This is the most anti-consumer thing I have ever seen. Forcing the 2014 version of spells out of the character creator will create a whole host of problems for people deciding to stick with the older edition or for those who don’t want to update rules mid-longterm campaign. When a new edition comes out people don’t automatically want to upgrade to the newest edition. Some people might prefer how the older edition works and plays compared to the newer edition.
it also shows a huge lack of respect for the people who have purchased books on this website. They were sold as being usable with the character creator and by essentially forcing players to homebrew over 400 spells in order to maintain running a game in their preferred edition is like telling us very clearly you have zero respect for people and the money they spent unless they are willing to fork over even more money for the new books and to suck it up and play the game you think we want to play.
this shows that you don’t care about players or the game at all. It’s a clear message that wizards of the coast only wants to sell the latest book and will turn their back on loyal customers the second there is a chance to make another profit. You have a responsibility to people who purchased these books to give them the product they paid for. They paid for books that are marketed and described as being functional with the character creator.
I work in virtual table tops and know that it takes a significant amount of time to develop these toolsets. This wasn’t a “we can’t afford to have two rulesets” issue this was a clear and deliberate choice made by the company to prevent people from having access to the tools they paid for in order to promote sales of your new product. You can easily revert this change and offer the content in the character creator for people have paid for this content and restore faith in the people who have been loyal to dndbeyond for almost a decade. If you continue down this path and set this as your precedence as how you handle edition changes, what’s stopping you from doing this when the next edition comes out? If you move forward with this change. I can’t see myself moving forward with purchasing anymore first party digital dnd content. You need to seriously ask yourselves if pushing this new edition on consumers is worth losing your most loyal fan base.
If the removal of 2014 spells and magic items goes through I will be absolutely done with this company. I've spent hundreds this last year building my digital library for my players just to have the core of it gutted so you can force people into buying the new books. Shameful. I won't spend another penny here.
This is theft of content. I paid for the 2014 versions of spells and items to be useable, not to have to copy them myself by hand.
Exactly! I have absolutely zero plans to use 5e24 and will never purchase those books. They are taking away my access to build my characters using just 5e14 content. They are taking away the functionality that was built in to the digital versions of these books by revising all the tooltips to only point at 5e24 content.
They need to make the content I paid for accessible in the manner in which is has been or start issuing refunds.
As a player in a campaign that is going into a hybrid mode of 2014-2024 rules, depending on the wishes of the individual player (we have some people who we know will be sticking with the 2014 class for definite and some who are considering switching to 2024 once we've seen the rules in their entirity) and as someone who's co-running a 2014 RAW Discord server, this site change is going to be a nightmare. For us to stick to the 2014 rules, we are going to have to allow Homebrew be turned on (which we normally don't as we use the RAW as much as possible) and review every sheet's spell list and etc. at all times in order to ensure their usage of the 2014 versions is correct and functioning correctly. We may have the trust of our playerbase, but it is going to be ridiculously easy to make mistakes or deliberate edits to things in such a way as to slip through the cracks.
This is one of the worst decisions WOTC and/or the Beyond Team (we have no real way of knowing who's actually responsible for these decisions behind the scenes unless they come forward) could possibly have made in terms of player retention. Let's not pretend like there aren't many, many ways of utilising 2014 5e content without paying the company any bit of money (obviously not going to name any such sources here). All this is going to do is alienate long-time consumers of the decade-long tradition that is DnD 5e due to being incapable of accessing the rules they know and love on the platform they've paid for these rulesets on. The solution being offered being to go homebrew copies of things is in no way a sustainable solution, especially if all tooltips are going to link to the 2024 versions as opposed to the 2014 versions. We will have no way of knowing the range of things being affected until it is too late. The ability to toggle on and off access to many things (Partnered by specific source, expanded vs base rules, even 2014 Legacy content) is already codified into the site.
I would love to hear from a site admin / employee / team representative, in a public post focused on this issue and not just as a reply to this thread, what exactly the reasoning is behind basically forcing all of us who love, appreciate, and have spent countless hours and anywhere in the hundreds of dollars worth of our local currencies on building our best 2014 - no, our best DnD 5e experience - to adapt to the new ruleset that we might not want to reach out to yet? Why is it that you cannot use existing functionality within your site to keep it being accessible to 2014 players as well as the 2024 players to come? Could you explain it in such a way that someone not versed in coding and such could understand? And, if you read back your explanation, is it something that the billion-dollar company that owns the site could not solve with a bit of investment into customer retention?
Because that is what making this site fully accessible to the 2014 and 2024 rulesets will be. Retention of customers who utilise the subscription services. Retention of the loyal customers who have been screwed over repeatedly by the parent company recently. Retention of those of us who wish with all our hearts to continue playing the games we've been running and playing for years without having to adapt to a drastic change. Retention of those who are loyal to the ruleset we have grown to love and cherish and work within. Just scrolling through this thread demonstrates the level of retention this change is bringing - a negative level, as you are losing people. Please reconsider, for the sake of all of us who play this game.
Make a parallel version for the 2024 content. Do not remove the 2014. Put it on a toggle to let people switch between the two (or allow them to switch on both)
This should be an option like every other option in character creation.
This is anti-consumer. And frankly a spit in the face of the people who have bought content on this platform for 5e over the years. I will no longer be purchasing content here. Alternatives exist.
If I have to make special homebrew versions of every 2014 spell in order for them to appear on the character sheets of my players, then I think it might just be easier to cancel my subscription and stop using D&D Beyond altogether. This is infuriating.
Completely unacceptable. You're throwing a titanic wrench into every ongoing campaign with a massive bait and switch. I didn't buy the 2014-2023 books with all their spells, items, and rules so they could just be discarded and the money I spent p***ed away all because you want to force people into buying the new book. I'm canceling my subscription thanks, I'll use other online tools and not hand over another red cent to WOTC.
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.
If I have to make special homebrew versions of every 2014 spell in order for them to appear on the character sheets of my players, then I think it might just be easier to cancel my subscription and stop using D&D Beyond altogether. This is infuriating.
It will more likely be a slow burn losing a little of each book with every new book. Like the old boiling live frogs apologue, It will be sad to watch them take away what we have paid for, but if they do it slow enough more will stay longer and buy more, is likely the logic being used. Sunk costs will rule the day for some sadly.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
CENSORSHIP IS THE TOOL OF COWARDS and WANNA BE TYRANTS.
I was planning to finish out my long-term campaign using the old 2014 rules before switching to the 2024 rules whenever we start our next campaign, likely not even purchasing the updated PHB until that time.
What happens in this case? What happens if I don't even own the updated content? When my players go to level up will they simply have zero spells to choose from unless I homebrew 100s of spells? Will the spells and magic items already on their sheets disappear? Or are we getting a free update to the new versions?
More broadly with tool tips, etc, what happens if I hover over something and don't own the new PHB? Will I see anything? Or is the intent here that there'll be a 2024 Basic Rules equivalent that everyone is forced to use?
I really don't understand why there couldn't have been a simple toggle and legacy tag like has already been done for the multiverse races, AND IS EVEN CONTINUING TO BE USED FOR RACES, CLASSES AND SUBCLASSES! Why not do the exact same thing for spells and magic items?
This planned version of things seems to only make using 2014 content as difficult as possible. Either these things and use cases weren't considered at all, or it's intentionally making it more difficult in a thinly veiled attempt to force people to use and purchase the 2024 content before they would have otherwise. So, is it malice or stupidity?
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?
The problem is more than just the spells and items, although that’s a problem for established and ongoing characters and campaigns. The bigger problem IMO is the rules and interface updates. It’s that they promised that we could continue to run 1014 games with 2014 characters and rules and while they don’t force users to use DnDBeyond, this is THEIR tool and the tool doesn’t support the promise they made. It’s a slap in the face after players and GMs were starting to get excited about the option to test and dip into the new rules before fully committing to them in their games.
What the ****? So i cant use the spells and items I PAID TO USE in dnd beyond if i dont want to buy the new phb? Will there be free basic rules version of the new phb for this site like there was for the 2014 rules? Why the hell wouldnt they be marked under legacy like EVERYTHING ELSE!
What the ****? So i cant use the spells and items I PAID TO USE in dnd beyond if i dont want to buy the new phb? Will there be free basic rules version of the new phb for this site like there was for the 2014 rules? Why the hell wouldnt they be marked under legacy like EVERYTHING ELSE!
The release notes said that you’ll still have access to the old books in DnDBeyond but essentially if you want to see the way a legacy spell or rule or item or magic item was written, you’ll need to look it up the way you would in a paper book; open the book in the app, flip to the right page, and look up the text entry.
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.
This. My group decided to at least wait until the DMG was released before switching over, even while most of us are buying the 2024 PHB because we are excited about many of the changes. But we assumed nothing would change on our old character sheets. This is completely ridiculous we do not have an option to “freeze” our characters and have a designation for existing campaigns/PCs with the rulesets that we had purchased.
I really enjoyed using DnD beyond but a forum post basically saying “this is the way it is” two weeks before many of us were getting our copy of the new book is bad PR. Why pay for anything in the future when the company has set this precedent?
Folks, you paid for the books. You keep the books. Everything in them stays as it is. Spells and magic items that have been made legacy won't appear in the character creator sheets. Creator != Books
So, let's say I bought an individual spell from a book I don't own. Can I still use it? Can I even access it somewhere?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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This is the most anti-consumer thing I have ever seen. Forcing the 2014 version of spells out of the character creator will create a whole host of problems for people deciding to stick with the older edition or for those who don’t want to update rules mid-longterm campaign. When a new edition comes out people don’t automatically want to upgrade to the newest edition. Some people might prefer how the older edition works and plays compared to the newer edition.
it also shows a huge lack of respect for the people who have purchased books on this website. They were sold as being usable with the character creator and by essentially forcing players to homebrew over 400 spells in order to maintain running a game in their preferred edition is like telling us very clearly you have zero respect for people and the money they spent unless they are willing to fork over even more money for the new books and to suck it up and play the game you think we want to play.
this shows that you don’t care about players or the game at all. It’s a clear message that wizards of the coast only wants to sell the latest book and will turn their back on loyal customers the second there is a chance to make another profit. You have a responsibility to people who purchased these books to give them the product they paid for. They paid for books that are marketed and described as being functional with the character creator.
I work in virtual table tops and know that it takes a significant amount of time to develop these toolsets. This wasn’t a “we can’t afford to have two rulesets” issue this was a clear and deliberate choice made by the company to prevent people from having access to the tools they paid for in order to promote sales of your new product. You can easily revert this change and offer the content in the character creator for people have paid for this content and restore faith in the people who have been loyal to dndbeyond for almost a decade. If you continue down this path and set this as your precedence as how you handle edition changes, what’s stopping you from doing this when the next edition comes out? If you move forward with this change. I can’t see myself moving forward with purchasing anymore first party digital dnd content. You need to seriously ask yourselves if pushing this new edition on consumers is worth losing your most loyal fan base.
If the removal of 2014 spells and magic items goes through I will be absolutely done with this company. I've spent hundreds this last year building my digital library for my players just to have the core of it gutted so you can force people into buying the new books. Shameful. I won't spend another penny here.
Exactly! I have absolutely zero plans to use 5e24 and will never purchase those books. They are taking away my access to build my characters using just 5e14 content. They are taking away the functionality that was built in to the digital versions of these books by revising all the tooltips to only point at 5e24 content.
They need to make the content I paid for accessible in the manner in which is has been or start issuing refunds.
As a player in a campaign that is going into a hybrid mode of 2014-2024 rules, depending on the wishes of the individual player (we have some people who we know will be sticking with the 2014 class for definite and some who are considering switching to 2024 once we've seen the rules in their entirity) and as someone who's co-running a 2014 RAW Discord server, this site change is going to be a nightmare. For us to stick to the 2014 rules, we are going to have to allow Homebrew be turned on (which we normally don't as we use the RAW as much as possible) and review every sheet's spell list and etc. at all times in order to ensure their usage of the 2014 versions is correct and functioning correctly. We may have the trust of our playerbase, but it is going to be ridiculously easy to make mistakes or deliberate edits to things in such a way as to slip through the cracks.
This is one of the worst decisions WOTC and/or the Beyond Team (we have no real way of knowing who's actually responsible for these decisions behind the scenes unless they come forward) could possibly have made in terms of player retention. Let's not pretend like there aren't many, many ways of utilising 2014 5e content without paying the company any bit of money (obviously not going to name any such sources here). All this is going to do is alienate long-time consumers of the decade-long tradition that is DnD 5e due to being incapable of accessing the rules they know and love on the platform they've paid for these rulesets on. The solution being offered being to go homebrew copies of things is in no way a sustainable solution, especially if all tooltips are going to link to the 2024 versions as opposed to the 2014 versions. We will have no way of knowing the range of things being affected until it is too late. The ability to toggle on and off access to many things (Partnered by specific source, expanded vs base rules, even 2014 Legacy content) is already codified into the site.
I would love to hear from a site admin / employee / team representative, in a public post focused on this issue and not just as a reply to this thread, what exactly the reasoning is behind basically forcing all of us who love, appreciate, and have spent countless hours and anywhere in the hundreds of dollars worth of our local currencies on building our best 2014 - no, our best DnD 5e experience - to adapt to the new ruleset that we might not want to reach out to yet? Why is it that you cannot use existing functionality within your site to keep it being accessible to 2014 players as well as the 2024 players to come? Could you explain it in such a way that someone not versed in coding and such could understand? And, if you read back your explanation, is it something that the billion-dollar company that owns the site could not solve with a bit of investment into customer retention?
Because that is what making this site fully accessible to the 2014 and 2024 rulesets will be. Retention of customers who utilise the subscription services. Retention of the loyal customers who have been screwed over repeatedly by the parent company recently. Retention of those of us who wish with all our hearts to continue playing the games we've been running and playing for years without having to adapt to a drastic change. Retention of those who are loyal to the ruleset we have grown to love and cherish and work within. Just scrolling through this thread demonstrates the level of retention this change is bringing - a negative level, as you are losing people. Please reconsider, for the sake of all of us who play this game.
Make a parallel version for the 2024 content. Do not remove the 2014.
Put it on a toggle to let people switch between the two (or allow them to switch on both)
This should be an option like every other option in character creation.
have to admit im genuinely confused why 2014 content cant just be a toggle on/off at the start of character creation?
aside from trying to strong arm people into adopting the not new edition of course
I'll add to this chorus.
This is anti-consumer. And frankly a spit in the face of the people who have bought content on this platform for 5e over the years. I will no longer be purchasing content here. Alternatives exist.
If I have to make special homebrew versions of every 2014 spell in order for them to appear on the character sheets of my players, then I think it might just be easier to cancel my subscription and stop using D&D Beyond altogether. This is infuriating.
This is dumb and everyone who signed off on it is a smelly corporate hack. You have visible stink-lines coming off of you IRL.
Completely unacceptable. You're throwing a titanic wrench into every ongoing campaign with a massive bait and switch. I didn't buy the 2014-2023 books with all their spells, items, and rules so they could just be discarded and the money I spent p***ed away all because you want to force people into buying the new book. I'm canceling my subscription thanks, I'll use other online tools and not hand over another red cent to WOTC.
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.
It will more likely be a slow burn losing a little of each book with every new book. Like the old boiling live frogs apologue, It will be sad to watch them take away what we have paid for, but if they do it slow enough more will stay longer and buy more, is likely the logic being used. Sunk costs will rule the day for some sadly.
CENSORSHIP IS THE TOOL OF COWARDS and WANNA BE TYRANTS.
Wow. This is going to make dndbeyond absolutely unusable for me. Guess it's time to cancel my subscription.
I was planning to finish out my long-term campaign using the old 2014 rules before switching to the 2024 rules whenever we start our next campaign, likely not even purchasing the updated PHB until that time.
What happens in this case? What happens if I don't even own the updated content? When my players go to level up will they simply have zero spells to choose from unless I homebrew 100s of spells? Will the spells and magic items already on their sheets disappear? Or are we getting a free update to the new versions?
More broadly with tool tips, etc, what happens if I hover over something and don't own the new PHB? Will I see anything? Or is the intent here that there'll be a 2024 Basic Rules equivalent that everyone is forced to use?
I really don't understand why there couldn't have been a simple toggle and legacy tag like has already been done for the multiverse races, AND IS EVEN CONTINUING TO BE USED FOR RACES, CLASSES AND SUBCLASSES! Why not do the exact same thing for spells and magic items?
This planned version of things seems to only make using 2014 content as difficult as possible. Either these things and use cases weren't considered at all, or it's intentionally making it more difficult in a thinly veiled attempt to force people to use and purchase the 2024 content before they would have otherwise. So, is it malice or stupidity?
The problem is more than just the spells and items, although that’s a problem for established and ongoing characters and campaigns. The bigger problem IMO is the rules and interface updates. It’s that they promised that we could continue to run 1014 games with 2014 characters and rules and while they don’t force users to use DnDBeyond, this is THEIR tool and the tool doesn’t support the promise they made. It’s a slap in the face after players and GMs were starting to get excited about the option to test and dip into the new rules before fully committing to them in their games.
What the ****? So i cant use the spells and items I PAID TO USE in dnd beyond if i dont want to buy the new phb? Will there be free basic rules version of the new phb for this site like there was for the 2014 rules? Why the hell wouldnt they be marked under legacy like EVERYTHING ELSE!
The release notes said that you’ll still have access to the old books in DnDBeyond but essentially if you want to see the way a legacy spell or rule or item or magic item was written, you’ll need to look it up the way you would in a paper book; open the book in the app, flip to the right page, and look up the text entry.
How do we get refunds for the previous content we've purchased since it's essentially being removed?
This. My group decided to at least wait until the DMG was released before switching over, even while most of us are buying the 2024 PHB because we are excited about many of the changes. But we assumed nothing would change on our old character sheets. This is completely ridiculous we do not have an option to “freeze” our characters and have a designation for existing campaigns/PCs with the rulesets that we had purchased.
I really enjoyed using DnD beyond but a forum post basically saying “this is the way it is” two weeks before many of us were getting our copy of the new book is bad PR. Why pay for anything in the future when the company has set this precedent?
So, let's say I bought an individual spell from a book I don't own. Can I still use it? Can I even access it somewhere?