I'm overall pretty happy with what I'm seeing here. My group intends to convert our campaign as soon as the PHB drops, rebuilding characters under the new rules. I DO agree that it's strange that we can keep races, classes, subclasses and monsters accessible with legacy tags, but not spells. It would seem like those could be legacied as well to allow for use without needing to homebrew them all, putting that work on us, your supporters, when they are already all there in the databases asking to "simply" be retagged.
I can understand the frustration from people who want to stick with 2014 and not update. They've invested a lot of money here over the past 10 years - I've spent hundreds here myself between books and years of a Master tier subscription. On the one hand, DDB isn't taking away the books we've purchased, so with those and homebrew we can still play the 2014 game. But I also recognize that Beyond is the official toolset, so the rules here should reflect the current iteration.
THE ONLY REASON I HAVE DND BEYOND IS TO CREATE 2014 CHARACTERS EASILY AND THAT YOUR ADDING NEW NONE DND CONTENT. YOU CAN TAKE 2024 AND SHOVE IT AS THERE IS NO WAY IM UPDATING TO IT AS IT ISN'T AN UPGRADE IN ANYWAY. JUST ADDS A FEW HOMECREW WE'VE ALREADY BEEN USING.
i WANT MY 2014 SPELLS LEFT ALLONE AS i PAID FOR THEM.
I regret the money I spent on DnD Beyond, and my efforts to get my group to also use it. I'll be finishing my current campaign with the sheet as I've got it set up but sadly I'm going to walk away from the platform at that point because there's a persistent insistence on making choices for the platform which diminish the usability of the platform to access the content which we have paid to use.
Hi, I don't want this to sound like another rant post, but I would appreciate some clarity that isn't provided in the linked blog post.
...so that you can jump into play as soon as the new core rulebooks become available...
Does this mean that the rules are implemented for everyone, even those people who are part way through a campaign? I don't particularly want to explain all this to my players, when we started with 5th edition and it sounds like the site is being updated to 6th edition wholesale. Is it the case that the characters will stay under 5th edition but receive that legacy badge? I.e. the Character sheets visually won't change?
The below section seems to back up my main concern from above:
This change impacts the information you’ll find on your character sheet, in tooltips, and that is linked in the compendium.
This seems to imply that players who are partway through a campaign are about to see all the 6th edition rules instead of the 5th edition rules? Will it be possible to belay this change for ongoing games, so that the ruleset doesn't change partway through?
To give a real-world example, I usually have the books nearby as a quick reference, but some of my players reference the app. I don't have the new books yet so it feels like this might cause a break in gameplay while clarifications are sought, which is more hassle than it's worth.
(To clarify, I'm not against 6th edition, I would just like to start a fresh campaign with a new ruleset, not have to migrate away from D&D Beyond just to keep character sheets consistent for an ongoing game).
If you wish to use the old version of a magic item or spell that has been replaced by its 2024 counterpart, you will need to create a homebrew copy of it and enable homebrew content on your character sheet. Then, you can add it to your character sheet.
As others have already said, this seems a bit like you're undermining the convenience of D&D Beyond for DMs and Players. I realise you might think it's small, but preparation is already a bit of a time-consuming task, and putting additional overhead on users in this manner seems like a bad idea, especially when the spells are still in the source books, it just sounds like you're not bothering with the LEGACY tag for these things?
I like the update to the stat blocks. They look good.
Again, I don't mind the introduction of 6th Edition, but given the above assumptions (and please tell me if I'm wrong!) it seems like I might be best exporting all the character sheets and reverting to pen and paper for this current campaign, then renewing my subscription if/when the dust has settled for a new campaign and starting afresh when we're ready to start using the 6th Edition rules.
I would also like to know exactly how features are going to be silently updated on existing character sheets. Will existing characters just see a bunch of Legacy tags appear next to everything that's been updated but isn't being deleted, like subclasses, backgrounds, etc.? I have two campaigns currently in-progress, and none of us are eager to adopt a whole new ruleset midstream. I'd like to know if the characters in those campaigns will stay as they are, or if my players and I will need to go in and manually swap features back to their legacy versions after the switch for the things we won't be adopting this time around.
I mean D&D Insider (the D&D Beyond equivalent for 4E) stayed up for years. While updates ended for it in 2014 with the launch of 5E, they allowed new subscribers until December 2015 (so roughly a year & half after the release of 5E). And they allowed existing subscribers to continue to pay for the service until 2020 when Microsoft Silverlight shutdown. Removing access on basically day 1 is super disruptive to campaigns that are currently in progress. D&D Beyond originally sold different tiers of content - most people bought the compendium + tooltips version although you could have purchased just the compendium for cheaper. So it's not unreasonable to be angry that something you've paid for (the functionality of using the compendium in the various tools such as character sheets) is being removed and being told it's fine because you're not losing access to the compendium. If I wanted just the compendium, I could have spent less money and purchased only that. Hopefully EU users will report because they have better legal protections around digital services when shenanigans like this occur.
It would reasonable to limit legacy content to D&D Beyond and not port it over to the new VTT as an incentive to move to 5.5. Circling back to D&D Insider, the wikipedia article on it highlights:
Academic Nicholas J. Mizer in his book Tabletop Role-Playing Games and the Experience of Imagined Worlds (2019) characterized D&D Insider as a way for Wizards of the Coast to maintain control over Dungeons & Dragons and shift the game towards producing a predictable McDonaldized product:
If Wizards can succeed at convincing players that D&DI is convenient [...], they need not necessarily convince them that the content provided is better. [...] If Wizards wants to change a rule, they do not need to convince players to change the way they play, they simply update the entry in the database. Everyone subscribing to the service will see the new rule as written the next time they access the database. [...] Players can theoretically develop customized, homebrewed characters and rules, but once they have bought into the McDonaldized system, they often find it too inconvenient. Wizards even provides the extra-convenient "Choose for me" button every step of the way for the player who is overwhelmed by the pre-cooked options presented to them.
This is fundamentally what the D&D Beyond update is about; instead of making a good UX choice, they've made a choice to push people to 5.5 because they want people to move on. It's about making it just inconvenient enough to use the 2014 version of D&D (ie. taking the time to manually input 40+ spells into the homebrew feature, needing to dig in the compendium because the search bar is limited to the update, etc) that people default to 5.5 which then leads them to buying new products down the line. The compendium is annoying to use because the books don't have search features built in (because there's the big search bar on top) and you're limited to hoping you've clicked on the right section when you use ctrl+F to find something. A recent Hasbro investor meeting highlighted that D&D Beyond is 50% of the revenue for tabletop D&D (D&D as an entire brand has other larger revenue sources); during the OGL scandal, reporters confirmed that part of Hasbro backing down was because of users cancelling their D&D Beyond subscriptions en masse. Fundamentally, unless people are willing to leave D&D Beyond over this, Hasbro isn't going to change this to be more UX friendly for the 2014 version of the game.
I mean D&D Insider (the D&D Beyond equivalent for 4E) stayed up for years. While updates ended for it in 2014 with the launch of 5E, they allowed new subscribers until December 2015 (so roughly a year & half after the release of 5E). And they allowed existing subscribers to continue to pay for the service until 2020 when Microsoft Silverlight shutdown. Removing access on basically day 1 is super disruptive to campaigns that are currently in progress. D&D Beyond originally sold different tiers of content - most people bought the compendium + tooltips version although you could have purchased just the compendium for cheaper. So it's not unreasonable to be angry that something you've paid for (the functionality of using the compendium in the various tools such as character sheets) is being removed and being told it's fine because you're not losing access to the compendium. If I wanted just the compendium, I could have spent less money and purchased only that. Hopefully EU users will report because they have better legal protections around digital services when shenanigans like this occur.
It would reasonable to limit legacy content to D&D Beyond and not port it over to the new VTT as an incentive to move to 5.5. Circling back to D&D Insider, the wikipedia article on it highlights:
Academic Nicholas J. Mizer in his book Tabletop Role-Playing Games and the Experience of Imagined Worlds (2019) characterized D&D Insider as a way for Wizards of the Coast to maintain control over Dungeons & Dragons and shift the game towards producing a predictable McDonaldized product:
If Wizards can succeed at convincing players that D&DI is convenient [...], they need not necessarily convince them that the content provided is better. [...] If Wizards wants to change a rule, they do not need to convince players to change the way they play, they simply update the entry in the database. Everyone subscribing to the service will see the new rule as written the next time they access the database. [...] Players can theoretically develop customized, homebrewed characters and rules, but once they have bought into the McDonaldized system, they often find it too inconvenient. Wizards even provides the extra-convenient "Choose for me" button every step of the way for the player who is overwhelmed by the pre-cooked options presented to them.
This is fundamentally what the D&D Beyond update is about; instead of making a good UX choice, they've made a choice to push people to 5.5 because they want people to move on. It's about making it just inconvenient enough to use the 2014 version of D&D (ie. taking the time to manually input 40+ spells into the homebrew feature, needing to dig in the compendium because the search bar is limited to the update, etc) that people default to 5.5 which then leads them to buying new products down the line. The compendium is annoying to use because the books don't have search features built in (because there's the big search bar on top) and you're limited to hoping you've clicked on the right section when you use ctrl+F to find something. A recent Hasbro investor meeting highlighted that D&D Beyond is 50% of the revenue for tabletop D&D (D&D as an entire brand has other larger revenue sources); during the OGL scandal, reporters confirmed that part of Hasbro backing down was because of users cancelling their D&D Beyond subscriptions en masse. Fundamentally, unless people are willing to leave D&D Beyond over this, Hasbro isn't going to change this to be more UX friendly for the 2014 version of the game.
On a note about Insider, they allowed you to download PDFs of everything you purchased. Something DnDB removed a few years ago.
On a note about Insider, they allowed you to download PDFs of everything you purchased. Something DnDB removed a few years ago.
If they are absolutely set on this route returning the ability to download PDFs of the old content would do wonders for me. I much prefer being able to find all my stuff in a file than navigate the sources tab on the site, especially as I imagine the 2014 stuff will slowly become harder to find.
Will we be getting refunds for the spells you are taking away or offer us a credit for future spells based on how many we purchased? I would have homebrewed them originally instead of buying them had there been a warning that they may be taken away from us. Or offer us a credit for future spells based on how many we purchased? I don't think it's fair, being punished for supporting you. Someone else suggested a toggle between 2024 and 2014 content, that would also be acceptable. Don't steal from us please. I won't be able to give you anymore money if you do.
Adding my voice to the disappointment that I have to make homebrew spell copies of 2014 spells. This will disrupt my current campaign 26 sessions in and cause a huge unnecessary effort on my part. I will have to not only make homebrew versions of the spells my players currently use but all others that they might be able to switch to or level up to and select. That's just ridiculous. I'm not switching to 2024 so deep into a campaign. Sad sad sad and uncaring decision.
> Gold Medal for "Outstanding Book of the Year" in 2012 Independent Publisher Book Awards > National Indie Excellence Book Award finalist > A Greater Monster named a "Top 10 Book of 2012" by Common Ills blog > Listed in "10 Hot Chicago Reads for Chilly Nights" on Refinery29.com
So first, this is being handled terribly. Let people keep the content they payed for. Its not that hard. You already have the Legacy tag.
Second, will people who bought the 2014 content will be getting the 2024 version for free at least? I know most of the spells and Items will be covered in the basic rules/SRD but not all of them are.
That is... truly bonkers that you think there is even a chance for this? Should the designers and writers not get paid?
Will we be getting refunds for the spells you are taking away or offer us a credit for future spells based on how many we purchased? I would have homebrewed them originally instead of buying them had there been a warning that they may be taken away from us. Or offer us a credit for future spells based on how many we purchased? I don't think it's fair, being punished for supporting you. Someone else suggested a toggle between 2024 and 2014 content, that would also be acceptable. Don't steal from us please. I won't be able to give you anymore money if you do.
There is no alacarte system anymore so no more buying spells by themselves.
So first, this is being handled terribly. Let people keep the content they payed for. Its not that hard. You already have the Legacy tag.
Second, will people who bought the 2014 content will be getting the 2024 version for free at least? I know most of the spells and Items will be covered in the basic rules/SRD but not all of them are.
That is... truly bonkers that you think there is even a chance for this? Should the designers and writers not get paid?
They're forcing us to use the revised rules since tooltips and links will only link to 5e24 rules and statblocks and whatnot. If I wanted to use the 5e24 rules, I'd by the 5e24 books. Which I absolutely have no plan to do so. D&D Beyond is taking content away from us that we paid for.
It's well-recognized when you purchase "books" on d&d beyond, you don't own the content, just a license to it, but irrespective of how much you "own" the materials you're using, forcing your customers to use new materials by restricting access to old ones they have a license to = a short-sighted decision that is unfair to them. Why not use the 2014 source materials unless they own the 2024 equivalent, then show that? Because it doesn't encourage buying new materials?
I've purchased ~95%+ of the source materials available on here (read: spent thousands of dollars) and I can't think of a bigger "haha kick rocks but thanks for your money, we look forward to more of it" move than this. It's hard to stay motivated buying digital content, knowing this is how it may go. Does this song and dance repeat when d&d one is on its way out?
We are not ready to just stop all of our current play to abruptly change everything with a snap of a finger. Guess will just go back to paper and drop out of your BS.
Will we be getting refunds for the spells you are taking away or offer us a credit for future spells based on how many we purchased? I would have homebrewed them originally instead of buying them had there been a warning that they may be taken away from us. Or offer us a credit for future spells based on how many we purchased? I don't think it's fair, being punished for supporting you. Someone else suggested a toggle between 2024 and 2014 content, that would also be acceptable. Don't steal from us please. I won't be able to give you anymore money if you do.
There is no alacarte system anymore so no more buying spells by themselves.
Something many were chided for crying wolf about when the book of many things dropped, now they will be chided for expressing the opinion that this is the new business model to remove content and force new the purchase of new content. This isn't a modern video game, it is a 50 year old table top game.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
CENSORSHIP IS THE TOOL OF COWARDS and WANNA BE TYRANTS.
I remember during the OGL days that some people had their accounts deleted. I respect that level of commitment. Anyone here planning on having accounts deleted?
I remember during the OGL days that some people had their accounts deleted. I respect that level of commitment. Anyone here planning on having accounts deleted?
Sadly I can't as I'm the DM and need to share my content to my players.
I'm overall pretty happy with what I'm seeing here. My group intends to convert our campaign as soon as the PHB drops, rebuilding characters under the new rules. I DO agree that it's strange that we can keep races, classes, subclasses and monsters accessible with legacy tags, but not spells. It would seem like those could be legacied as well to allow for use without needing to homebrew them all, putting that work on us, your supporters, when they are already all there in the databases asking to "simply" be retagged.
I can understand the frustration from people who want to stick with 2014 and not update. They've invested a lot of money here over the past 10 years - I've spent hundreds here myself between books and years of a Master tier subscription. On the one hand, DDB isn't taking away the books we've purchased, so with those and homebrew we can still play the 2014 game. But I also recognize that Beyond is the official toolset, so the rules here should reflect the current iteration.
THE ONLY REASON I HAVE DND BEYOND IS TO CREATE 2014 CHARACTERS EASILY AND THAT YOUR ADDING NEW NONE DND CONTENT. YOU CAN TAKE 2024 AND SHOVE IT AS THERE IS NO WAY IM UPDATING TO IT AS IT ISN'T AN UPGRADE IN ANYWAY. JUST ADDS A FEW HOMECREW WE'VE ALREADY BEEN USING.
i WANT MY 2014 SPELLS LEFT ALLONE AS i PAID FOR THEM.
I regret the money I spent on DnD Beyond, and my efforts to get my group to also use it.
I'll be finishing my current campaign with the sheet as I've got it set up but sadly I'm going to walk away from the platform at that point because there's a persistent insistence on making choices for the platform which diminish the usability of the platform to access the content which we have paid to use.
So will you give me a refund for all the stuff I purchased and can't use anymore in the future or what?
I would also like to know exactly how features are going to be silently updated on existing character sheets. Will existing characters just see a bunch of Legacy tags appear next to everything that's been updated but isn't being deleted, like subclasses, backgrounds, etc.? I have two campaigns currently in-progress, and none of us are eager to adopt a whole new ruleset midstream. I'd like to know if the characters in those campaigns will stay as they are, or if my players and I will need to go in and manually swap features back to their legacy versions after the switch for the things we won't be adopting this time around.
I mean D&D Insider (the D&D Beyond equivalent for 4E) stayed up for years. While updates ended for it in 2014 with the launch of 5E, they allowed new subscribers until December 2015 (so roughly a year & half after the release of 5E). And they allowed existing subscribers to continue to pay for the service until 2020 when Microsoft Silverlight shutdown. Removing access on basically day 1 is super disruptive to campaigns that are currently in progress. D&D Beyond originally sold different tiers of content - most people bought the compendium + tooltips version although you could have purchased just the compendium for cheaper. So it's not unreasonable to be angry that something you've paid for (the functionality of using the compendium in the various tools such as character sheets) is being removed and being told it's fine because you're not losing access to the compendium. If I wanted just the compendium, I could have spent less money and purchased only that. Hopefully EU users will report because they have better legal protections around digital services when shenanigans like this occur.
It would reasonable to limit legacy content to D&D Beyond and not port it over to the new VTT as an incentive to move to 5.5. Circling back to D&D Insider, the wikipedia article on it highlights:
This is fundamentally what the D&D Beyond update is about; instead of making a good UX choice, they've made a choice to push people to 5.5 because they want people to move on. It's about making it just inconvenient enough to use the 2014 version of D&D (ie. taking the time to manually input 40+ spells into the homebrew feature, needing to dig in the compendium because the search bar is limited to the update, etc) that people default to 5.5 which then leads them to buying new products down the line. The compendium is annoying to use because the books don't have search features built in (because there's the big search bar on top) and you're limited to hoping you've clicked on the right section when you use ctrl+F to find something. A recent Hasbro investor meeting highlighted that D&D Beyond is 50% of the revenue for tabletop D&D (D&D as an entire brand has other larger revenue sources); during the OGL scandal, reporters confirmed that part of Hasbro backing down was because of users cancelling their D&D Beyond subscriptions en masse. Fundamentally, unless people are willing to leave D&D Beyond over this, Hasbro isn't going to change this to be more UX friendly for the 2014 version of the game.
On a note about Insider, they allowed you to download PDFs of everything you purchased. Something DnDB removed a few years ago.
If they are absolutely set on this route returning the ability to download PDFs of the old content would do wonders for me. I much prefer being able to find all my stuff in a file than navigate the sources tab on the site, especially as I imagine the 2014 stuff will slowly become harder to find.
Will we be getting refunds for the spells you are taking away or offer us a credit for future spells based on how many we purchased? I would have homebrewed them originally instead of buying them had there been a warning that they may be taken away from us. Or offer us a credit for future spells based on how many we purchased? I don't think it's fair, being punished for supporting you. Someone else suggested a toggle between 2024 and 2014 content, that would also be acceptable. Don't steal from us please. I won't be able to give you anymore money if you do.
Adding my voice to the disappointment that I have to make homebrew spell copies of 2014 spells. This will disrupt my current campaign 26 sessions in and cause a huge unnecessary effort on my part. I will have to not only make homebrew versions of the spells my players currently use but all others that they might be able to switch to or level up to and select. That's just ridiculous. I'm not switching to 2024 so deep into a campaign. Sad sad sad and uncaring decision.
Join my homebrew campaign!
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> National Indie Excellence Book Award finalist
> A Greater Monster named a "Top 10 Book of 2012" by Common Ills blog
> Listed in "10 Hot Chicago Reads for Chilly Nights" on Refinery29.com
That is... truly bonkers that you think there is even a chance for this? Should the designers and writers not get paid?
There is no alacarte system anymore so no more buying spells by themselves.
They're forcing us to use the revised rules since tooltips and links will only link to 5e24 rules and statblocks and whatnot. If I wanted to use the 5e24 rules, I'd by the 5e24 books. Which I absolutely have no plan to do so. D&D Beyond is taking content away from us that we paid for.
It's well-recognized when you purchase "books" on d&d beyond, you don't own the content, just a license to it, but irrespective of how much you "own" the materials you're using, forcing your customers to use new materials by restricting access to old ones they have a license to = a short-sighted decision that is unfair to them. Why not use the 2014 source materials unless they own the 2024 equivalent, then show that? Because it doesn't encourage buying new materials?
I've purchased ~95%+ of the source materials available on here (read: spent thousands of dollars) and I can't think of a bigger "haha kick rocks but thanks for your money, we look forward to more of it" move than this. It's hard to stay motivated buying digital content, knowing this is how it may go. Does this song and dance repeat when d&d one is on its way out?
We are not ready to just stop all of our current play to abruptly change everything with a snap of a finger. Guess will just go back to paper and drop out of your BS.
Something many were chided for crying wolf about when the book of many things dropped, now they will be chided for expressing the opinion that this is the new business model to remove content and force new the purchase of new content. This isn't a modern video game, it is a 50 year old table top game.
CENSORSHIP IS THE TOOL OF COWARDS and WANNA BE TYRANTS.
Canceled and if a solution that allows me to use the 2014 content without any 2024 revisions isn't implemented, I will be seeking a full refund.
Terrible move by D&D Beyond.. This is going to push a lot of people away.
I remember during the OGL days that some people had their accounts deleted. I respect that level of commitment. Anyone here planning on having accounts deleted?
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Sadly I can't as I'm the DM and need to share my content to my players.