If I have to homebrew in the spells I want, what goddamn benefit was there to buying them in the first place? I bought spells and magic items a la carte (another pants-on-head stupid change, by the way!) for the express purposes of using the character builder and to have an easy lookup. Now I can't use the things I *expressly* bought in the builder, and lookup is now weird and convoluted?
I'll echo what others have said - this stinks like an attempt to coerce players into buying the new books. And this will definitely get worse with a recent interview from that one higher-up who wanted to make more money by enshrining power creep into the game. I know how to make Hasbro profitable - cut the executives recreational drug budget.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"I would sell you to Strahd for one corn chip"
-To the warlock in (coincidentally) our final session of CoS.
Am I understanding correctly that existing sheets etc. will automatically pull the 2024 rules rather than the ones they were created with? So current characters, being played in campaigns built with and designed around the 2014 rules, will have to either be adapted to the new rules or be rebuilt to have every impacted element of the sheet saved as homebrew?
That's a lot of work to foist off on players who want to simply continue to use content that already exists in the site and could (and should!) be easily available. Beyond which, the absolute disrespect to paying subscribers is breathtaking. My gaming group and I have collectively spent hundreds of dollars on content here; to be informed now that those resources are going to be essentially unusable smells a lot like theft. We weren't RENTING those books.
I've been eyeballing subscriptions to cancel and tighten up my budget, and DDB just put themselves at the top of the list with this.
Just wanted to update this to make it clear to WotC/Hasbro: I did in fact just cancel my subscription. My spouse will be canceling his Master tier this evening as well, and multiple players in our current campaigns have confirmed they are doing so as well.
Welp, thanks for getting me to finally cancel my subscription. Only a few in my group use beyond for character sheet, so it would be dumb for half the group to be using 2024 version and the rest using what we are all used to. unless you have an option to toggle between the rulesets to keep using characters as they are now, I will not be resubscribing or buying new books
7 and a half years on this site, and master sub for most of it, oh well.
With this news I'll be cancelling my subscription and moving over to roll 20.. Wizards has made it abundantly clear that they don't want or deserve my money.
Sigh Looks like Ill have to cancel my Master tier subscription again. Should be a simple slider in the character creator/editor of which rule sets you plan to use. It would be way better and inclusive to the community to allow a legacy characters, on top of it will just drive traffic away from DnDB if people have to put a ton of work into home brew again just to get what they already had.
For example if I create a homebrew copy of healing word it lists the classes with cleric, bard, druid, and alchemist.
When the new PHB hits will those tags for cleric, bard, and druid refer to the current cleric/bard/druid or will they refer to the 5.5 versions?
I'm in the middle of going through the list creating homebrew copies and just realized this change might not be pre-homebrew friendly. And there's a chance that what I'm really homebrewing right now are copies of the spells to be used by 2024 versions of these classes, not the current ones that I want to keep using.
A quick poll of our 3 DMs have 2 of them saying players will just need to go back to using paper/pen, because they aren't converting to 2024 (and one is running an online game with players who don't own hardcopies). This sucks.
All three have now weighed in, none will be allowing any 2024 content in their current campaigns. That means that for my extended group, across 3 campaigns, we will no longer have any use for DnD Beyond. Since we can't use the online character sheets, and will have to go back to using paper/pen, and since it will be faster to look up info using our physical books instead of trying to find and search out legacy content buried behind several menus - there's simply no reason to continue using DnD Beyond.
What annoys me the most about this is that I most likely was going to switch to the 2024 rules ... I just wanted to do so on my own terms and at my own pace. I was hoping I could wait until all three core rulebooks are out, and then maybe wait some more till we get the inevitable errata / sage advice to fix the janky stuff (like the new stealth rules and the fact that the new goliath's Powerful Build feature does nothing as written). But if I want to keep using D&D Beyond, then I've not only got no choice but to switch, I have to put up with an evolving hybrid ruleset for the next six months.
EDIT: That being said, I will wait and see if this gets reversed before deciding whether to vote with my wallet.
Also canceling my subscription unless this change is reversed. My group is not switching to the 2024 rules for our current ongoing campaign and I refuse to go through the extra effort of creating homebrew versions of spells and magic items that I paid for and already exist in the tool as-is. That is an absurd thing to even suggest as a "solution." This is not the backwards compatibility that was promised.
What annoys me the most about this is that I most likely was going to switch to the 2024 rules ... I just wanted to do so on my own terms and at my own pace. I was hoping I could wait until all three core rulebooks are out, and then maybe wait some more till we get the inevitable errata / sage advice to fix the janky stuff (like the new stealth rules and the fact that the new goliath's Powerful Build feature does nothing as written). But if I want to keep using D&D Beyond, then I've not only got no choice but to switch, I have to put up with an evolving hybrid ruleset for the next six months.
EDIT: That being said, I will wait and see if this gets reversed before deciding whether to vote with my wallet.
This does have the feel of paid eratta doesn't it?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
CENSORSHIP IS THE TOOL OF COWARDS and WANNA BE TYRANTS.
EDIT: That being said, I will wait and see if this gets reversed before deciding whether to vote with my wallet.
If you have a subscription, cancelling it now is part of the way to pressure WotC.
But practically speaking, waiting to see before voting with your wallet (aside from not purchasing new material) allows them to stay the course.
Ultimately a decision we'll all make for ourselves. But did want to point that out. IIRC during the OGL it was DDB subscriptions getting cancelled over it that helped push them to relent.
EDIT: That being said, I will wait and see if this gets reversed before deciding whether to vote with my wallet.
If you have a subscription, cancelling it now is part of the way to pressure WotC.
But practically speaking, waiting to see before voting with your wallet (aside from not purchasing new material) allows them to stay the course.
Ultimately a decision we'll all make for ourselves. But did want to point that out. IIRC during the OGL it was DDB subscriptions getting cancelled over it that helped push them to relent.
Sure. For the record, I didn't cancel my subscription during the OGL fiasco either.
2024 is not the same as 2014 and that is fine, different balancing and theme targets... but let me use what I purchased.
Exactly!
I never expected to get any 5.5 content for free. I was fine and dandy with the idea that I'd have to pay additional money to use anything outside the 5.5 SRD. My group is 5.0, my current Play-by-Post (PBP) DMs intend to stay on 5.0, and I intended to stay on 5.0 for any PBPs I ran.
I even fully supported that people with 5.0 PHB/DMG/MM would not get 5.5 PHB/DMG/MM for free. Seemed reasonable enough to me. Just let me use what I owned and everything was fine.
That's the big issue with this change, removing access to the utility of what I purchased. I and many others are not asking for DDB to do something new. We just want to be able to continue using the functionality we've used with the books we've used. As long as we don't see changes to functionality we're happy campers.
And I also have a feeling that if this change goes live, they're gonna see a lot more angry people. Because this announcement wasn't front-and-center anywhere. So there's a lot of people unaware of what's planned. And when they open their character sheet and start seeing their spells got changed they're gonna ask, "Um... what?"
I hate this. This is what will finally make me unsubscribe.
I already downgraded from master tier because content sharing is blocked on the vtt and now you're forcing us to use content some of us didn't want to buy when we have already double paid for the 2014 versions!
I have always bought the physical and digital versions and now you're deleting them. I'm lucky that I prepared for this kind of horrendous behavior in having the physical copies as back ups but this makes me so mad I don't even want to play any wizards content and if I hadn't already paid for Magic Con this would have made me skip it too.
Poorly done, and after so many of us stayed after the open source fiasco too.
EDIT: Since the retraction I've had mixed feelings. I'm glad that we get to keep content we paid for without being forced into the new system. I now feel like I have more time to finish my Saltmarsh and Waterdeep campaigns but am scared something like this will happen again. So many of my friends have already quit this service and abandoned the games I run because I stick with D&D. I feel like Wizards is so out of touch with their players not to have expected this kind of devastation. I'll be encouraging my players to switch back to paper after this, and I've put a reminder in my calendar of my subscription renewal just in case. Shape up! Your die-hard fans are taking a beating out here!
Wow - To say that this throws a potentially campaign-breaking goblin-wrench into all of our in progress campaigns is an understatement.
VERY not happy with WoTC right now.
Playing D&D since 1982
Have played every version of the game since Basic (Red Box Set), except that abomination sometimes called 4e.
Terrible terrible choice, just a money grab attempt to push everybody to start buying the new content. Horrible. This company has gone downhill.
If I have to homebrew in the spells I want, what goddamn benefit was there to buying them in the first place? I bought spells and magic items a la carte (another pants-on-head stupid change, by the way!) for the express purposes of using the character builder and to have an easy lookup. Now I can't use the things I *expressly* bought in the builder, and lookup is now weird and convoluted?
I'll echo what others have said - this stinks like an attempt to coerce players into buying the new books. And this will definitely get worse with a recent interview from that one higher-up who wanted to make more money by enshrining power creep into the game. I know how to make Hasbro profitable - cut the executives recreational drug budget.
"I would sell you to Strahd for one corn chip"
-To the warlock in (coincidentally) our final session of CoS.
Just wanted to update this to make it clear to WotC/Hasbro: I did in fact just cancel my subscription. My spouse will be canceling his Master tier this evening as well, and multiple players in our current campaigns have confirmed they are doing so as well.
Welp, thanks for getting me to finally cancel my subscription. Only a few in my group use beyond for character sheet, so it would be dumb for half the group to be using 2024 version and the rest using what we are all used to. unless you have an option to toggle between the rulesets to keep using characters as they are now, I will not be resubscribing or buying new books
7 and a half years on this site, and master sub for most of it, oh well.
With this news I'll be cancelling my subscription and moving over to roll 20.. Wizards has made it abundantly clear that they don't want or deserve my money.
Sigh Looks like Ill have to cancel my Master tier subscription again. Should be a simple slider in the character creator/editor of which rule sets you plan to use. It would be way better and inclusive to the community to allow a legacy characters, on top of it will just drive traffic away from DnDB if people have to put a ton of work into home brew again just to get what they already had.
HOMEBREW QUESTION
Will the class tags still work like they do now?
For example if I create a homebrew copy of healing word it lists the classes with cleric, bard, druid, and alchemist.
When the new PHB hits will those tags for cleric, bard, and druid refer to the current cleric/bard/druid or will they refer to the 5.5 versions?
I'm in the middle of going through the list creating homebrew copies and just realized this change might not be pre-homebrew friendly. And there's a chance that what I'm really homebrewing right now are copies of the spells to be used by 2024 versions of these classes, not the current ones that I want to keep using.
This is a signature. It was a simple signature. But it has been upgraded.
Belolonandalogalo, Sunny | Draíocht, Kholias | Eggo Lass, 100 Dungeons
Talorin Tebedi, Vecna: Eve | Cherry, Stormwreck | Chipper, Strahd
We Are Modron
Get rickrolled here. Awesome music here. Track 48, 5/23/25, Immaculate Mary
A quick poll of our 3 DMs have 2 of them saying players will just need to go back to using paper/pen, because they aren't converting to 2024 (and one is running an online game with players who don't own hardcopies). This sucks.All three have now weighed in, none will be allowing any 2024 content in their current campaigns. That means that for my extended group, across 3 campaigns, we will no longer have any use for DnD Beyond. Since we can't use the online character sheets, and will have to go back to using paper/pen, and since it will be faster to look up info using our physical books instead of trying to find and search out legacy content buried behind several menus - there's simply no reason to continue using DnD Beyond.
Playing D&D since 1982
Have played every version of the game since Basic (Red Box Set), except that abomination sometimes called 4e.
This needs many more upvotes.
They've said the spells will be updated _everywhere in the toolset_.
~Never cruel nor cowardly; never give up, never give in.
Annnnndddd... that's the end of my subscription.
What annoys me the most about this is that I most likely was going to switch to the 2024 rules ... I just wanted to do so on my own terms and at my own pace. I was hoping I could wait until all three core rulebooks are out, and then maybe wait some more till we get the inevitable errata / sage advice to fix the janky stuff (like the new stealth rules and the fact that the new goliath's Powerful Build feature does nothing as written). But if I want to keep using D&D Beyond, then I've not only got no choice but to switch, I have to put up with an evolving hybrid ruleset for the next six months.
EDIT: That being said, I will wait and see if this gets reversed before deciding whether to vote with my wallet.
Also canceling my subscription unless this change is reversed. My group is not switching to the 2024 rules for our current ongoing campaign and I refuse to go through the extra effort of creating homebrew versions of spells and magic items that I paid for and already exist in the tool as-is. That is an absurd thing to even suggest as a "solution." This is not the backwards compatibility that was promised.
This does have the feel of paid eratta doesn't it?
CENSORSHIP IS THE TOOL OF COWARDS and WANNA BE TYRANTS.
If you have a subscription, cancelling it now is part of the way to pressure WotC.
But practically speaking, waiting to see before voting with your wallet (aside from not purchasing new material) allows them to stay the course.
Ultimately a decision we'll all make for ourselves. But did want to point that out. IIRC during the OGL it was DDB subscriptions getting cancelled over it that helped push them to relent.
This is a signature. It was a simple signature. But it has been upgraded.
Belolonandalogalo, Sunny | Draíocht, Kholias | Eggo Lass, 100 Dungeons
Talorin Tebedi, Vecna: Eve | Cherry, Stormwreck | Chipper, Strahd
We Are Modron
Get rickrolled here. Awesome music here. Track 48, 5/23/25, Immaculate Mary
me as well
Sure. For the record, I didn't cancel my subscription during the OGL fiasco either.
Yeah put me with the others here... I wanted to have both 2024 and 2014 S separate entities so I could swap between them at will.
2024 is not the same as 2014 and that is fine, different balancing and theme targets... but let me use what I purchased.
Exactly!
I never expected to get any 5.5 content for free. I was fine and dandy with the idea that I'd have to pay additional money to use anything outside the 5.5 SRD. My group is 5.0, my current Play-by-Post (PBP) DMs intend to stay on 5.0, and I intended to stay on 5.0 for any PBPs I ran.
I even fully supported that people with 5.0 PHB/DMG/MM would not get 5.5 PHB/DMG/MM for free. Seemed reasonable enough to me. Just let me use what I owned and everything was fine.
That's the big issue with this change, removing access to the utility of what I purchased. I and many others are not asking for DDB to do something new. We just want to be able to continue using the functionality we've used with the books we've used. As long as we don't see changes to functionality we're happy campers.
And I also have a feeling that if this change goes live, they're gonna see a lot more angry people. Because this announcement wasn't front-and-center anywhere. So there's a lot of people unaware of what's planned. And when they open their character sheet and start seeing their spells got changed they're gonna ask, "Um... what?"
This is a signature. It was a simple signature. But it has been upgraded.
Belolonandalogalo, Sunny | Draíocht, Kholias | Eggo Lass, 100 Dungeons
Talorin Tebedi, Vecna: Eve | Cherry, Stormwreck | Chipper, Strahd
We Are Modron
Get rickrolled here. Awesome music here. Track 48, 5/23/25, Immaculate Mary
I hate this. This is what will finally make me unsubscribe.
I already downgraded from master tier because content sharing is blocked on the vtt and now you're forcing us to use content some of us didn't want to buy when we have already double paid for the 2014 versions!
I have always bought the physical and digital versions and now you're deleting them. I'm lucky that I prepared for this kind of horrendous behavior in having the physical copies as back ups but this makes me so mad I don't even want to play any wizards content and if I hadn't already paid for Magic Con this would have made me skip it too.
Poorly done, and after so many of us stayed after the open source fiasco too.
EDIT: Since the retraction I've had mixed feelings. I'm glad that we get to keep content we paid for without being forced into the new system. I now feel like I have more time to finish my Saltmarsh and Waterdeep campaigns but am scared something like this will happen again. So many of my friends have already quit this service and abandoned the games I run because I stick with D&D. I feel like Wizards is so out of touch with their players not to have expected this kind of devastation. I'll be encouraging my players to switch back to paper after this, and I've put a reminder in my calendar of my subscription renewal just in case. Shape up! Your die-hard fans are taking a beating out here!