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

What happens to all of the sourcebooks and adventures that's been purchased? It's unfair to those of us who've spent hundreds of dollars on these for them to be forced into redundancy. Probably illegal too.

Quote from garvil_loken >>

What happens to all of the sourcebooks and adventures that's been purchased? It's unfair to those of us who've spent hundreds of dollars on these for them to be forced into redundancy. Probably illegal too.

 they basically get turned into PDF stuffs and marked as legacy and unless its been reprinted in the 2024 rules then you can use it. if its reprinted the pinkertons will hunt you down if you try to use the old versions 

This is shit

Also chiming in to support a toggle option instead of a blanket overwrite of 2014 spells.

Both of my current campaigns have players that use a mix of DNDbeyond/digital sources and physical books/sheets. With this change folks with the same spell will be accessing two different versions of it - unless paper users buy the new book, or I homebrew back in the old versions for the digital crew. Both of those options suck and are not in spirit of keeping this game accessible for people to play. The whole point of a digital toolset is to make playing the game easier (especially for more casual players that don't keep up with rules changes like a lot of us here in the forums do) and unfortunately it feels like DNDbeyond has given up on that ideal.

I'll stay subbed for now but expect will unsub once my longest-running campaign ends. Other options are becoming more viable as a replacement, and I've been considering it anyway since the option to purchase piecemeal content was removed.

Quote from TherealCarian >>

Today, when you create a character, the first page that you are presented with is this one:

 

If they could simply make something similar instead of a toggle, not even the legacy badge would be necessary to be visible.

Just let the people creating the character decide if they want to use 2014 or 2024 rules right after they click "Create a New Character".
Not a toggle in the home settings of the sheet, but an option before character creation. 

If a user chooses to create a 2014 character, they are presented with the same options that always existed in DnD Beyond, you already HAVE that system.

If they choose to create a 2024 character, they instead go to this new character creation and character sheet designed for 2024. 

I can't see a reason for not doing that besides wanting to tire users into adapting for 2024, eventually selling more books. If that's the plan, I do hope it fails miserably. 

 This. I like this. This is an excellent solution!

This is an absolutely horrible decision that will seriously affect ongoing campaigns. I have some fairly new players who just got used to the 2014 ruleset and now they're expected to relearn all of their spells and game mechanics over the course of a couple weeks? Why not just have an opt-in feature for the 2024 ruleset and spells? These are the kinds of scummy business practices that show complete contempt for your customer base.

This is a pretty terrible implementation for anyone running a 2014 game that doesn't want to switch over, or was even just undecided. I don't know how I'm going to handle this, and I know at least one of my DMs is going to hate this. It could be worse (no access to anything 2014 at all), but yeesh, this blows.

How am I supposed to handle this with my campaign of fairly new players who JUST got comfortable with their spells/items? "Oh hey sorry guys, gotta jump to the new ruleset". This is such a bait and switch and again makes me consider canceling my sub. I would have been more than happy to gradually introduce the changes as OPTIONS like they were originally presented as. You should make us want to switch not force us.

All this has done is make me look at another system. If you're going to force me to update my current ongoing game then I might as well move to a system who isn't going to pull the rug out from under me. 

WHAT IF I WANT TO USE THE 2014 VERSION OF A SPELL OR MAGIC ITEM?

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.

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I need to be very clear that if I am unable to access content that I currently use and have paid for, I will not only be leaving dndbeyond and the Master Tier subscription I have paid for since 2017, I will never purchase another piece of content of WotC ever again. You will have completely broken my trust as a consumer by ensuring I can't access content that I paid you for. Forcing consumers to buy new editions before they're ready to upgrade and being inconsiderate of changing the spells, items, etc that characters have in actively running campaigns is completely unacceptable. 

If I have to homebrew everything to keep it, I'll give my money to Foundry instead. 

Yeah, my DM has just announced that our campaign will be leaving DDB because of this. Changes to new characters is one thing, but forcing changes on existing characters is not useful. If I own the old rules, I want to apply those rules to my sheet. And if I can't filter out homebrew because I've had to duplicate all of the spells and magic items, the site loses even more utility for me.

I'm not paying for this site anymore. I'm not going to have access to materials I paid for as I paid for them, which I consider tantamount to fraud. You could have simply created a toggle for people who don't want your unnecessary new system, but instead you chose to outright steal from your customer base. Though I guess that is wotc's preferred MO, isn't it?

Despicable.

I am a DM and I really like using DNDBeyond as a lookup function with my in-person team. About half my players use DNDBeyond and the other half use pen-and-paper. I'm not interested in edition chasing - especially a minor update. But what this change does is create a major discrepancy between my two player types. So I'll be 'freezing' my game at the 2014 edition and will be forced to migrate off DNDBeyond. For now, I can homebrew patch the changes, but once DNDBeyond becomes more work than it helps, I will just move over to either a different digital service or, more likely, just bake my content into something like Notion. And that will likely just push my group into a different game system entirely. 

I understand that its a digital service and that things change - but when key value proposition of the site goes away so does my business.

I'm fine with this. It seems like a good solution in the age of phones and computers auto-updating, it seems silly how offended people are. 

But many (if not all) of the updated spells are originally from the Basic Rules. Will we lose access if we don't own the new Player's Handbook, or just gain free access to the new version?

1. From d and d beyond discord mod: This means if you own a spell from the 2014 PHB, you will continue to be able to use it in the tools, it'll just have the 2024 wording Same for magic items. Its not going to stop anyone from using stuff they have bought, they will just have updated wording. 

Yeah, this is really just on you.

If you want a frozen copy of a book, you should have purchased a physical book.

This is the way Digital Works evolve these days. You can't tell Apple that you don't want to ever get an update to your iPhone and expect it to remain supported.

Free access

Quote from broomemike >>

I'm fine with this. It seems like a good solution in the age of phones and computers auto-updating, it seems silly how offended people are. 

But many (if not all) of the updated spells are originally from the Basic Rules. Will we lose access if we don't own the new Player's Handbook, or just gain free access to the new version?

 Free access. 

Have you been hiding under a rock? Why didn't you prepare your players for this? The DND team has been extremely transparent that if things have been updated, the game will want you using the new version.

This was announced formally months ago on interviews and press releases. Why would you assume DnD Beyond would be ignoring it?

This is such a stupid, anti-customer decision that makes your site aggressively unusable when character sheets will just change formats and mechanics.

Quote from Voice4Rent >>

This should've been done in reverse. You have a perfectly established 5e system already in place and a new and widely untested 5.5e that you're rolling out; you should be adding the tab to opt in, not opt out.

With this one update, you've set back every 5E player that doesn't want to use the new system and essentially made it much harder to use the 5E content. Telling us to copy and paste 'old' content as homebrew is like telling every fifth edition player to pick up the slack that you dropped; there should simply be a 2014 and 2024 tab to swap between the two rulesets.

 And the ironic part? They are STILL selling material on the website for the 2014 edition ruleset, while screwing over the player base. Why in the world would I buy any of the 2014 books now when you are forcing the 2024 ruleset to be used for character creation and information available on the site such as ALL of the information in the Game Rules tab? Both of those will be useless to anyone working with the 2014 books, not to mention totally mess up any campaigns currently being run through the website that use the 2014 ruleset and information.

This is going to cost WotC and DDB money in the long run. Sure, we'll still have access to all our characters, campaigns, and the digital books we bought, but (if I'm reading the Changelog correctly) the information on the character sheets are going to be 'updated" to the 2024 ruleset, essentially changing the data currently on the sheets. Oh, and we'll only have less than two weeks to either homebrew the spells that are being changed and make pdf's of the sheets if we want to save them with the 2014 information on them, or learn to live with the new material being installed into the system. For someone with a large number of characters, and already set plans for Labor Day weekend that Can Not be changed (I'm sorry, but my Aunt's Funeral in another state DOES take precedence over homebrewing all the material they want me to!) it is unreasonable to expect their clientbase to do all of this in the short period of time DDB has given to their clientbase.

WotC and DDB are being unreasonable, and unrealistic in what they are asking for, and will find that this hurts them in the long run financially when folks stop subscribing to the website, and stop purchasing material. From this point forward, only the 2024 material will be marketable for use with the features available on the website (most notably the top row of the Collections, and the aforementioned game rules tabs). They are cutting off their nose to spite their face by doing this. No one is interested in buying the 2014 material if they're not going to be able to use it on the website. There are other sources they can go to, and they will. In droves.