Ages ago, before they stopped doing it, I bought all of the Player's Handbook Spells and Magic Items.
I've been searching everywhere for an answer to this to no avail. Does anyone know how the 2024 changes are going to effect spells that were purchased Al La Carte? Will they simply register as already owned and be updated, or will they just no longer be available?
The changes detailed in the changelog will affect the spells regardless of whether they were purchased a la carte or as a whole book.
Basically they're going to into the database and editing the spell itself. This is why you lose the 2014 version and will need to create a homebrew version, because the official 2014 will be overwritten to the 2024 one. On one hand you'll get the updated version free. On the other, if you prefer 2014 version you have a little work to do to get it back.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Click ✨ HERE ✨ For My Youtube Videos featuring Guides, Tips & Tricks for using D&D Beyond. Need help with Homebrew? Check out ✨ thisFAQ/Guide thread ✨ by IamSposta.
Ages ago, before they stopped doing it, I bought all of the Player's Handbook Spells and Magic Items.
You bought over 200 spells a la carte? Why not just buy the book itself at that point... 🤨
Yes, you'll get the 2024 versions of those spells for free. If you want to stick with the 2014 versions for any that were updated and use them from your sheet, you'll need to use the homebrew tools. For any that don't need to be used from your sheet, you can just pull up your 2014 PHB and read them from there. If you want to instead own the entire book, I'd contact customer service, you've certainly spent enough.
The changes detailed in the changelog will affect the spells regardless of whether they were purchased a la carte or as a whole book.
Basically they're going to into the database and editing the spell itself. This is why you lose the 2014 version and will need to create a homebrew version, because the official 2014 will be overwritten to the 2024 one. On one hand you'll get the updated version free. On the other, if you prefer 2014 version you have a little work to do to get it back.
but why do we have to do the work? that feels pointless when we already have the spells already listed you think they would just add a filter option like they did with classes. making people have to recreate the content they already paid for (the version they saw, wanted, and bought) and getting rid of it replacing it with something they might not have wanted feels really bad.
The changes detailed in the changelog will affect the spells regardless of whether they were purchased a la carte or as a whole book.
Basically they're going to into the database and editing the spell itself. This is why you lose the 2014 version and will need to create a homebrew version, because the official 2014 will be overwritten to the 2024 one. On one hand you'll get the updated version free. On the other, if you prefer 2014 version you have a little work to do to get it back.
but why do we have to do the work? that feels pointless when we already have the spells already listed you think they would just add a filter option like they did with classes. making people have to recreate the content they already paid for (the version they saw, wanted, and bought) and getting rid of it replacing it with something they might not have wanted feels really bad.
How am I gonna know? I don't work here. 🤣
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Click ✨ HERE ✨ For My Youtube Videos featuring Guides, Tips & Tricks for using D&D Beyond. Need help with Homebrew? Check out ✨ thisFAQ/Guide thread ✨ by IamSposta.
Ages ago, before they stopped doing it, I bought all of the Player's Handbook Spells and Magic Items.
You bought over 200 spells a la carte? Why not just buy the book itself at that point... 🤨
I don't know why you're so dubious, they were sold as a bundle, like all the a la carte features. You didn't need to buy them all at $2 each. According to my order history the spell bundle for the PHB was $5 (probably cheaper than most bundles as much of it was free in the basic rules).
That same $5 was then discounted off the price of the PHB if you decided to buy the whole thing, so you would never end up spending more than the price of the whole book if you went back for the rest later.
Ages ago, before they stopped doing it, I bought all of the Player's Handbook Spells and Magic Items.
You bought over 200 spells a la carte? Why not just buy the book itself at that point... 🤨
I don't know why you're so dubious, they were sold as a bundle, like all the a la carte features. You didn't need to buy them all at $2 each. According to my order history the spell bundle for the PHB was $5 (probably cheaper than most bundles as much of it was free in the basic rules).
That same $5 was then discounted off the price of the PHB if you decided to buy the whole thing, so you would never end up spending more than the price of the whole book if you went back for the rest later.
So either (a) get your 5 dollars refunded, or (b) make your character with the spells you want, then pull up the old text in a different tab when you're using said spells and said text is different. Or both.
The homebrew option is literally just for changed spells where you prefer the old versions and that you want the sheet to roll for you. Most characters don't have that many of them.
Regardless, if you want to keep the original spells, if I were you, I'd go through and make copies of the spells as homebrew, just in case you want to keep them as-is.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Ages ago, before they stopped doing it, I bought all of the Player's Handbook Spells and Magic Items.
You bought over 200 spells a la carte? Why not just buy the book itself at that point... 🤨
I don't know why you're so dubious, they were sold as a bundle, like all the a la carte features. You didn't need to buy them all at $2 each. According to my order history the spell bundle for the PHB was $5 (probably cheaper than most bundles as much of it was free in the basic rules).
That same $5 was then discounted off the price of the PHB if you decided to buy the whole thing, so you would never end up spending more than the price of the whole book if you went back for the rest later.
So either (a) get your 5 dollars refunded, or (b) make your character with the spells you want, then pull up the old text in a different tab when you're using said spells and said text is different. Or both.
The homebrew option is literally just for changed spells where you prefer the old versions and that you want the sheet to roll for you. Most characters don't have that many of them.
We paid not to have to homebrew, who is gonna pay us to do it this including the learning curve which has $0 ROI as I am pretty sure paying someone to do it for you is piracy, and the time to actually enter the home brews and test them after we learn how to do it?, that is exactly what we paid not to do when we purchased the content or we would have bought the physical books or compendium only when it was available, why ever pay for anything on this site other than a master tier subscription if this is going to happen whenever wizbro wants to come out with a new book or 2 and shore up the margins for the investor call which is when oh, next month right about the time new PHB releases??
We have always and still can homebrew not publish anything we want for free and share it for ~$50 a year as long as we don't publish it, so the $100's of dollars spent not to have to manually enter what we paid this site to do for us is wasted, not to mention the countless hours taken to learn how to do so when we created a nice homebrew experience for our players with tooltips that this new stuff breaks is just wasted when wizbro steals what we paid for and says just homebrew and we are gonna break anything but the most basic homebrewed things it or buy our new book we know you don't want but we are still gonna break your homebrew, they even removed piecemeal in preparation for this scenario.
I mean if it works for you great, but it is gonna break a lot of games for a lot of people, and we have what a couple of weeks to fix it with a holiday weekend during that, SMH what a joke.
So no $5 ain't close to covering the real damages many will suffer from this fiasco.
Ultimately if they can keep legacy races, they can keep legacy spells. I have paid for 2014 content, they are altering the product after purchase, I bought those spells with the full expectation that they would be available on a decent character creator for ease of use permanently. I do not want to be persuaded to buy 2024 content to save me time homebrewing 100's of spells. It is a cashgrab to get people who weren't fully on board with 2024 panicked into updating to the new edition to save them a lot of faff. Paying a couple of guys a bit to make a 2014 spell toggle in the character and write out maybe the 100 spells that have changed would have been the right way to go about this. Nail in the coffin in terms of whether or not I renew my sub
It should be noted, many spells are staying the same, and the ones that are being updated had mechanical problems. For example, healing spells did not keep up with monster damage, resulting in a gameplay loop where a healer’s best bet was often to heal someone when downed, rather than proactively try to keep them from going down in the first place. Or spiritual weapon never having required concentration, allowing clerics to become tempests of repeated damage through doubling up spiritual weapons and spirit guardians.
Other changes include common sense ones like making Chill Touch a touch spell (alleviating an incredibly obvious problem for newer players) and rebalancing some of the cantrips folks never used to ensure players have meaningful options and don’t just take the same basic cantrips every time.
If these changes were down by errata, no one would bat an eye - people would look at them and say “yeah, that makes sense. That does fix a gameplay issue.” Think of it as errata - which is basically what it is - and you shouldn’t have any real issue with things that are, after a decade, getting fixed.
There is a reason no one has been saying “here is why I want a specific underpowered/overpowered 2014 spell” - it is just a bunch of folks essentially whining “I don’t want change, never mind that I can’t articulate a single reason I don’t want the change other than my not wanting change in the first place.” And, as always, the loudest voices and instigators on these forums are the same folks who hate Wizards and find anything to stir the “change is bad” pot, even if it is a pretty minor thing like some obviously-needed errata.
It should be noted, many spells are staying the same, and the ones that are being updated had mechanical problems. For example, healing spells did not keep up with monster damage, resulting in a gameplay loop where a healer’s best bet was often to heal someone when downed, rather than proactively try to keep them from going down in the first place. Or spiritual weapon never having required concentration, allowing clerics to become tempests of repeated damage through doubling up spiritual weapons and spirit guardians.
Other changes include common sense ones like making Chill Touch a touch spell (alleviating an incredibly obvious problem for newer players) and rebalancing some of the cantrips folks never used to ensure players have meaningful options and don’t just take the same basic cantrips every time.
If these changes were down by errata, no one would bat an eye - people would look at them and say “yeah, that makes sense. That does fix a gameplay issue.” Think of it as errata - which is basically what it is - and you shouldn’t have any real issue with things that are, after a decade, getting fixed.
There is a reason no one has been saying “here is why I want a specific underpowered/overpowered 2014 spell” - it is just a bunch of folks essentially whining “I don’t want change, never mind that I can’t articulate a single reason I don’t want the change other than my not wanting change in the first place.” And, as always, the loudest voices and instigators on these forums are the same folks who hate Wizards and find anything to stir the “change is bad” pot, even if it is a pretty minor thing like some obviously-needed errata.
While I agree that there's much less changing than people are assuming, there's no changelog for the spells, and there are known to be at least some changes that are significant, so they can't tell.
Having made the decision to do it this way, which is a surprise to everyone, since it's not the way they're handling anything else, WotC should've had the spell changelog available.
They also sowed some extra confusion with their list of things that will be changing on the character sheet including a bunch of things like AC where AFAIK they're not changing anything but the rules text that comes up.
I couldn't agree more! If you paid for a crappy version of a thing, and that version gets updated, it's a GOOD thing!
I think the only people with specific gripes are lovers of the broken Conjure Spells. I'm so happy WotC has owned up to the brokenness of these so I, as a DM, don't have to argue with every new druid at my table who wants a 30 minute turn.
You're wrong on that one, certain conjure spells (animals cough) needed to change I agree but they killed any creativity with conjure celestial, elemental, fey. The changes I don't like include those to shocking grasp, inflict wounds(nerfed), conjure minor elementals (which is now busted), blade ward (buffed when it didn't need it), grease (specifically not flammable), hunters Mark on all attack rolls not just weapons, spiritual weapon is actually far stronger than it used be to a point where it's a must pick, the old one was actually just fine( you can go look at the optimising community's opinion in 5e of you doubt me). True strike buffing SADpaladin by allowing spellcasting ability modifier attacks(old true strike was shit but I don't like the buffed version). And ultimately the level of power creep in buffed spells (so many) and character classes is crazy but we don't even have a clue how monsters are gonna be buffed to deal with every PC being that much closer to demigods. The healing buffs are hugely relevant as to why this change needed to be put on hold, as they massively effect the way an adventuring day pans out. This change could have waited until the MM and DMG were due to release at the very least. Balancing will be hard with the monsters we currently have access to with the massive buffs across the board to PCs and no CR calculation updates. So here I am articulating why I don't want these changes but agree with some of them, because weirdly enough a lot of people aren't just whining but have genuine concerns about this and their right to access and use content in an accessible manner that they paid a lot of money for.
This is the thing. My opposition to the forced changes has nothing to do with whether the new options are better or worse. I had no intention of switching mid campaign and so haven't even looked at what the new rules are (outside of the odd news article).
It doesn't matter if the new rules are all 100% better than the old, no-one should be forced to switch before they are ready. Especially as the 2014 rules could all be hidden away between one or more "Legacy" toggles. DMs have enough to do prep-wise without having to adapt to new rules on virtually no notice.
Ages ago, before they stopped doing it, I bought all of the Player's Handbook Spells and Magic Items.
I've been searching everywhere for an answer to this to no avail. Does anyone know how the 2024 changes are going to effect spells that were purchased Al La Carte? Will they simply register as already owned and be updated, or will they just no longer be available?
Owned and updated to the 2024 rules, according to the new change log update posted minutes ago. This is after the announcement earlier today.
I couldn't agree more! If you paid for a crappy version of a thing, and that version gets updated, it's a GOOD thing!
I think the only people with specific gripes are lovers of the broken Conjure Spells. I'm so happy WotC has owned up to the brokenness of these so I, as a DM, don't have to argue with every new druid at my table who wants a 30 minute turn.
There is an entire thread on these forums about Silvery Barbs. With many defending what many a DM banned at his or her table. With many getting angry at the thought that a DM would ban a spell at his or her table. But just like magic with a new version of the game soon to be on the shelves things that were once great and worth defending have become crap upon their being revised or removed.
I couldn't agree more! If you paid for a crappy version of a thing, and that version gets updated, it's a GOOD thing!
I think the only people with specific gripes are lovers of the broken Conjure Spells. I'm so happy WotC has owned up to the brokenness of these so I, as a DM, don't have to argue with every new druid at my table who wants a 30 minute turn.
"Crappy version" is subjective. I've had fun with current "crappy" versions. I've enjoyed the "crappy" versions. From my perspective, they're not "crappy" at all. I think they're good!
I love Spiritual Weapon. It's a nice feeling to be like, "Okay, this is a tough fight. Time to bring out the second level spell."
I love healing spells. There was a healing word chain that was awesome. The bard got my cleric up from zero and then my cleric got the fighter up from zero. That was a fun game moment! And it was using the "crappy" version of healing word too!
I'm not going to tell you what you should like. If you like the 5.5 spells, more power to you! I've heard things people are excited about and I'm sure you'll have fun with them. But I like what I have right now. And I like the group where we use what we have right now. So please don't say that I should be happy when DDB is taking away the spells that I've been happy with. Because I'm not happy with losing the spells I like.
Ages ago, before they stopped doing it, I bought all of the Player's Handbook Spells and Magic Items.
I've been searching everywhere for an answer to this to no avail. Does anyone know how the 2024 changes are going to effect spells that were purchased Al La Carte? Will they simply register as already owned and be updated, or will they just no longer be available?
The changes detailed in the changelog will affect the spells regardless of whether they were purchased a la carte or as a whole book.
Basically they're going to into the database and editing the spell itself. This is why you lose the 2014 version and will need to create a homebrew version, because the official 2014 will be overwritten to the 2024 one. On one hand you'll get the updated version free. On the other, if you prefer 2014 version you have a little work to do to get it back.
Click ✨ HERE ✨ For My Youtube Videos featuring Guides, Tips & Tricks for using D&D Beyond.
Need help with Homebrew? Check out ✨ this FAQ/Guide thread ✨ by IamSposta.
You bought over 200 spells a la carte? Why not just buy the book itself at that point... 🤨
Yes, you'll get the 2024 versions of those spells for free. If you want to stick with the 2014 versions for any that were updated and use them from your sheet, you'll need to use the homebrew tools. For any that don't need to be used from your sheet, you can just pull up your 2014 PHB and read them from there. If you want to instead own the entire book, I'd contact customer service, you've certainly spent enough.
but why do we have to do the work? that feels pointless when we already have the spells already listed you think they would just add a filter option like they did with classes. making people have to recreate the content they already paid for (the version they saw, wanted, and bought) and getting rid of it replacing it with something they might not have wanted feels really bad.
How am I gonna know? I don't work here. 🤣
Click ✨ HERE ✨ For My Youtube Videos featuring Guides, Tips & Tricks for using D&D Beyond.
Need help with Homebrew? Check out ✨ this FAQ/Guide thread ✨ by IamSposta.
I don't know why you're so dubious, they were sold as a bundle, like all the a la carte features. You didn't need to buy them all at $2 each. According to my order history the spell bundle for the PHB was $5 (probably cheaper than most bundles as much of it was free in the basic rules).
That same $5 was then discounted off the price of the PHB if you decided to buy the whole thing, so you would never end up spending more than the price of the whole book if you went back for the rest later.
So either (a) get your 5 dollars refunded, or (b) make your character with the spells you want, then pull up the old text in a different tab when you're using said spells and said text is different. Or both.
The homebrew option is literally just for changed spells where you prefer the old versions and that you want the sheet to roll for you. Most characters don't have that many of them.
Regardless, if you want to keep the original spells, if I were you, I'd go through and make copies of the spells as homebrew, just in case you want to keep them as-is.
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Tasha
We paid not to have to homebrew, who is gonna pay us to do it this including the learning curve which has $0 ROI as I am pretty sure paying someone to do it for you is piracy, and the time to actually enter the home brews and test them after we learn how to do it?, that is exactly what we paid not to do when we purchased the content or we would have bought the physical books or compendium only when it was available, why ever pay for anything on this site other than a master tier subscription if this is going to happen whenever wizbro wants to come out with a new book or 2 and shore up the margins for the investor call which is when oh, next month right about the time new PHB releases??
We have always and still can homebrew not publish anything we want for free and share it for ~$50 a year as long as we don't publish it, so the $100's of dollars spent not to have to manually enter what we paid this site to do for us is wasted, not to mention the countless hours taken to learn how to do so when we created a nice homebrew experience for our players with tooltips that this new stuff breaks is just wasted when wizbro steals what we paid for and says just homebrew and we are gonna break anything but the most basic homebrewed things it or buy our new book we know you don't want but we are still gonna break your homebrew, they even removed piecemeal in preparation for this scenario.
I mean if it works for you great, but it is gonna break a lot of games for a lot of people, and we have what a couple of weeks to fix it with a holiday weekend during that, SMH what a joke.
So no $5 ain't close to covering the real damages many will suffer from this fiasco.
CENSORSHIP IS THE TOOL OF COWARDS and WANNA BE TYRANTS.
Ultimately if they can keep legacy races, they can keep legacy spells. I have paid for 2014 content, they are altering the product after purchase, I bought those spells with the full expectation that they would be available on a decent character creator for ease of use permanently. I do not want to be persuaded to buy 2024 content to save me time homebrewing 100's of spells. It is a cashgrab to get people who weren't fully on board with 2024 panicked into updating to the new edition to save them a lot of faff. Paying a couple of guys a bit to make a 2014 spell toggle in the character and write out maybe the 100 spells that have changed would have been the right way to go about this. Nail in the coffin in terms of whether or not I renew my sub
It should be noted, many spells are staying the same, and the ones that are being updated had mechanical problems. For example, healing spells did not keep up with monster damage, resulting in a gameplay loop where a healer’s best bet was often to heal someone when downed, rather than proactively try to keep them from going down in the first place. Or spiritual weapon never having required concentration, allowing clerics to become tempests of repeated damage through doubling up spiritual weapons and spirit guardians.
Other changes include common sense ones like making Chill Touch a touch spell (alleviating an incredibly obvious problem for newer players) and rebalancing some of the cantrips folks never used to ensure players have meaningful options and don’t just take the same basic cantrips every time.
If these changes were down by errata, no one would bat an eye - people would look at them and say “yeah, that makes sense. That does fix a gameplay issue.” Think of it as errata - which is basically what it is - and you shouldn’t have any real issue with things that are, after a decade, getting fixed.
There is a reason no one has been saying “here is why I want a specific underpowered/overpowered 2014 spell” - it is just a bunch of folks essentially whining “I don’t want change, never mind that I can’t articulate a single reason I don’t want the change other than my not wanting change in the first place.” And, as always, the loudest voices and instigators on these forums are the same folks who hate Wizards and find anything to stir the “change is bad” pot, even if it is a pretty minor thing like some obviously-needed errata.
While I agree that there's much less changing than people are assuming, there's no changelog for the spells, and there are known to be at least some changes that are significant, so they can't tell.
Having made the decision to do it this way, which is a surprise to everyone, since it's not the way they're handling anything else, WotC should've had the spell changelog available.
They also sowed some extra confusion with their list of things that will be changing on the character sheet including a bunch of things like AC where AFAIK they're not changing anything but the rules text that comes up.
Thanks, Caerwyn!
I couldn't agree more! If you paid for a crappy version of a thing, and that version gets updated, it's a GOOD thing!
I think the only people with specific gripes are lovers of the broken Conjure Spells. I'm so happy WotC has owned up to the brokenness of these so I, as a DM, don't have to argue with every new druid at my table who wants a 30 minute turn.
Now if only they’d actually fixed the Conjure spells instead of tossing them in a dumpster, pouring gasoline over it, and chucking a lit match in.
You're wrong on that one, certain conjure spells (animals cough) needed to change I agree but they killed any creativity with conjure celestial, elemental, fey. The changes I don't like include those to shocking grasp, inflict wounds(nerfed), conjure minor elementals (which is now busted), blade ward (buffed when it didn't need it), grease (specifically not flammable), hunters Mark on all attack rolls not just weapons, spiritual weapon is actually far stronger than it used be to a point where it's a must pick, the old one was actually just fine( you can go look at the optimising community's opinion in 5e of you doubt me). True strike buffing SADpaladin by allowing spellcasting ability modifier attacks(old true strike was shit but I don't like the buffed version). And ultimately the level of power creep in buffed spells (so many) and character classes is crazy but we don't even have a clue how monsters are gonna be buffed to deal with every PC being that much closer to demigods. The healing buffs are hugely relevant as to why this change needed to be put on hold, as they massively effect the way an adventuring day pans out. This change could have waited until the MM and DMG were due to release at the very least. Balancing will be hard with the monsters we currently have access to with the massive buffs across the board to PCs and no CR calculation updates. So here I am articulating why I don't want these changes but agree with some of them, because weirdly enough a lot of people aren't just whining but have genuine concerns about this and their right to access and use content in an accessible manner that they paid a lot of money for.
This is the thing. My opposition to the forced changes has nothing to do with whether the new options are better or worse. I had no intention of switching mid campaign and so haven't even looked at what the new rules are (outside of the odd news article).
It doesn't matter if the new rules are all 100% better than the old, no-one should be forced to switch before they are ready. Especially as the 2014 rules could all be hidden away between one or more "Legacy" toggles. DMs have enough to do prep-wise without having to adapt to new rules on virtually no notice.
Owned and updated to the 2024 rules, according to the new change log update posted minutes ago. This is after the announcement earlier today.
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There is an entire thread on these forums about Silvery Barbs. With many defending what many a DM banned at his or her table. With many getting angry at the thought that a DM would ban a spell at his or her table. But just like magic with a new version of the game soon to be on the shelves things that were once great and worth defending have become crap upon their being revised or removed.
they would have to remake all the spells. and none of the spells are gonna be THAT different.
"Crappy version" is subjective. I've had fun with current "crappy" versions. I've enjoyed the "crappy" versions. From my perspective, they're not "crappy" at all. I think they're good!
I love Spiritual Weapon. It's a nice feeling to be like, "Okay, this is a tough fight. Time to bring out the second level spell."
I love healing spells. There was a healing word chain that was awesome. The bard got my cleric up from zero and then my cleric got the fighter up from zero. That was a fun game moment! And it was using the "crappy" version of healing word too!
I'm not going to tell you what you should like. If you like the 5.5 spells, more power to you! I've heard things people are excited about and I'm sure you'll have fun with them. But I like what I have right now. And I like the group where we use what we have right now. So please don't say that I should be happy when DDB is taking away the spells that I've been happy with. Because I'm not happy with losing the spells I like.
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