Thank you for the clarification. I have just canceled my subscription. I do not accept your changes made to your previous statement. I want my things to continue to work as they have.
Literally no one uses the compendium books, we rely on DnDBeyond Character sheets to automate them into our game. My group is just gonna switch to a different tool now, bravo.
Not good enough, you betray your paying fan base and customers at every turn to the point that you’ve completely turned the d&d community from a fan base first into just customers. You have ruined our game by thinking you actually own it. The players own it. Otherwise it could never exist. We chose you for the character sheet and accessibility combined. But since you’ve become so well funded due to our good will you have decided to run your company like all the other corrupt businesses who extort their base. Shame on you all. How much good will can you burn away if your doing it every few months. We don’t need you for d&d if you keep making it this unpleasant to be a part of. But you should recognise your responsibility to people who just want to play d&d with their friends and are being bent over because of your incessant greed to appease shareholders. Stop killing and suffocating our game. Wizards and D&D beyond should have learnt from last year but no. Disgusting profit chasing without any thought or care. We see you
Hello WOTC. If you're not aware, this is how we are using DNDbeyond:
1) Quick reference for the DM to look up spells in the PHB and supplements (Compendium), if the players are unsure about what spells do and sometimes enemy spells
2) for the players as a tool to quickly see their spells in character sheets.
THIS INFORMATION NOW DIFFERS. This is not acceptable. Support for this functionality, to have the rules in one place, is why we pay subscription fees for crying out loud.
I do not want to be forced to make a homebrew version of a spell or item i already have just because, i dont want it only in the compendium, i want them in the character sheet. This will push the people out of dndbeyond, is totally anti-consumer policy.
This is ridiculous, as the DM for three different campaigns in progress I really don't like to be forced to change to some "hybrid" system.
I was gonna partly transition anyway as I am curious about the new ruleset. But as everyone else here has pointed out: we bought DndBeyond as a character builder primarily, and campaign manager and everything else secondary. To denie us access to the core functionality of a product that many of us (including myself) have poured over a thousand dollars into, and have used for years, is outright insane. It is disrespectful to your customers (again).
Think about it: many of us were going to transition at some point anyway. All you've done by forcing them, is keeping only the hardcore fanbase, and enrage everyone else. Scaring many people away from your content (again!).
When will the suits realise that D&D is still not mainstream enough to apply corporate tactics like these. We are still niche and we will not only complain, but take action: cancel our subscriptions and leave
I urge you to reconsider... Though I have little hope of getting through.
Let it be a toggle option, or implement a wider legacy system for old spells and magic items. I don't care if it's "still there in the compendium", I don't want things to be automatically changed and overwritten in my character sheets WITHOUT MY CONSENT. The main reason I use Dnd Beyond is for the character creation, not for the compendium. All the information being retained is useless if it can't be readily accessed via the character sheets
You know it's funny, you say you guys have been listening to the feedback and want to make some clarifications and then you don't actually address the big problem everyone is talking about. So here it is spelled out very clearly. You ready?
WE WANT TO HAVE THE 2014 RULES, TOOLTIPS, ETC, AVAILABLE ON THE CHARACTER SHEET. WE WANT TO BE ABLE TO ACCESS THE SPELLS, ITEMS AND EVERYTHING ELSE FROM 2014 WITHOUT JUMPING THROUGH A BUNCH OF HOOPS OR TAKING TIME CONSUMING BS STEPS. IN SHORT WE WANT THE OPTION TO CONTINUE USING THE SITE EXACTLY AS WE HAVE FOR YEARS WITH THE 2014 RULES.
I honestly don't even know why I'm bothering. WotC and by extension DND Beyond obviously don't care and aren't going to try and change course or put out this dumpster fire they've created. Thanks for showing me you aren't actually listening and aren't looking to change anything. I'm cancelling 5 years of Master Tier. Peace Out✌️
I agree with all of the sentiments above, I signed up to create 2014 character sheets. It should be my decision what spells and items I allow, and it should all be at the click of a button and upfront.
I am in the middle of a campaign, I have no plans to swap over yet, I don't want to have to slow down my game looking up the old versions on at a time, or stop, and read everything new ro rule it.
Toggles and previous versions are available for literally everything else, why would you not have it for these specific things too?
It's decisions like this that lead people to 3rd party alternatives and away from your ecosystem.
D&D is about choice, we should get to decide what we use and now, not you. You job is just to facilitate those choices.
When updated, Spell descriptions on character sheets will default to 2024 Core Rulebook descriptions. All users, regardless of whether they have purchased the 2024 Player’s Handbook, will be able to access these updated Spells for free if they previously purchased the 2014 Player’s Handbook. All 2014 versions of Spells will still be accessible in the D&D Beyond Compendium and available for players to access.
Does this only mean the text of them will be available in the Players Handbook (2014), or that the spells from Players Handbook (2014) will be available in the Rules listing? To use a specific example of a spell with a known minor change, will:
Still refer to the 2014 Grease Spell, and the 2024 version be given a different id and url, or will the spell with id 2127 be changed to the 2024 version, and the 2014 version not be available anywhere under Game Rules, and only as raw text in the 2014 PHB?
It really catches my attention that there are a lot of people who have been on the site for many years but have less than ~10 posts. And a lot of those posts are just to say "bye" :(
This is sad for me, especially since this is my first year here with you guys.
Maybe one simple option could be to create a copy of the database and make a legacy app for smartphones, locked to that copy. No modifications, no maintenance—just so people can connect to their current character sheets and the 2014 rules and descriptions.
Pretty sure this is against consumer law in the UK / EU / Australia at the very least. Where do I request a refund? Or do I have to wait for the inevitable class-action lawsuit? I cancelled my subscription after the OGL changes, but now I want a refund for the content that I paid for and that you've withdrawn (or are about to).
Anything that references or grants a 2014 spell or feature will be switched to the new rules. To continue using the 2014 rules, spells and features going forward without constantly checking the compendium:
• every legacy subclass that grants 2014 spells needs to be homebrewed
• every legacy item that grants 2014 spells needs to be homebrewed
• every legacy monster that casts 2014 spells will need to be homebrewed
It gets more complicated though:
• every warlock invocation that grants 2014 spells cannot be homebrewed so they'll always display 2024 spells.
• every legacy class that grants extra spells (mainly through the Tasha's expanded lists) cannot be homebrewed so they'll always display 2024 spells.
Basically, if you want to use purely 2014 rules, spells and charactors on DnDBeyond you can't as they are taking the digital toolset that this site is for away from all of us who wants to play 2014-2023 content.
If you want to use D&D BEYOND official digital toolset for all the books pre-2024 you are going to start to hit problems as sub-classes, monsters and charactors tied to the old rule set will no longer work correctly. It's really not even worth trying when the whole point of the site was the convenience factor and they are taking that away from everyone who paid for books prior to this september.
The digital books being sold clearly state "Purchasing a digital copy of this book unlocks it for use in the D&D BEYOND compendium and toolset. D&D BEYOND is the official digital toolset for DUNGEONS & DRAGONS." How can you lock us out of the digital tool access we specifically bought access too?
We are being forced to use the September 2024 features, rules, spells and items to make it impossible or extremely inconvenient to try run games using the estabalished 2014-2023 ruleset that all the current books have been built around. This change breaks charactors and the dozens of adventure books tied to the 2014 rules, monsters, spells and features.
For those of us who own not just all the source books but many of the adventure books on this site these changes are horrific in scale as we can see its designed to inconvenience us into giving up all content on this site thats designed for the older rules and forcing us to rebuy it all in the future.
D&D BEYOND is the official digital toolset and all of us are being locked out of them digital tools if we want to carry on playing under 2014 rules and charactors with all the books, classes and monsters designed for the 2014 rules that have been released over the last decade.
Every time something absolutely outrageous is attempted by WOTC, they say they've listened to the feedback, but then ignore what 99% of the feedback is.
Just added my voice, I want a toggle to 2014 spells in the character sheet please. If not respectfully you will lose my sub and likey many other peoples.
I am not upset because I misunderstood. I am upset because I will no longer have access to the 2014 spells and magic items in the character builder without a ton of work on my part. Requiring us to homebrew literally HUNDREDS of items and spells is ridiculous. Isn't coding this stuff into the builder YOUR job? Wasn't that the deal? We pay you a ton of money, you do the tedious programming work for us? So you've taken our money and are now dumping the work back on us. Not cool.
Can you at least make the homebrew items yourselves and give us all access to it?
This clarification just confirms that while DDB claims to be listening to our feedback, you're not understanding. Or you are understanding, and are just trying to twist the language to pretend this is a good thing, no big deal, everyone should just put up or shut up.
I don't think ANYONE believed that you were taking away access to the 2014 rules completely. But you seem to be missing the point that the main issue being flagged is that the 'ease of access' feature of being able to pick those spells in the character builder IS being taken away, and the solution is "Just homebrew your own old copy of it, lol".
I (and my players) use DDB because we only get a limited time window to play. We don't have time to be leafing through books digging up spell descriptions mid-fight. Digging up the spell in the online rules compendium has similar time impact to leafing through a book. My party was leery of using DDB because it was new and different, but I showed them how easy it was to click on the spell, or ability, or item, and boom - you get the relevant description right there. It was the ease-of-use that made it worthwhile, so we bought subs, and I bought a bunch of books.
And now DDB is taking away that ease of use feature, UNLESS we are prepared to either a) update to the 2024 ruleset, which WOTC told us we didn't have to do, or b) manually homebrew back in spells that we currently have access to.
The term is 'enshittification'.
And it's made worse because we know DDB can just slap legacy tags on things and call it a day. You've got legacy races, legacy monsters... so it really just feels like you guys looked at the spells and said, "Wait, there are HOW many spells? No, just make the players do it."
And you had better ways to handle this. You could've just added a toggle at character creation: "Use 2014 ruleset, Use 2024 ruleset". You could just tag the 2024 versions as 'legacy' - which wouldn't require you to do anymore work than you're already doing - because I guarantee someone isn't sitting up manually altering all of the spells Sept 3rd. You already have 2024 'versions' ready to go. You've already got monsters being listed as being from '2014 basic rules', implying you'll have versions from '2024 basic rules'.
So it's obvious DDB has the ability to do the same for spells. You've just decided not to. That's why people are angry - because it seems like a blatant attempt to force people to use the new ruleset, unless their DM's are willing to do a crap-ton of extra work to maintain the ease-of-use functionality that we are already paying to use.
EDIT: And while it's great that the 2024 PHB only impacts two magic items, just for 'clarity', the DMG coming out in a couple months has a whole lot more. So our expectation would be the same - legacy versions of any DMG magic item you're planning on updating, retain access to them through the character builder.
Otherwise, that's 6 Hero subs and a Master sub that are basically pointless to us if the character builder no longer works as originally promised.
Thank you for the clarification. I have just canceled my subscription. I do not accept your changes made to your previous statement. I want my things to continue to work as they have.
Character. Sheets.
Literally no one uses the compendium books, we rely on DnDBeyond Character sheets to automate them into our game. My group is just gonna switch to a different tool now, bravo.
Not good enough, you betray your paying fan base and customers at every turn to the point that you’ve completely turned the d&d community from a fan base first into just customers. You have ruined our game by thinking you actually own it. The players own it. Otherwise it could never exist. We chose you for the character sheet and accessibility combined. But since you’ve become so well funded due to our good will you have decided to run your company like all the other corrupt businesses who extort their base. Shame on you all. How much good will can you burn away if your doing it every few months. We don’t need you for d&d if you keep making it this unpleasant to be a part of. But you should recognise your responsibility to people who just want to play d&d with their friends and are being bent over because of your incessant greed to appease shareholders. Stop killing and suffocating our game. Wizards and D&D beyond should have learnt from last year but no. Disgusting profit chasing without any thought or care. We see you
Hello WOTC. If you're not aware, this is how we are using DNDbeyond:
1) Quick reference for the DM to look up spells in the PHB and supplements (Compendium), if the players are unsure about what spells do and sometimes enemy spells
2) for the players as a tool to quickly see their spells in character sheets.
THIS INFORMATION NOW DIFFERS. This is not acceptable. Support for this functionality, to have the rules in one place, is why we pay subscription fees for crying out loud.
This is not what we paid (and pay) for. Legacy spells (and the retention of them on existing characters until WE choose to switch them) are required.
This feels like you fired your UX devs.
The DM yeeteth and the DM yoinketh away.
I do not want to be forced to make a homebrew version of a spell or item i already have just because, i dont want it only in the compendium, i want them in the character sheet. This will push the people out of dndbeyond, is totally anti-consumer policy.
This is ridiculous, as the DM for three different campaigns in progress I really don't like to be forced to change to some "hybrid" system.
I was gonna partly transition anyway as I am curious about the new ruleset. But as everyone else here has pointed out: we bought DndBeyond as a character builder primarily, and campaign manager and everything else secondary. To denie us access to the core functionality of a product that many of us (including myself) have poured over a thousand dollars into, and have used for years, is outright insane. It is disrespectful to your customers (again).
Think about it: many of us were going to transition at some point anyway. All you've done by forcing them, is keeping only the hardcore fanbase, and enrage everyone else. Scaring many people away from your content (again!).
When will the suits realise that D&D is still not mainstream enough to apply corporate tactics like these. We are still niche and we will not only complain, but take action: cancel our subscriptions and leave
I urge you to reconsider... Though I have little hope of getting through.
If I wanted to buy the 2014 compendium only I would have bought the compendium for a discount.
I prefer to keep the full toolset.
Let it be a toggle option, or implement a wider legacy system for old spells and magic items. I don't care if it's "still there in the compendium", I don't want things to be automatically changed and overwritten in my character sheets WITHOUT MY CONSENT. The main reason I use Dnd Beyond is for the character creation, not for the compendium. All the information being retained is useless if it can't be readily accessed via the character sheets
You know it's funny, you say you guys have been listening to the feedback and want to make some clarifications and then you don't actually address the big problem everyone is talking about. So here it is spelled out very clearly. You ready?
WE WANT TO HAVE THE 2014 RULES, TOOLTIPS, ETC, AVAILABLE ON THE CHARACTER SHEET. WE WANT TO BE ABLE TO ACCESS THE SPELLS, ITEMS AND EVERYTHING ELSE FROM 2014 WITHOUT JUMPING THROUGH A BUNCH OF HOOPS OR TAKING TIME CONSUMING BS STEPS. IN SHORT WE WANT THE OPTION TO CONTINUE USING THE SITE EXACTLY AS WE HAVE FOR YEARS WITH THE 2014 RULES.
I honestly don't even know why I'm bothering. WotC and by extension DND Beyond obviously don't care and aren't going to try and change course or put out this dumpster fire they've created. Thanks for showing me you aren't actually listening and aren't looking to change anything. I'm cancelling 5 years of Master Tier. Peace Out✌️
I agree with all of the sentiments above, I signed up to create 2014 character sheets. It should be my decision what spells and items I allow, and it should all be at the click of a button and upfront.
I am in the middle of a campaign, I have no plans to swap over yet, I don't want to have to slow down my game looking up the old versions on at a time, or stop, and read everything new ro rule it.
Toggles and previous versions are available for literally everything else, why would you not have it for these specific things too?
It's decisions like this that lead people to 3rd party alternatives and away from your ecosystem.
D&D is about choice, we should get to decide what we use and now, not you. You job is just to facilitate those choices.
Does this only mean the text of them will be available in the Players Handbook (2014), or that the spells from Players Handbook (2014) will be available in the Rules listing? To use a specific example of a spell with a known minor change, will:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/spells/2127-grease
Still refer to the 2014 Grease Spell, and the 2024 version be given a different id and url, or will the spell with id 2127 be changed to the 2024 version, and the 2014 version not be available anywhere under Game Rules, and only as raw text in the 2014 PHB?
It really catches my attention that there are a lot of people who have been on the site for many years but have less than ~10 posts. And a lot of those posts are just to say "bye" :(
This is sad for me, especially since this is my first year here with you guys.
Maybe one simple option could be to create a copy of the database and make a legacy app for smartphones, locked to that copy. No modifications, no maintenance—just so people can connect to their current character sheets and the 2014 rules and descriptions.
Pretty sure this is against consumer law in the UK / EU / Australia at the very least. Where do I request a refund? Or do I have to wait for the inevitable class-action lawsuit? I cancelled my subscription after the OGL changes, but now I want a refund for the content that I paid for and that you've withdrawn (or are about to).
Anything that references or grants a 2014 spell or feature will be switched to the new rules. To continue using the 2014 rules, spells and features going forward without constantly checking the compendium:
• every legacy subclass that grants 2014 spells needs to be homebrewed
• every legacy item that grants 2014 spells needs to be homebrewed
• every legacy monster that casts 2014 spells will need to be homebrewed
It gets more complicated though:
• every warlock invocation that grants 2014 spells cannot be homebrewed so they'll always display 2024 spells.
• every legacy class that grants extra spells (mainly through the Tasha's expanded lists) cannot be homebrewed so they'll always display 2024 spells.
Basically, if you want to use purely 2014 rules, spells and charactors on DnDBeyond you can't as they are taking the digital toolset that this site is for away from all of us who wants to play 2014-2023 content.
If you want to use D&D BEYOND official digital toolset for all the books pre-2024 you are going to start to hit problems as sub-classes, monsters and charactors tied to the old rule set will no longer work correctly. It's really not even worth trying when the whole point of the site was the convenience factor and they are taking that away from everyone who paid for books prior to this september.
The digital books being sold clearly state "Purchasing a digital copy of this book unlocks it for use in the D&D BEYOND compendium and toolset. D&D BEYOND is the official digital toolset for DUNGEONS & DRAGONS." How can you lock us out of the digital tool access we specifically bought access too?
We are being forced to use the September 2024 features, rules, spells and items to make it impossible or extremely inconvenient to try run games using the estabalished 2014-2023 ruleset that all the current books have been built around. This change breaks charactors and the dozens of adventure books tied to the 2014 rules, monsters, spells and features.
For those of us who own not just all the source books but many of the adventure books on this site these changes are horrific in scale as we can see its designed to inconvenience us into giving up all content on this site thats designed for the older rules and forcing us to rebuy it all in the future.
D&D BEYOND is the official digital toolset and all of us are being locked out of them digital tools if we want to carry on playing under 2014 rules and charactors with all the books, classes and monsters designed for the 2014 rules that have been released over the last decade.
Yeah, I'll be seeking refunds if this goes ahead as planned.
Every time something absolutely outrageous is attempted by WOTC, they say they've listened to the feedback, but then ignore what 99% of the feedback is.
I just canceled my master subscription.
Just added my voice, I want a toggle to 2014 spells in the character sheet please. If not respectfully you will lose my sub and likey many other peoples.
I am not upset because I misunderstood. I am upset because I will no longer have access to the 2014 spells and magic items in the character builder without a ton of work on my part. Requiring us to homebrew literally HUNDREDS of items and spells is ridiculous. Isn't coding this stuff into the builder YOUR job? Wasn't that the deal? We pay you a ton of money, you do the tedious programming work for us? So you've taken our money and are now dumping the work back on us. Not cool.
Can you at least make the homebrew items yourselves and give us all access to it?
Hi Sarah,
This clarification just confirms that while DDB claims to be listening to our feedback, you're not understanding. Or you are understanding, and are just trying to twist the language to pretend this is a good thing, no big deal, everyone should just put up or shut up.
I don't think ANYONE believed that you were taking away access to the 2014 rules completely. But you seem to be missing the point that the main issue being flagged is that the 'ease of access' feature of being able to pick those spells in the character builder IS being taken away, and the solution is "Just homebrew your own old copy of it, lol".
I (and my players) use DDB because we only get a limited time window to play. We don't have time to be leafing through books digging up spell descriptions mid-fight. Digging up the spell in the online rules compendium has similar time impact to leafing through a book. My party was leery of using DDB because it was new and different, but I showed them how easy it was to click on the spell, or ability, or item, and boom - you get the relevant description right there. It was the ease-of-use that made it worthwhile, so we bought subs, and I bought a bunch of books.
And now DDB is taking away that ease of use feature, UNLESS we are prepared to either a) update to the 2024 ruleset, which WOTC told us we didn't have to do, or b) manually homebrew back in spells that we currently have access to.
The term is 'enshittification'.
And it's made worse because we know DDB can just slap legacy tags on things and call it a day. You've got legacy races, legacy monsters... so it really just feels like you guys looked at the spells and said, "Wait, there are HOW many spells? No, just make the players do it."
And you had better ways to handle this. You could've just added a toggle at character creation: "Use 2014 ruleset, Use 2024 ruleset". You could just tag the 2024 versions as 'legacy' - which wouldn't require you to do anymore work than you're already doing - because I guarantee someone isn't sitting up manually altering all of the spells Sept 3rd. You already have 2024 'versions' ready to go. You've already got monsters being listed as being from '2014 basic rules', implying you'll have versions from '2024 basic rules'.
So it's obvious DDB has the ability to do the same for spells. You've just decided not to. That's why people are angry - because it seems like a blatant attempt to force people to use the new ruleset, unless their DM's are willing to do a crap-ton of extra work to maintain the ease-of-use functionality that we are already paying to use.
EDIT: And while it's great that the 2024 PHB only impacts two magic items, just for 'clarity', the DMG coming out in a couple months has a whole lot more. So our expectation would be the same - legacy versions of any DMG magic item you're planning on updating, retain access to them through the character builder.
Otherwise, that's 6 Hero subs and a Master sub that are basically pointless to us if the character builder no longer works as originally promised.