game, that's all. I mean, all you all fighting in defense of these lost words, you all know the rest of the book too, right? Or are you here because BoLS ignited you? I mean looking at the errata section for Volo's, were your games really harmed by the ability score modifiers when WotC got rid of negative mods? When that sort of stuff comes up, there's a common refrain by complainants that such moves are homogenizing character options with a note of something to the effect of "why be any species" etc. I never actually hear those posters actually corroborating how their games have been ruined or otherwise hampered by these mechanical changes.
Don't presume I'm some sort who wants D&D with "play nice" as a requisite. I can play very dark. We have discussions at my table to make sure we're all on board with my portrayals of undead and aberrations (informed by a mix of vocational and intimate familiarity I have with physical trauma and the entropy just beyond the barriers imposed by the neurochemical phenomenon we call rationale thought). It's a way I can play, but not a mode I unleash on players without discussions of boundaries. Moreover, I want D&D to be a rule set that serves as the foundation of play for a broader player community than just me. I got no problem mining the history of game lore to find an "edge" if I want to. Heck, my favorite present game I'm running is basically mining 2E's Planescape mixed up with a mix of pop and actual philosophical nihilism (sorta think Into the 'Spiderverse meets True Detective with a liberal dose of Twin Peaks). I don't need a 5e manual granting me the authority to play that way. Nor should any complainant demand it. The "established lore" of any edition has always been nothing more than a simple foundation, not the architecture. To use an old Plato analogy, more to be cute than anything else, get out of the cave and see that folks are discovering great forms of play beyond the shadows to which you're clinging.
*Or at least J.R. Zambrano's, I don't know whether the views of BoLS beyond that one writer are really represented in his article, just as I find suspect Zambrano's presumption of interpreting what "D&D players" in general feel about these edits without qualifying what segment of the player base he's actually talking about.
postscript: oh those assertions about the integral mechanical role of alignment? Do tell me how Detect Evil and Good work in 5e rules. Yes Evil and Good in some sort of default cosmology offered by WotC (though also explained as an option and not essential for play ... look at some of Coleville's extraplanar entities S&F to see how things can go off the script if you just do your own build) are "elemental" in that the planes and their alignment positioning sort of "give shape" to the multiverse (if the DM wants to follow those suggestions). However, just because you have extraplanar entities who take an alignment absolutely, that in no way mandates world building where a given wordly entity that includes such an entitiy in their creation narrative also be absolutely positioned in that alignment. I mean, come on, all the logic chopping posing as philosophical rigor in that vein is readily defeated by actual theologies that pose good and evil as "real things" in the world but grant that human souls or psyches or being or what have you are not "essentially" one or the other. One shouldn't have to go there in discussing fantasy, but I guess sometimes such reality checks are warranted when absolutism, even in fantasy, is asserted.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
First of all, Wizards of the Coast didn't even exist as a company when the Satanic Panic occurred. That was TSR. And they didn't remove demons and devils from 2nd Edition, they just changed their names to tanar'ri and baatizu and said that those were the names that they called themselves while "demon" and "devil" were the words ignorant mortals used for them. So they were never brought back to the game because they never left.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Sourcebooks are supposed to be unbiased third-person omniscient perspectives on the beings that live in a D&D world. They need to provide accurate information, not present some sort of in-universe bias that's written by a whiny basement dweller who's still bitter that his ex got sick of his passive aggressive BS and dumped him in favor of an orc so now he's going to make their whole race look bad in revenge. If a sourcebook is "just someone's perspective," it's a useless source.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
It's what they've been doing: releasing Realms content in small packages, and washing their hands of anything remotely looking like a comprehensive FR setting sourcebook. There's the SCAG and a couple of adventures ostensibly set in the Realms, I'm sure there'll be an Underdark book at some point and maybe others, but there's no Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting book anymore and I'm thinking there won't ever be one for 5E.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
FR suffers from extreme bloat. Main npc's die and get resurrected through cloning more than marvel heroes, leading to complete lack of caring on my part. You can't kick a tree without an Arch Mage falling out of one, deities die every few minutes to be reborn a few modules later. This setting needs a hard reset. I used to love it, but now I can't make myself care. And while I can only applaud WoTC finally entering the twenty-first century I wish they had done this not by removing lore but by rewriting it in a manner I don't want to start an argument with myself. But lets wait and see what next year brings.
*emphasis mine*
Oh, have I got a thread for you. Case-in-point:
https://www.enworld.org/threads/red-orc-american-indians-and-yellow-orc-mongolians-in-d-d.684780/page-2#post-8488556
This is from an old D&D sourcebook for the long-abandoned setting of Mystara.
If you can read that post and still say that "orcs [were] never an analog for real world people in D&D", you're lying. Yes they were. Yes, they continue to be through the existence of those products and the racist stereotypes that were attached to them.
There have been depictions of Orcs and Half-Orcs in D&D that have been undeniably racist. Those products are proof. You are wrong. You may have been ignorant of this before, which isn't your fault, but there are a ton of people denying the history of the game because they don't want to get their feelings hurt over a hobby they have attached their own self-esteem to.
That depiction (and others) of Orcs in an official D&D product was racist. Orcs have been a stand-in for many different groups of real-world peoples in D&D worlds for decades. Denying that is a flat-out lie.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
*cough* *Lich* *phylactery and tefillin* *cough*