*cough* Dragonlance and Ravenloft *cough* (Caliban, Tinker Gnomes, Gully Dwarves, Kender). Oh, and the Derro, but Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman had nothing to do with them, that was all Gygax (which isn't that surprising).
And that is why I love Weis & Hickman, and why the child of Gygax is a trash human trying to resurrect TSR as ... ok I have not a single good thing to say about the new TSR, and the toxic cesspool they have going on. Also Gary Gygax was removed from TSR in the 80s for a unstated reason. Sooo who knows maybe it was his lowkey racism.
*cough* Dragonlance and Ravenloft *cough* (Caliban, Tinker Gnomes, Gully Dwarves, Kender). Oh, and the Derro, but Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman had nothing to do with them, that was all Gygax (which isn't that surprising).
And that is why I love Weis & Hickman, and why the child of Gygax is a trash human trying to resurrect TSR as ... ok I have not a single good thing to say about the new TSR, and the toxic cesspool they have going on. Also Gary Gygax was removed from TSR in the 80s for a unstated reason. Sooo who knows maybe it was his lowkey racism.
Kinda......really mostly not.There is actually a cool book on TSR called "Slaying the Dragon" by Ben Riggs. I would highly recommend it, he did a great job. But it clarifies some of why "saint Gary" was removed.
*cough* Dragonlance and Ravenloft *cough* (Caliban, Tinker Gnomes, Gully Dwarves, Kender). Oh, and the Derro, but Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman had nothing to do with them, that was all Gygax (which isn't that surprising).
And that is why I love Weis & Hickman
Wait, you love them because they made some of the most problematic races in the history of D&D? What?
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Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
*cough* Dragonlance and Ravenloft *cough* (Caliban, Tinker Gnomes, Gully Dwarves, Kender). Oh, and the Derro, but Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman had nothing to do with them, that was all Gygax (which isn't that surprising).
And that is why I love Weis & Hickman
Wait, you love them because they made some of the most problematic races in the history of D&D? What?
Gygax was behind the Race designs, they wrote the books. They may have been complacent in some of it, but overall they wrote good stuff for it's time. It's just the 80s and 90s had a universal issue with bigotry which makes it harder to blame individuals when it was the entirety of the system that was an issue.
Like HP Lovecraft, love his books, love the entirety of the Eldritch horror genre that he spawned. He was a Liberal Racist of his time, and basically said the BS racism that was common for all white people of his era. I don't blame him for it, I blame the period of time, and the system that basically dehumanized anyone who wasn't of Northern European ancestry and Christian.
The 90s things were getting better, but the sterotypes, and language used were built from the racism of previous generations. It's hard to avoid these things when the whole world still used them as a universal language. It's also still a problem today but we are currently in a culture war of the past system and the new more sensitive system. We can now pick sides, we now have access to the information and understanding that was lacking in the 80s and 90s. Hickman and Weis are not racists (gygax probably was as his son is a POS bigot), and they have tried to distance themselves from the problematic parts of their past writing. But again, they were licensed writers making books about one specific game which involved Gygax as DM. So I see the issues more relating to one man and his game and less the books which did their best in spite of things. You should read Deathgate Cycle to see what they are like as writers when not following a script given to them by G.Gygax.
Kinda......really mostly not.There is actually a cool book on TSR called "Slaying the Dragon" by Ben Riggs. I would highly recommend it, he did a great job. But it clarifies some of why "saint Gary" was removed.
I've actually heard a lot of stories as to why, including some from people who knew Gygax. I guess I should read the book. The only consistent thing was Gygax apparently was a bit of an (bleep) hole, that could do no wrong in his mind, and everyone else was sick of his (bleep). So they paid him off, and moved the company away from his over the top wargame ideas to more of what we have today.
Gygax didn't make the Kender, Caliban, Tinker Gnomes, and Gully Dwarves, right? So . . . all of what you just said, equating Gygax to D&D's Lovecraft (lol) and blaming almost everything problematic in D&D on him is just straight up false.
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Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Gygax was behind the Race designs, they wrote the books.
Kender, Gully Dwarves, and Tinker Gnomes were all new to Dragonlance; nothing to do with Gygax. Calibans, as far as I can tell, were introduced in the 3e Ravenloft Campaign Setting and don't have much to do with either Gygax or Weis/Hickman.
Also Gary Gygax was removed from TSR in the 80s for a unstated reason.
Not even remotely true. He resigned, and he did so rather than continue to exist at TSR as a minority stakeholder. He got to that point via multiple steps that included a court battle over his legal ability to buy some specific stocks, but it is true that a significant step in that set was him being ousted as CEO. That was done for purely monetary and entirely public reasons. Then as now, no corporation on the entire planet would ever oust a CEO over moral outrage - they are driven entirely by corporate greed.
Gygax didn't make the Kender, Caliban, Tinker Gnomes, and Gully Dwarves, right? So . . . all of what you just said, equating Gygax to D&D's Lovecraft (lol) and blaming almost everything problematic in D&D on him is just straight up false.
Going to quote a few sources in wikipedia as it's way easier.
Calibanhave not been brought back into 5th Edition, and were a thing in Ravenloft, based on a character in Shakespeare. He's a Half-Human half-Monster from the Tempest.
Tinker Gnomes - nothing wrong with them as an idea, in fact gnomes in modern mythology have really taken hard to the tinkerer POV. They are just based on the idea of a mad scientist.
Gully Dwarves are Wiess and Hickman's from 1984 Dragons of Autumn Twilight.
Kender -
Conception and development
In preparation for the Dragonlance setting, Tracy Hickman ran a series of Dungeons & Dragons adventures. Harold Johnson, one of those involved in the games, chose to play a halfling thief character whom he called Almar Tann. When Hickman, Johnson and others moved to the Dragonlance setting for their games, the character of Almar Tann went with them. It soon became clear to those involved, however, that halflings were unsuitable to the Dragonlance world. As Johnson described it, this was especially due to his character's possession of a ring of invisibility, so that "it all sounded too much like another story," referring to Bilbo Baggins and the One Ring. Halflings were then dropped from the campaign, and Johnson developed both the initial concept of the kender and the first representative of the fantasy race, Tasslehoff Burrfoot. To solidify the distinction, they were originally described as "thinner, more wiry, and more cunning and streetwise" than halflings, with mixed success: While Matt Barton and Shane Stacks assessed kender to be similar to Tolkien's hobbits, Daisy De Palmas Jauze considered them a novelty.
Roger E. Moore introduced the kender, and Tasslehoff Burrfoot, to the wider community through his short story A Stone's Throw Away, published in April 1984 in Dragon. While Hickman was involved in some of the development, he stated that it was Roger Moore who contributed the most in defining the kender's final iteration.
The original concept of the kender held that they were "savage, warrior children, ever curious, ever alert." This concept was altered dramatically when Janet Pack became involved in dramatic readings of the works, as Pack's personal characteristics had a strong impact on how those involved in the process viewed the kender. According to Jeff Grubb, she, "and as a result all kender since her, was cute. Extremely cute. Sweetly, lovably, frustratingly cute.... And it's hard, after seeing Janet play Tas, to imagine them any other way." Two of the other key characteristics of kender—their curiosity and kleptomania—were introduced by Hickman. Hickman was uncomfortable with the notion of a "race of thieves" in his games, but still wanted the skills typically associated with thieves, so he added their "innocent tendency to 'borrow' things for indeterminate periods of time."
Originally, kender were to be called "kinder", in reference to kinderkin, but Hickman has reported that readers tended to read the name as "kind-er" rather than "kin-der" in print, leading to the decision to alter the spelling.
Shannon Appelcline noted that game designer John Wick commented in a 2009 podcast that: "Kender … they don't make sense. It doesn't make sense for a race of sociopathic kleptomaniacs to exist in a culture. So how do you put that in a culture to make it make sense?"
Also Gary Gygax was removed from TSR in the 80s for a unstated reason.
Not even remotely true. He resigned, and he did so rather than continue to exist at TSR as a minority stakeholder. He got to that point via multiple steps that included a court battle over his legal ability to buy some specific stocks, but it is true that a significant step in that set was him being ousted as CEO. That was done for purely monetary and entirely public reasons. Then as now, no corporation on the entire planet would ever oust a CEO over moral outrage - they are driven entirely by corporate greed.
In todays world with multi-billion dollar industries, true. Back in 1985 not so much, and since the company was making low millions a year, his leaving of the company and being removed from D&D was for a lot of issues. A lot of unsaid issues, things which all parties included never forgave each other over. Things other than money, however money was involved. His leaving TSR and selling his shares had a lot to do with what ever happened between him and the other people working on D&D. Clash of egos, clash of morality, clash of a lot of things. Greed ironically wasn't why they booted Gygax, but Gygax's greed may have had a hand in it.
Tinker Gnomes - nothing wrong with them as an idea, in fact gnomes in modern mythology have really taken hard to the tinkerer POV. They are just based on the idea of a mad scientist.
The problem with tinker gnomes isn't that they're inventors. It's that they're inventors of utterly pointless things that probably blow the inventor up.
Tinker Gnomes - nothing wrong with them as an idea, in fact gnomes in modern mythology have really taken hard to the tinkerer POV. They are just based on the idea of a mad scientist.
The problem with tinker gnomes isn't that they're inventors. It's that they're inventors of utterly pointless things that probably blow the inventor up.
Tinker gnomes, as portrayed in 2nd Edition, were given multiple negative stereotypes commonly associated with ADHD and autism. As a race they were a joke, they were literally incapable of being important, there's a reason that there are no Dragonlance novels that feature a gnome as a main character.
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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.
Also Gary Gygax was removed from TSR in the 80s for a unstated reason.
Not even remotely true. He resigned, and he did so rather than continue to exist at TSR as a minority stakeholder. He got to that point via multiple steps that included a court battle over his legal ability to buy some specific stocks, but it is true that a significant step in that set was him being ousted as CEO. That was done for purely monetary and entirely public reasons. Then as now, no corporation on the entire planet would ever oust a CEO over moral outrage - they are driven entirely by corporate greed.
In todays world with multi-billion dollar industries, true. Back in 1985 not so much, and since the company was making low millions a year, his leaving of the company and being removed from D&D was for a lot of issues. A lot of unsaid issues, things which all parties included never forgave each other over. Things other than money, however money was involved. His leaving TSR and selling his shares had a lot to do with what ever happened between him and the other people working on D&D. Clash of egos, clash of morality, clash of a lot of things. Greed ironically wasn't why they booted Gygax, but Gygax's greed may have had a hand in it.
The reason Gygax was booted from TSR was because he'd made several major screw-ups that cost TSR significant amounts of money combined with many people there had gotten fed up with him personally. It wasn't moral outrage, it was that he'd done a bad enough job that nobody was willing to work for him anymore.
Also, HP Lovecraft was considered to be someone who was scandalously racist while he was alive. His views on race were widely considered excessive even at the time, but it was permissible in part because Hugo Gernsback was also a huge racist and Lovecraft was writing for him.
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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.
Erm, in reference to the OP, I also am scared of "my" 5e Books being retconned into One D&D / 6e, or otherwise edited to the point of being unrecognizable in terms of what I'd originally purchased. I definitely don't think it's amoral or evil, and agree with the various folks that mentioned it's basically an author releasing an edited version of their own work (think of the various Blade Runner cuts over the years). I feel it's more of an ethical issue that should bother anyone that originally invested in 5e and are either resistant or cautious on regards the next edition. Personally crossing my fingers that WotC / DDB creates an Edition Delineation for Sourcebooks and Adventures, and since we haven't had any comment on that beyond a Mod telling me WotC will do what they want, I feel less inclined to play D&D than I previously have. How would anyone feel to have invested time under one Rule Set for a Campaign and then find their books were basically completely unavailable?
Erm, in reference to the OP, I also am scared of "my" 5e Books being retconned into One D&D / 6e, or otherwise edited to the point of being unrecognizable in terms of what I'd originally purchased. I definitely don't think it's amoral or evil, and agree with the various folks that mentioned it's basically an author releasing an edited version of their own work (think of the various Blade Runner cuts over the years). I feel it's more of an ethical issue that should bother anyone that originally invested in 5e and are either resistant or cautious on regards the next edition. Personally crossing my fingers that WotC / DDB creates an Edition Delineation for Sourcebooks and Adventures, and since we haven't had any comment on that beyond a Mod telling me WotC will do what they want, I feel less inclined to play D&D than I previously have. How would anyone feel to have invested time under one Rule Set for a Campaign and then find their books were basically completely unavailable?
Sorry to be blunt but that's just your (and by "you", I mean a "general you") fault. People are all so happy about online stuff and subscriptions and netflix/spotify/dndb type of services where you purchase the rights to access the material instead of buying the "physical" (mp3/pdf/whatever) copies and when it bites them in their backs, they are all so surprised. YOU've decided to get the digital copies, now you have to risk the consequences. (And just to be clear, I also do not agree with the retconns, and that's why i buy the physical stuff instead)
Honestly comes across as pretty rude regardless of how you cut that. As the digital age just keeps ramping up, most people are going to be sticking with digital and screw the physical. The comparison to Netflix is also out of whack seeing as that's a streaming service where the content is constantly changing in it's entirety and in a library sense, not in an edit of individual films. I'm not paying monthly subscription fees for a library of books that just keep getting swapped out.
Be aware that the subscription here does include such editing. If that is not the subscription you wanted, you need to check the fine print again and decide if you want to continue the subscription.
I knew what I was getting into when I purchased materials here on DDB. As I mentioned prior if it goes in a direction I cannot abide, I will walk away. For me, it hasn't done that, yet.
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Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider. My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong. I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲 “It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
Erm, in reference to the OP, I also am scared of "my" 5e Books being retconned into One D&D / 6e, or otherwise edited to the point of being unrecognizable in terms of what I'd originally purchased. I definitely don't think it's amoral or evil, and agree with the various folks that mentioned it's basically an author releasing an edited version of their own work (think of the various Blade Runner cuts over the years). I feel it's more of an ethical issue that should bother anyone that originally invested in 5e and are either resistant or cautious on regards the next edition. Personally crossing my fingers that WotC / DDB creates an Edition Delineation for Sourcebooks and Adventures, and since we haven't had any comment on that beyond a Mod telling me WotC will do what they want, I feel less inclined to play D&D than I previously have. How would anyone feel to have invested time under one Rule Set for a Campaign and then find their books were basically completely unavailable?
This is a common fear among D&D Beyond posters and caused quite the uproar when MMM was announced. At that point, the fear was somewhat warranted - we had never seen such a massive rerelease and re-editing as MMM, and Wizards dropped the ball on how the release would be handled. You had D&D Beyond staff—not owned by Wizards at the time—left hanging in the wind because Wizards had not told them how to handle the release, and “wait and see, we know nothing, but will tell you when Wizards tells us something” is not exactly the most reassuring of statements.
But we are past MMM—itself effectively a proto-OneD&D book. We now know that infrastructure was put in place for “Legacy” content to be handled separately from the modern iteration. Programming something like that takes time and effort - it is not going to merely be used for a single reprint book and then discarded. All present evidence points to 5e content (all of which will be compatible with OneD&D) remaining preserved under a “legacy” tab. Being “scared” of OneD&D errata changing existing 5e content seems a little premature and ungrounded based upon the present facts.
And that fear certainly does not follow from the topic of this thread - there is a big difference between preserving a “legacy” version of rules, which is easy and has utility and historical value, and preserving racism. MMM is the precedent one should be looking at; not Wizards using its broad errata powers to remove something that never should have existed.
I never contested any of what you just said, though I admit the use of "ethical" wasn't technically correct, just the best I could think of. And I also will be walking away from D&D Beyond dependent on how far the editing goes (as I already said), and also just dependent on how WotC proceeds in a more general way. I'm currently disgruntled by the One D&D polls which don't even ask the questions that are most important to me in answering, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised they haven't provided any real insight on their plans for 5e as legacy content. I honestly felt customer service on DDB was superior when it was it's own seperate entity.
I'm not seeing anything that suggests current books will be replaced/rewritten once One D&D graduates from playtesting to full release. Looking at it from their side as a publisher, it makes no fiscal sense to just give everyone the brand new material for free when their goal will be to sell it. WotC's stated goal right now is still backwards compatibility, though, so unlike the moves from 3E/3.5E to 4E and 4E to 5E, you'll actually be able to use most of your 5E products when One D&D hits full release. This should be reassuring, but if you want to be absolutely sure you maintain access to 5th Edition books, the surefire way to do that is to buy hard copies. Even if they release errata, change problematic passages, etc. automatically in the digital version, WotC isn't going to send anyone around house-by-house to rip out pages out of people's books like some weird, copyediting Santa Claus.
Also, the nervous feeling as we shift to a new edition will fade. Feeling trepidation about a new edition is a rite of passage that everyone goes through when their first, beloved edition is in its twilight and a new edition is announced.
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And that is why I love Weis & Hickman, and why the child of Gygax is a trash human trying to resurrect TSR as ... ok I have not a single good thing to say about the new TSR, and the toxic cesspool they have going on. Also Gary Gygax was removed from TSR in the 80s for a unstated reason. Sooo who knows maybe it was his lowkey racism.
Kinda......really mostly not.There is actually a cool book on TSR called "Slaying the Dragon" by Ben Riggs. I would highly recommend it, he did a great job. But it clarifies some of why "saint Gary" was removed.
N/A
Wait, you love them because they made some of the most problematic races in the history of D&D? What?
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
Gygax was behind the Race designs, they wrote the books. They may have been complacent in some of it, but overall they wrote good stuff for it's time. It's just the 80s and 90s had a universal issue with bigotry which makes it harder to blame individuals when it was the entirety of the system that was an issue.
Like HP Lovecraft, love his books, love the entirety of the Eldritch horror genre that he spawned. He was a Liberal Racist of his time, and basically said the BS racism that was common for all white people of his era. I don't blame him for it, I blame the period of time, and the system that basically dehumanized anyone who wasn't of Northern European ancestry and Christian.
The 90s things were getting better, but the sterotypes, and language used were built from the racism of previous generations. It's hard to avoid these things when the whole world still used them as a universal language. It's also still a problem today but we are currently in a culture war of the past system and the new more sensitive system. We can now pick sides, we now have access to the information and understanding that was lacking in the 80s and 90s. Hickman and Weis are not racists (gygax probably was as his son is a POS bigot), and they have tried to distance themselves from the problematic parts of their past writing. But again, they were licensed writers making books about one specific game which involved Gygax as DM. So I see the issues more relating to one man and his game and less the books which did their best in spite of things. You should read Deathgate Cycle to see what they are like as writers when not following a script given to them by G.Gygax.
I've actually heard a lot of stories as to why, including some from people who knew Gygax. I guess I should read the book. The only consistent thing was Gygax apparently was a bit of an (bleep) hole, that could do no wrong in his mind, and everyone else was sick of his (bleep). So they paid him off, and moved the company away from his over the top wargame ideas to more of what we have today.
Gygax didn't make the Kender, Caliban, Tinker Gnomes, and Gully Dwarves, right? So . . . all of what you just said, equating Gygax to D&D's Lovecraft (lol) and blaming almost everything problematic in D&D on him is just straight up false.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
Kender, Gully Dwarves, and Tinker Gnomes were all new to Dragonlance; nothing to do with Gygax. Calibans, as far as I can tell, were introduced in the 3e Ravenloft Campaign Setting and don't have much to do with either Gygax or Weis/Hickman.
Not even remotely true. He resigned, and he did so rather than continue to exist at TSR as a minority stakeholder. He got to that point via multiple steps that included a court battle over his legal ability to buy some specific stocks, but it is true that a significant step in that set was him being ousted as CEO. That was done for purely monetary and entirely public reasons. Then as now, no corporation on the entire planet would ever oust a CEO over moral outrage - they are driven entirely by corporate greed.
Going to quote a few sources in wikipedia as it's way easier.
Caliban have not been brought back into 5th Edition, and were a thing in Ravenloft, based on a character in Shakespeare. He's a Half-Human half-Monster from the Tempest.
Tinker Gnomes - nothing wrong with them as an idea, in fact gnomes in modern mythology have really taken hard to the tinkerer POV. They are just based on the idea of a mad scientist.
Gully Dwarves are Wiess and Hickman's from 1984 Dragons of Autumn Twilight.
Kender -
In todays world with multi-billion dollar industries, true. Back in 1985 not so much, and since the company was making low millions a year, his leaving of the company and being removed from D&D was for a lot of issues. A lot of unsaid issues, things which all parties included never forgave each other over. Things other than money, however money was involved. His leaving TSR and selling his shares had a lot to do with what ever happened between him and the other people working on D&D. Clash of egos, clash of morality, clash of a lot of things. Greed ironically wasn't why they booted Gygax, but Gygax's greed may have had a hand in it.
The problem with tinker gnomes isn't that they're inventors. It's that they're inventors of utterly pointless things that probably blow the inventor up.
Tinker gnomes, as portrayed in 2nd Edition, were given multiple negative stereotypes commonly associated with ADHD and autism. As a race they were a joke, they were literally incapable of being important, there's a reason that there are no Dragonlance novels that feature a gnome as a main character.
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.
The reason Gygax was booted from TSR was because he'd made several major screw-ups that cost TSR significant amounts of money combined with many people there had gotten fed up with him personally. It wasn't moral outrage, it was that he'd done a bad enough job that nobody was willing to work for him anymore.
Also, HP Lovecraft was considered to be someone who was scandalously racist while he was alive. His views on race were widely considered excessive even at the time, but it was permissible in part because Hugo Gernsback was also a huge racist and Lovecraft was writing for him.
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.
6th Lyran Guard,
After reading your sig I think we need a canon cannon, to shoot info to people. Or maybe to all of us who play D&D, a 5th canon cannon.
Please go back to the topic.
Erm, in reference to the OP, I also am scared of "my" 5e Books being retconned into One D&D / 6e, or otherwise edited to the point of being unrecognizable in terms of what I'd originally purchased. I definitely don't think it's amoral or evil, and agree with the various folks that mentioned it's basically an author releasing an edited version of their own work (think of the various Blade Runner cuts over the years). I feel it's more of an ethical issue that should bother anyone that originally invested in 5e and are either resistant or cautious on regards the next edition. Personally crossing my fingers that WotC / DDB creates an Edition Delineation for Sourcebooks and Adventures, and since we haven't had any comment on that beyond a Mod telling me WotC will do what they want, I feel less inclined to play D&D than I previously have. How would anyone feel to have invested time under one Rule Set for a Campaign and then find their books were basically completely unavailable?
Sorry to be blunt but that's just your (and by "you", I mean a "general you") fault. People are all so happy about online stuff and subscriptions and netflix/spotify/dndb type of services where you purchase the rights to access the material instead of buying the "physical" (mp3/pdf/whatever) copies and when it bites them in their backs, they are all so surprised. YOU've decided to get the digital copies, now you have to risk the consequences. (And just to be clear, I also do not agree with the retconns, and that's why i buy the physical stuff instead)
Honestly comes across as pretty rude regardless of how you cut that. As the digital age just keeps ramping up, most people are going to be sticking with digital and screw the physical. The comparison to Netflix is also out of whack seeing as that's a streaming service where the content is constantly changing in it's entirety and in a library sense, not in an edit of individual films. I'm not paying monthly subscription fees for a library of books that just keep getting swapped out.
Be aware that the subscription here does include such editing. If that is not the subscription you wanted, you need to check the fine print again and decide if you want to continue the subscription.
I knew what I was getting into when I purchased materials here on DDB. As I mentioned prior if it goes in a direction I cannot abide, I will walk away. For me, it hasn't done that, yet.
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider.
My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong.
I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲
“It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
This is a common fear among D&D Beyond posters and caused quite the uproar when MMM was announced. At that point, the fear was somewhat warranted - we had never seen such a massive rerelease and re-editing as MMM, and Wizards dropped the ball on how the release would be handled. You had D&D Beyond staff—not owned by Wizards at the time—left hanging in the wind because Wizards had not told them how to handle the release, and “wait and see, we know nothing, but will tell you when Wizards tells us something” is not exactly the most reassuring of statements.
But we are past MMM—itself effectively a proto-OneD&D book. We now know that infrastructure was put in place for “Legacy” content to be handled separately from the modern iteration. Programming something like that takes time and effort - it is not going to merely be used for a single reprint book and then discarded. All present evidence points to 5e content (all of which will be compatible with OneD&D) remaining preserved under a “legacy” tab. Being “scared” of OneD&D errata changing existing 5e content seems a little premature and ungrounded based upon the present facts.
And that fear certainly does not follow from the topic of this thread - there is a big difference between preserving a “legacy” version of rules, which is easy and has utility and historical value, and preserving racism. MMM is the precedent one should be looking at; not Wizards using its broad errata powers to remove something that never should have existed.
I never contested any of what you just said, though I admit the use of "ethical" wasn't technically correct, just the best I could think of. And I also will be walking away from D&D Beyond dependent on how far the editing goes (as I already said), and also just dependent on how WotC proceeds in a more general way. I'm currently disgruntled by the One D&D polls which don't even ask the questions that are most important to me in answering, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised they haven't provided any real insight on their plans for 5e as legacy content. I honestly felt customer service on DDB was superior when it was it's own seperate entity.
I'm not seeing anything that suggests current books will be replaced/rewritten once One D&D graduates from playtesting to full release. Looking at it from their side as a publisher, it makes no fiscal sense to just give everyone the brand new material for free when their goal will be to sell it. WotC's stated goal right now is still backwards compatibility, though, so unlike the moves from 3E/3.5E to 4E and 4E to 5E, you'll actually be able to use most of your 5E products when One D&D hits full release. This should be reassuring, but if you want to be absolutely sure you maintain access to 5th Edition books, the surefire way to do that is to buy hard copies. Even if they release errata, change problematic passages, etc. automatically in the digital version, WotC isn't going to send anyone around house-by-house to rip out pages out of people's books like some weird, copyediting Santa Claus.
Also, the nervous feeling as we shift to a new edition will fade. Feeling trepidation about a new edition is a rite of passage that everyone goes through when their first, beloved edition is in its twilight and a new edition is announced.