Retroactively applying new rules to existing characters in ongoing campaigns seems needlessly confusing to me. Especially with <1 months' notice, and with DMs not even having a chance to read the new material before it goes live on character sheets.
Our campaign is winding up and our very last game session will be right after the new rules drop. Now I'm feeling concerned that the session is going to be bogged down with confusion about rules and spells instead of focused on narrative.
Can't you just please make the Spells and Magic Items have a legacy tag as well? This would make it so much easier for our 2014 game. Our home game liked 2014 better and are contented with it. Please don't make this harder for us.
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.
I did that and hope everyone else concerned with it do it as well, but I'm not hopeful about them changing their mind for that, I unsubscribed for myself, not for them to change.
The OGL thing worked because not only there were plenty of un-subscriptions, but MANY creators stand out to talk about it, since this affected them directly. This new thing will not be the case for creators, it will not affect them. And besides that, WoTC learned their lesson, and now those creators are part of their paycheck, they will never speak against D&D and risk losing money and privileges from WoTC.
The only way it's to hope for the downfall of this company. Hoping for them to make the right thing because a few users are canceling their subscription is hard, they just believe they can simply compensate for that with new users.
Literally the absolute worst handling you could implement. I will Not be using your site any longer against my own wishes because I will Not be implementing your new rules in my campaign. Now I'll have to use a new system entirely because I'm tired of playing this song and dance with you. You are ruining DnD. Thank you so much.
This is an incredibly bad move. My current campaign is not updating to 5.5, we may for our next campaign - but we aren't about to switch rule systems mid-game. Even if folks are planning to try out the new updates, excited even, you can't honestly expect everyone to want to make that switch in the middle of a campaign - so now I'll need to either do an insane amount of work to "Homebrew" everything in a very short amount of time OR go back to pen and paper - which honestly is feeling like the correct call. If I can't have access to the content I paid for, I see no reason to keep paying you.
It does suck to lose access to the spells, but who is actually interested in using the older version of those spells? The vast majority very much needed the changes. Could just treat it as errata, no?
I am in the middle of a 5th ed campaign. I have spent hundreds of dollars purchasing almost every 5th ed material on this website exclusively because of how wonderfully easy it makes running the game and building characters. And now, with no choice of my own to speak of, all of that is now essentially useless unless I go to each specific book and hunt down the one thing I'm looking for. Even with legacy tags on classes, it's so much more than that. Spells, weapons, so much I'll have to now manually look for to continue playing the campaign I prepped for for months.
This is bad. I haven't even touched the 5.5 rules for a reason, but now I'm actually being forced to use them despite my wishes? The hell happened to customer loyalty dude?
I might be on the extreme end of the "this is kind of ruinous to our table, actually, and that's really not as dramatic a statement as it might sound" sliding scale, but nevertheless, I'm sure a lot of people are looking at this going "we literally can't work with this, everything we already paid for and rely upon no longer does what we pay for it to do and need it to do." So I'm going to go into the deep end of my own side of things, and hopefully it can highlight some of the egregious problems here:
(division line for ease of reading this monster)
At my table, I have been running a series of campaigns for almost 6 years now that all take place in the same worldbuilding setting. We call it "Elsewhere." This has spanned 5 campaigns and multiple mini-campaigns and canonical oneshots.
My current campaign is close to the end, we'll probably be concluding by the end of the year, maybe early 2025, so about a 3 year campaign (Saturday is session 113).
My next campaign ("Converge") is already deep in planning, and it is a massive undertaking even for our experienced group. It brings back prior PCs and NPCs, spans across multiple PC groups concurrently (all played by the same one group of players), and weaves us through the countless remaining mysteries, stories, questions, lore, and all the rest that my players are eagerly awaiting. It brings us to and through the setting's apocalypse. For an idea of the scope and scale of this project, it:
Is expected to last 5+ years (very lowball estimate)
Is billed as "the end of Elsewhere as we know it" - aka the final campaign in the setting
Brings in all the prior PCs of my current players (that's 20-ish PCs across 3 players), ranging from levels 9 to 19, plus one level 22 (homebrew epic levels, which other PCs might also achieve)
Will introduce at least 3-5 new PC groups on top of that; and with 1-2 new players, that's anywhere from 9 to 25 new PCs (or more)
The veritable army of NPCs from across the prior campaigns (we have a google sheet tracking NPCs at this point; 586 as of today, with a ton of notes and notebooks that still need to be gone through)
A minimum of a dozen core NPCs which require character sheets, because they are critical NPCs and are a main or very frequent member of the PC party, and it's easier for everyone to manage them like we would a PC (such as PCs' partners/spouses, siblings, or the ubiquitous and nigh-obligate "we like this random character and are adopting them forever, here's some great gear you are now One Of Us")
A minimum of 50 non-core/not-usually-party-members but still major NPCs that have character sheets for the same reason
(Definitely not a beginner-friendly campaign.)
All of that is relevant to understanding how massively problematic our position is quickly becoming due to the poor decisions on how DDB will treat what should be legacy content.
Our plan, which it seems many others also shared, was to stick with 5e and simply adapt in what we like from 5.5e (we have many strong and varied opinions on 5.5e). Prior announcements gave the impression that this would be simple and easy to do, allowing us to choose which ruleset/legacy content we wanted to use. The fact that this has been reneged upon is clearly already causing a number of subscription cancellations, and a lot of my friends already have their fingers on the unsubscribe button - no less than 3 of us who have had master tier subscriptions for years, and at least one of which who have spent many hundreds of dollars on content, including the legendary bundle, so we could all have access to all the cool fun stuff. The claim implied we'd still be able to use all of that old content as before.
"Go out of your way to make homebrew copies of spells and items, and old rules can be found by opening up links outside of your character sheet and navigating through the books to reference them" is not using old content as before. For a tool meant to be clean and easy to use for what we need it for, this violates the entire point. Is violating your customers' trust (and, frankly, wallets) really the new status quo for WotC? It seems a significant and consistently-growing number of people believe so, and have been given every right to.
It is truly infuriating to be in a position where I have to either a) transition that insane amount of stuff outlined above (and far more) to a whole other system (probably pf2e, which is as close to 5e as possible - and free) with nowhere near enough time to do so, or b) continue financially supporting a company that is happy to snatch our money out of our hands, slather it in mud, and slap us in the face with it while calling it "services appropriately rendered."
(end very long explanation of where my particular points of contrivance burn from)
It's a wonderful thing that D&D - and, thus, TTRPG - has made the comeback that it has. So many people have been brought together through this wonderful hobby. And with the direction WotC has been going and the rate at which it's been speeding there, I think we will see the TTRPG community flourish even more as people look at the choices WotC is making and start to explore alternative TTRPG systems and companies.
Or, yknow, you could stop slapping us in the face with our own money.
I might be on the extreme end of the "this is kind of ruinous to our table, actually, and that's really not as dramatic a statement as it might sound" sliding scale, but nevertheless, I'm sure a lot of people are looking at this going "we literally can't work with this, everything we already paid for and rely upon no longer does what we pay for it to do and need it to do." So I'm going to go into the deep end of my own side of things, and hopefully it can highlight some of the egregious problems here:
(division line for ease of reading this monster)
At my table, I have been running a series of campaigns for almost 6 years now that all take place in the same worldbuilding setting. We call it "Elsewhere." This has spanned 5 campaigns and multiple mini-campaigns and canonical oneshots.
My current campaign is close to the end, we'll probably be concluding by the end of the year, maybe early 2025, so about a 3 year campaign (Saturday is session 113).
My next campaign ("Converge") is already deep in planning, and it is a massive undertaking even for our experienced group. It brings back prior PCs and NPCs, spans across multiple PC groups concurrently (all played by the same one group of players), and weaves us through the countless remaining mysteries, stories, questions, lore, and all the rest that my players are eagerly awaiting. It brings us to and through the setting's apocalypse. For an idea of the scope and scale of this project, it:
Is expected to last 5+ years (very lowball estimate)
Is billed as "the end of Elsewhere as we know it" - aka the final campaign in the setting
Brings in all the prior PCs of my current players (that's 20-ish PCs across 3 players), ranging from levels 9 to 19, plus one level 22 (homebrew epic levels, which other PCs might also achieve)
Will introduce at least 3-5 new PC groups on top of that; and with 1-2 new players, that's anywhere from 9 to 25 new PCs (or more)
The veritable army of NPCs from across the prior campaigns (we have a google sheet tracking NPCs at this point; 586 as of today, with a ton of notes and notebooks that still need to be gone through)
A minimum of a dozen core NPCs which require character sheets, because they are critical NPCs and are a main or very frequent member of the PC party, and it's easier for everyone to manage them like we would a PC (such as PCs' partners/spouses, siblings, or the ubiquitous and nigh-obligate "we like this random character and are adopting them forever, here's some great gear you are now One Of Us")
A minimum of 50 non-core/not-usually-party-members but still major NPCs that have character sheets for the same reason
(Definitely not a beginner-friendly campaign.)
All of that is relevant to understanding how massively problematic our position is quickly becoming due to the poor decisions on how DDB will treat what should be legacy content.
Our plan, which it seems many others also shared, was to stick with 5e and simply adapt in what we like from 5.5e (we have many strong and varied opinions on 5.5e). Prior announcements gave the impression that this would be simple and easy to do, allowing us to choose which ruleset/legacy content we wanted to use. The fact that this has been reneged upon is clearly already causing a number of subscription cancellations, and a lot of my friends already have their fingers on the unsubscribe button - no less than 3 of us who have had master tier subscriptions for years, and at least one of which who have spent many hundreds of dollars on content, including the legendary bundle, so we could all have access to all the cool fun stuff. The claim implied we'd still be able to use all of that old content as before.
"Go out of your way to make homebrew copies of spells and items, and old rules can be found by opening up links outside of your character sheet and navigating through the books to reference them" is not using old content as before. For a tool meant to be clean and easy to use for what we need it for, this violates the entire point. Is violating your customers' trust (and, frankly, wallets) really the new status quo for WotC? It seems a significant and consistently-growing number of people believe so, and have been given every right to.
It is truly infuriating to be in a position where I have to either a) transition that insane amount of stuff outlined above (and far more) to a whole other system (probably pf2e, which is as close to 5e as possible - and free) with nowhere near enough time to do so, or b) continue financially supporting a company that is happy to snatch our money out of our hands, slather it in mud, and slap us in the face with it while calling it "services appropriately rendered."
(end very long explanation of where my particular points of contrivance burn from)
It's a wonderful thing that D&D - and, thus, TTRPG - has made the comeback that it has. So many people have been brought together through this wonderful hobby. And with the direction WotC has been going and the rate at which it's been speeding there, I think we will see the TTRPG community flourish even more as people look at the choices WotC is making and start to explore alternative TTRPG systems and companies.
Or, yknow, you could stop slapping us in the face with our own money.
(edit for spacing/linebreak weirdness)
i agree with what you are saying every change WOTC has been making to DnD has only made me look at DC20 and pathfinder 2e sure they are different but they arent owned by blood sucking hasbro
I might be on the extreme end of the "this is kind of ruinous to our table, actually, and that's really not as dramatic a statement as it might sound" sliding scale, but nevertheless, I'm sure a lot of people are looking at this going "we literally can't work with this, everything we already paid for and rely upon no longer does what we pay for it to do and need it to do." So I'm going to go into the deep end of my own side of things, and hopefully it can highlight some of the egregious problems here:
(division line for ease of reading this monster)
At my table, I have been running a series of campaigns for almost 6 years now that all take place in the same worldbuilding setting. We call it "Elsewhere." This has spanned 5 campaigns and multiple mini-campaigns and canonical oneshots.
My current campaign is close to the end, we'll probably be concluding by the end of the year, maybe early 2025, so about a 3 year campaign (Saturday is session 113).
My next campaign ("Converge") is already deep in planning, and it is a massive undertaking even for our experienced group. It brings back prior PCs and NPCs, spans across multiple PC groups concurrently (all played by the same one group of players), and weaves us through the countless remaining mysteries, stories, questions, lore, and all the rest that my players are eagerly awaiting. It brings us to and through the setting's apocalypse. For an idea of the scope and scale of this project, it:
Is expected to last 5+ years (very lowball estimate)
Is billed as "the end of Elsewhere as we know it" - aka the final campaign in the setting
Brings in all the prior PCs of my current players (that's 20-ish PCs across 3 players), ranging from levels 9 to 19, plus one level 22 (homebrew epic levels, which other PCs might also achieve)
Will introduce at least 3-5 new PC groups on top of that; and with 1-2 new players, that's anywhere from 9 to 25 new PCs (or more)
The veritable army of NPCs from across the prior campaigns (we have a google sheet tracking NPCs at this point; 586 as of today, with a ton of notes and notebooks that still need to be gone through)
A minimum of a dozen core NPCs which require character sheets, because they are critical NPCs and are a main or very frequent member of the PC party, and it's easier for everyone to manage them like we would a PC (such as PCs' partners/spouses, siblings, or the ubiquitous and nigh-obligate "we like this random character and are adopting them forever, here's some great gear you are now One Of Us")
A minimum of 50 non-core/not-usually-party-members but still major NPCs that have character sheets for the same reason
(Definitely not a beginner-friendly campaign.)
All of that is relevant to understanding how massively problematic our position is quickly becoming due to the poor decisions on how DDB will treat what should be legacy content.
Our plan, which it seems many others also shared, was to stick with 5e and simply adapt in what we like from 5.5e (we have many strong and varied opinions on 5.5e). Prior announcements gave the impression that this would be simple and easy to do, allowing us to choose which ruleset/legacy content we wanted to use. The fact that this has been reneged upon is clearly already causing a number of subscription cancellations, and a lot of my friends already have their fingers on the unsubscribe button - no less than 3 of us who have had master tier subscriptions for years, and at least one of which who have spent many hundreds of dollars on content, including the legendary bundle, so we could all have access to all the cool fun stuff. The claim implied we'd still be able to use all of that old content as before.
"Go out of your way to make homebrew copies of spells and items, and old rules can be found by opening up links outside of your character sheet and navigating through the books to reference them" is not using old content as before. For a tool meant to be clean and easy to use for what we need it for, this violates the entire point. Is violating your customers' trust (and, frankly, wallets) really the new status quo for WotC? It seems a significant and consistently-growing number of people believe so, and have been given every right to.
It is truly infuriating to be in a position where I have to either a) transition that insane amount of stuff outlined above (and far more) to a whole other system (probably pf2e, which is as close to 5e as possible - and free) with nowhere near enough time to do so, or b) continue financially supporting a company that is happy to snatch our money out of our hands, slather it in mud, and slap us in the face with it while calling it "services appropriately rendered."
(end very long explanation of where my particular points of contrivance burn from)
It's a wonderful thing that D&D - and, thus, TTRPG - has made the comeback that it has. So many people have been brought together through this wonderful hobby. And with the direction WotC has been going and the rate at which it's been speeding there, I think we will see the TTRPG community flourish even more as people look at the choices WotC is making and start to explore alternative TTRPG systems and companies.
Or, yknow, you could stop slapping us in the face with our own money.
(edit for spacing/linebreak weirdness)
This is my exact same scenario, only the campaign I'm currently running is the first intended in a very long line. I prepared for a over a full year while I was running another game, and working, and doing all the things. *Everything* in the game is reliant on the ruleset I had purchased the content for. I have so many npcs, characters (both PC and npc) that will have to be redone and remade just to keep them viable.
I don't know anything about the new rules. So now I have to go and learn a new set just to see if it's even possible to transfer over to the new system and continue to use this tool. And even if it is, I'm screwed anyway, because the amount of homebrew things I'll now have to make is staggering when THEY ALREADY CURRENTLY EXIST.
I am in the process of homebrew copying over spells, and I can finish doing that over the next few days.
However, I am not sure I can handle magic items. The amount to copy is insane. Is there anyway we can get a list of items that are being updated so I do not have to copy everything over? Seems like mundane armor is unchanged, but what about magic armor? If I can skip copying magic armor and magic weapons, that will eliminate a huge load of work.
I am really not happy that I have to resort to homebrew copy a bunch of stuff that I paid for. As much as I love the digital tools on Beyond, I am not optimistic about Beyond's future. I am sticking with Beyond for now, so I will still continue to make purchases in the foreseeable future, but I really do not want to. I guess I should really start considering using Google Sheets, but it is such a pain in the ass to set things up.
Retroactively applying new rules to existing characters in ongoing campaigns seems needlessly confusing to me. Especially with <1 months' notice, and with DMs not even having a chance to read the new material before it goes live on character sheets.
Our campaign is winding up and our very last game session will be right after the new rules drop. Now I'm feeling concerned that the session is going to be bogged down with confusion about rules and spells instead of focused on narrative.
Can't you just please make the Spells and Magic Items have a legacy tag as well? This would make it so much easier for our 2014 game. Our home game liked 2014 better and are contented with it. Please don't make this harder for us.
I did that and hope everyone else concerned with it do it as well, but I'm not hopeful about them changing their mind for that, I unsubscribed for myself, not for them to change.
The OGL thing worked because not only there were plenty of un-subscriptions, but MANY creators stand out to talk about it, since this affected them directly.
This new thing will not be the case for creators, it will not affect them. And besides that, WoTC learned their lesson, and now those creators are part of their paycheck, they will never speak against D&D and risk losing money and privileges from WoTC.
The only way it's to hope for the downfall of this company. Hoping for them to make the right thing because a few users are canceling their subscription is hard, they just believe they can simply compensate for that with new users.
Seriously thanks for the gigantic **** you Hasbro. At least buy me a drink next time will you?
Literally the absolute worst handling you could implement. I will Not be using your site any longer against my own wishes because I will Not be implementing your new rules in my campaign. Now I'll have to use a new system entirely because I'm tired of playing this song and dance with you. You are ruining DnD. Thank you so much.
This is an incredibly bad move. My current campaign is not updating to 5.5, we may for our next campaign - but we aren't about to switch rule systems mid-game. Even if folks are planning to try out the new updates, excited even, you can't honestly expect everyone to want to make that switch in the middle of a campaign - so now I'll need to either do an insane amount of work to "Homebrew" everything in a very short amount of time OR go back to pen and paper - which honestly is feeling like the correct call. If I can't have access to the content I paid for, I see no reason to keep paying you.
Are they just trying to tell us to homebrew all of their paid for content and never buy from them again? because thats what it sounds like to me
Yep, cancelled subscription and voting with feet.
Lets see what the future holds.
how can i refund my book? i dont see any value in keeping it anymore.
i want to use the version of the stuff i paid for
If this goes live, I will be unsubscribing and not purchasing any more digital content.
Removing functionality from purchased content is akin to taking away a digital movie, song, or television show I purchased. Completely unacceptable.
Just goes to show, you can’t trust any digital media company. “You’ll own nothing and be happy.” 😡
If you have a subscription, cancelling it now is part of the way to pressure WotC.
Thanks for messing up so many current online games. Let us choose which content we are gonna use. Especially for 2014 spell references
I am in the middle of a 5th ed campaign. I have spent hundreds of dollars purchasing almost every 5th ed material on this website exclusively because of how wonderfully easy it makes running the game and building characters. And now, with no choice of my own to speak of, all of that is now essentially useless unless I go to each specific book and hunt down the one thing I'm looking for. Even with legacy tags on classes, it's so much more than that. Spells, weapons, so much I'll have to now manually look for to continue playing the campaign I prepped for for months.
This is bad. I haven't even touched the 5.5 rules for a reason, but now I'm actually being forced to use them despite my wishes? The hell happened to customer loyalty dude?
This is such a mess.
I might be on the extreme end of the "this is kind of ruinous to our table, actually, and that's really not as dramatic a statement as it might sound" sliding scale, but nevertheless, I'm sure a lot of people are looking at this going "we literally can't work with this, everything we already paid for and rely upon no longer does what we pay for it to do and need it to do." So I'm going to go into the deep end of my own side of things, and hopefully it can highlight some of the egregious problems here:
(division line for ease of reading this monster)
At my table, I have been running a series of campaigns for almost 6 years now that all take place in the same worldbuilding setting. We call it "Elsewhere." This has spanned 5 campaigns and multiple mini-campaigns and canonical oneshots.
My current campaign is close to the end, we'll probably be concluding by the end of the year, maybe early 2025, so about a 3 year campaign (Saturday is session 113).
My next campaign ("Converge") is already deep in planning, and it is a massive undertaking even for our experienced group. It brings back prior PCs and NPCs, spans across multiple PC groups concurrently (all played by the same one group of players), and weaves us through the countless remaining mysteries, stories, questions, lore, and all the rest that my players are eagerly awaiting. It brings us to and through the setting's apocalypse. For an idea of the scope and scale of this project, it:
(Definitely not a beginner-friendly campaign.)
All of that is relevant to understanding how massively problematic our position is quickly becoming due to the poor decisions on how DDB will treat what should be legacy content.
Our plan, which it seems many others also shared, was to stick with 5e and simply adapt in what we like from 5.5e (we have many strong and varied opinions on 5.5e). Prior announcements gave the impression that this would be simple and easy to do, allowing us to choose which ruleset/legacy content we wanted to use. The fact that this has been reneged upon is clearly already causing a number of subscription cancellations, and a lot of my friends already have their fingers on the unsubscribe button - no less than 3 of us who have had master tier subscriptions for years, and at least one of which who have spent many hundreds of dollars on content, including the legendary bundle, so we could all have access to all the cool fun stuff. The claim implied we'd still be able to use all of that old content as before.
"Go out of your way to make homebrew copies of spells and items, and old rules can be found by opening up links outside of your character sheet and navigating through the books to reference them" is not using old content as before. For a tool meant to be clean and easy to use for what we need it for, this violates the entire point. Is violating your customers' trust (and, frankly, wallets) really the new status quo for WotC? It seems a significant and consistently-growing number of people believe so, and have been given every right to.
It is truly infuriating to be in a position where I have to either a) transition that insane amount of stuff outlined above (and far more) to a whole other system (probably pf2e, which is as close to 5e as possible - and free) with nowhere near enough time to do so, or b) continue financially supporting a company that is happy to snatch our money out of our hands, slather it in mud, and slap us in the face with it while calling it "services appropriately rendered."
(end very long explanation of where my particular points of contrivance burn from)
It's a wonderful thing that D&D - and, thus, TTRPG - has made the comeback that it has. So many people have been brought together through this wonderful hobby. And with the direction WotC has been going and the rate at which it's been speeding there, I think we will see the TTRPG community flourish even more as people look at the choices WotC is making and start to explore alternative TTRPG systems and companies.
Or, yknow, you could stop slapping us in the face with our own money.
(edit for spacing/linebreak weirdness)
i agree with what you are saying every change WOTC has been making to DnD has only made me look at DC20 and pathfinder 2e sure they are different but they arent owned by blood sucking hasbro
Since Feats are getting the legacy badge (feats being optional in 5e), it's weird decision to not give the same treatment to spells.
One could argue that spells are relatively integral for DnD.
See below
This is my exact same scenario, only the campaign I'm currently running is the first intended in a very long line. I prepared for a over a full year while I was running another game, and working, and doing all the things. *Everything* in the game is reliant on the ruleset I had purchased the content for. I have so many npcs, characters (both PC and npc) that will have to be redone and remade just to keep them viable.
I don't know anything about the new rules. So now I have to go and learn a new set just to see if it's even possible to transfer over to the new system and continue to use this tool. And even if it is, I'm screwed anyway, because the amount of homebrew things I'll now have to make is staggering when THEY ALREADY CURRENTLY EXIST.
I am in the process of homebrew copying over spells, and I can finish doing that over the next few days.
However, I am not sure I can handle magic items. The amount to copy is insane. Is there anyway we can get a list of items that are being updated so I do not have to copy everything over? Seems like mundane armor is unchanged, but what about magic armor? If I can skip copying magic armor and magic weapons, that will eliminate a huge load of work.
I am really not happy that I have to resort to homebrew copy a bunch of stuff that I paid for. As much as I love the digital tools on Beyond, I am not optimistic about Beyond's future. I am sticking with Beyond for now, so I will still continue to make purchases in the foreseeable future, but I really do not want to. I guess I should really start considering using Google Sheets, but it is such a pain in the ass to set things up.
Check Licenses and Resync Entitlements: < https://www.dndbeyond.com/account/licenses >
Running the Game by Matt Colville; Introduction: < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-YZvLUXcR8 >
D&D with High School Students by Bill Allen; Season 1 Episode 1: < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52NJTUDokyk&t >