[News] Updating the D&D Beyond Toolset for the 2024 Core Rulebooks

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:

• 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)

Quote from gamsii >>

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:

• 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 

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

Quote from gamsii >>

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:

• 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.

Quote from XXXGammaRay >>

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 armor is unchanged, so I do not have to copy over that, but is there anything else I can skip copying?

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.

 this is going to be a problem if they do these changes the amount of people making their 2014 spells in HB will be alot of stuff for the website to deal with 

I wonder what the EU consumer protection has to say about you locking us out from purchased content.

Let's find out.

You guys need to reverse course on this decision. As has been stated and should have been the logical decision, a simple toggle on the character creation screen (similar to what sources are being used) should be available to define whether we see tooltips and spells for 2014 or 2024. I have no interest in most of what I have seen for 2024 and I will not be playing it at my table. Considering the fact that I have paid for content and been a paying subscriber for many years this is simply unacceptable. Honestly if this doesn't change, I think I will have to reconsider continuing to use this site. As convenient as it has been and as much as I have enjoyed the creation and management of characters and campaigns, I will not support companies that decide to do stupid things like this. Especially when there are simple solutions available and considering those rule books etc have content that was paid for. It's more than inconvenient for tool tips to change to things that might not make sense or apply to those playing strictly 2014. Not to mention the confusion for players that aren't seasoned seeing something different than before or different than what you've explained. Add to that the inconvenience of needing to create lots of homebrew spells so things can stay consistent. I suspect there may be others that will simply find this decision to be more hassle than it's worth to continue using your platform. I sincerely hope you change course. 

Quote from RobCo >>

I wonder what the EU consumer protection has to say about you locking us out from purchased content.

Let's find out.

I'm sure the T&Cs techically say we don't own any of the content we purchased so unless it impacted a lot of people it likely wouldn't be something consumer practices would be interested in I think? I dunno I'm not a lawyer. 

However every single book sold here is advertised as functioning with the D&D Beyond toolset, not just as compendium content. So yeah it definitely feels scam-like to have the toolset functionality removed without any cause. At least scam adjacent 

Quote from RobCo >>

I wonder what the EU consumer protection has to say about you locking us out from purchased content.

Let's find out.

 what does this mean? im from the US so no clue on what the EU laws are

Quote from UnkKnellnapper >>

 what does this mean? im from the US so no clue on what the EU laws are

In general EU consumer protection laws are stricter and prevent businesses from certain practices.

There are EU laws entitling you to a refund when a digital good no longer functions under certain conditions. (E.g. If you legally bought a chat app on Samsung that suddenly said "Only iPhones allowed" you would be entitled to a refund regardless of what the T&C said. EU guidelines also include things like 'music that doesn't play' and 'software that stops working' here).

However I doubt they'd be applicable in this case, at least not without a truly monumental fuss being kicked up. D&D Beyond is extremely niche and although all books are advertised as functioning with the D&D Beyond toolset I'm sure Hasbro lawyers would argue that the purchased asset is actually just the compendium content. 

Quote from KalligNox >>

I just tried to go in and post homebrew copies of spells, races, and magic items.  I keep getting a 404 error when i post anything.  So no, we can't even do their work for them.

 
it worked for me just now. I copied Spiritual Weapon. 

How do we access the 2014 rules for those in the middle of a campaign?

I currently have no interest in the new errata edition.

At least in Archives of Nethys you can toggle between legacy and remaster for Pathfinder 2e... I probably should abandon this platform for that better system...

Quote from Willthebloody >>

How do we access the 2014 rules for those in the middle of a campaign?

I currently have no interest in the new errata edition.

At least in Archives of Nethys you can toggle between legacy and remaster for Pathfinder 2e... I probably should abandon this platform for that better system...

 the new changes will be forced apon you whether you like it or not 

i'd pay for this to stay separate over this force overide. a tag or toggle be all you have to do. people paid money for 5e books not this force update.

I heard about this and was extremely annoyed and shocked TBH, yes to some this might not seem like much at all but think about people with learning disabilities or people with Autism like myself, for some of us we are told that we can purchase one thing and always have access to it online and that it wont go away. We get used to that for 10 years and then get used to legacy content and now we are told we have to make homebrew stuff now to make sure our old content we paid cash for is still there. This isn't right, massive bloody fail Hasbro and DnDBeyond, think I might cancel my subscription over this.

Quote from Armand_Alfodor >>

I heard about this and was extremely annoyed and shocked TBH, yes to some this might not seem like much at all but think about people with learning disabilities or people with Autism like myself, for some of us we are told that we can purchase one thing and always have access to it online and that it wont go away. We get used to that for 10 years and then get used to legacy content and now we are told we have to make homebrew stuff now to make sure our old content we paid cash for is still there. This isn't right, massive bloody fail Hasbro and DnDBeyond, think I might cancel my subscription over this.

 its sad to say but they only act like they care at this point.