D&D Publisher Walks Back Controversial Changes To Online Tools (theverge.com) 81
The Verge's Ash Parrish reports: Last week, as a part of the updates to Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition -- collectively known as the 2024 revision -- the publisher announced that it would update D&D Beyond, the tabletop RPG's official digital toolkit that players use to reference content and create characters using a host of official and third-party sources. The update would add the new 2024 rulebooks to the toolkit, mark outdated content with a "legacy" badge, and change players' character sheets to reflect all the new rules and features.
That last part is critical to understanding why some D&D players (including my own dungeon master) spent the last 72 hours in a state of panic. Though some of the 2024 revisions are essentially cosmetic in nature -- for example, "races" will be updated to "species" -- other updates like the ones to weapons, spells, and magic items fundamentally alter the game. Wizards of the Coast would have essentially overwritten every user's character sheet with the new information whether they wanted it or not. "All entries for mundane and magical items, weapons, armor, and spells will also be updated to their 2024 version," Wizards said in its initial announcement. The publisher did say that players would have the option to continue to use the 2014 version of spells and magic items. But doing so requires using the game's homebrew rules. which aren't known for being user-friendly.
Thankfully, Wizards of the Coast isn't in the car business, and after a weekend of backlash on social media, the company will no longer force the new changes on players. "We misjudged the impact of this change, and we agree that you should be free to choose your own way to play," Wizard's said in its latest announcement. Current character sheets will only be updated with new terminology while the older versions of spells, magic items, and weapons will be preserved. Also, players who have access to both the 2014 and 2024 digital versions will have the option to use both when creating new characters.
That last part is critical to understanding why some D&D players (including my own dungeon master) spent the last 72 hours in a state of panic. Though some of the 2024 revisions are essentially cosmetic in nature -- for example, "races" will be updated to "species" -- other updates like the ones to weapons, spells, and magic items fundamentally alter the game. Wizards of the Coast would have essentially overwritten every user's character sheet with the new information whether they wanted it or not. "All entries for mundane and magical items, weapons, armor, and spells will also be updated to their 2024 version," Wizards said in its initial announcement. The publisher did say that players would have the option to continue to use the 2014 version of spells and magic items. But doing so requires using the game's homebrew rules. which aren't known for being user-friendly.
Thankfully, Wizards of the Coast isn't in the car business, and after a weekend of backlash on social media, the company will no longer force the new changes on players. "We misjudged the impact of this change, and we agree that you should be free to choose your own way to play," Wizard's said in its latest announcement. Current character sheets will only be updated with new terminology while the older versions of spells, magic items, and weapons will be preserved. Also, players who have access to both the 2014 and 2024 digital versions will have the option to use both when creating new characters.
Well, a pretty good illustration of the issue (Score:4, Insightful)
I still use paper and pencil everything and have no relationship with WotC. They can do whatever they want with their trademarks. I'll never play their game again. They can't be trusted.
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It's been a few years since I DM'd my kids and their friends, but I found that the game gets more fun the fewer rulebooks you have.
Once you have a general framework - mostly the basic character classes - the cooperative storytelling you do with it is far more important than being a slave to the latest published rule book. Rule Lawyers and Min/Maxers don't know what they're missing.
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As some one who often feels hindered by D&Ds rules I disagree but to each their own. I definitely don't fall into the "the rules don't matter man" camp though.
And no that doesn't make me a min maxer or rule lawyer although on rare occasion Ive been thought of as such by people who don't know how to play the game.
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Back in the day we used to play the Fighting Fantasy roleplay system, based on the series of books. It's simplicity was its key feature - three stats, everything done with D6, short rule-set.
Warhammer wasn't bad either, not too complicated and combat was always very risky so you never got to the point where your character was so high level that lower level opponents and traps were of little concern.
D&D was always too complex for my liking. You don't need a rule for everything.
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You don't need a rule for everything.
When I first started playing D&D back in the late 70's, it was with the First Edition. It was simple, and required only a few books and minimal supplies, which was great for a pre-teen. My parents supplied me with a few bucks to get started.
When I last played, back in the 90's, in was Second Edition. I had a nearly complete set of Second Edition books and and a fair amount supplies from the 80's, so I didn't need to spend much of my college funds on more books and supplies. My friends and I had a great
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I still have my copy of that game. All D6s, which was a definite advantage when I lived about 60 miles from the nearest store that sold polyhedral dice.
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When I'm DMing these days, I'm using OSR, and in particular White Box FMAG, which is a reconstruction of the original White Box original D&D, with a few updates (like ascending armor class). Combat is lightning fast, there are only the four default character classes (Fighter, Magic User, Cleric, and the slightly later addition of the Thief), as well as the Elf, Dwarf and Halfling races. You can generate a character in about 10 minutes, and the player has the freedom to define the character in any way th
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I still use paper and pencil everything and have no relationship with WotC. They can do whatever they want with their trademarks. I'll never play their game again. They can't be trusted.
Yessir, I developed the same attitude toward WotC so I went off and started playing DCC, Castles and Crusades, Mythras and OSE. Also some ACKS since their economic stuff is really good.
Funny enough, my son is running Cyberpunk with some of his friends this weekend, and had a moment of despair this morning when he noticed that the character sheet made him think of a spreadsheet. He and his friends all play completely pencil and paper, no digital maps or anything like that. That boy makes me proud. :)
The only programs I use I wrote 1n the 80's (Score:2)
I havexa character generator, a random monster and magic item program, and a chi^2 program to check the randomness of dice.
We still play the original rules.
I met EGG in 84. And got punched out by Harlan Ellison,lol.
Panic? (Score:2)
Really? It wasn't even that big of a deal and all of the changes are good changes. It's not like any of the changes would critically ruin, or even have a real negative impact to, anyone's campaigns.
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Really? It wasn't even that big of a deal and all of the changes are good changes. It's not like any of the changes would critically ruin, or even have a real negative impact to, anyone's campaigns.
for example, "races" will be updated to "species"
Perhaps the backlash has more to do with how pointless the changes are.
For example, who’s the butthurt moron who is suddenly offended about “races” in a fantasy game set in ancient times? All changes are “good” changes? Clearly they aren’t, says the community.
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Re:Panic? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Species" is especially wrong, because if elves are a different species from humans then you cannot have half-elves, and so on and so forth.
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Not if you make up entirely new rules for biology.
Re:Panic? (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, but the purpose of using words is that they have a definition which is commonly understood. Fantasy texts can make up all the fake biology rules they want, but that does't address the English issue.
If you just make up new definitions for existing words, it defeats the whole reason for using that word. I can say "Have a happy Friday" all I want ... but if I keep saying it to people on a Tuesday, I'm going to get some weird looks.
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I agree, but most people already know next to nothing beyond elementary level biology, and even that is a stretch for some. I don't care what they call them: races, species, breed, genus, whatever. It's not important and doesn't really matter. It's like bitching about a change to flavor text - it has no meaning.
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Who gives a flying fuck why or what their reasons were? None of it matters. Does it change how you play? No. Does it negatively impact any current sessions/campaigns? No.
So how about you say something of substance? Anonymous pussy.
Re:Panic? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Horses and asses can cross breed (mules) as can tigers and lions (liger), as can many other different species. Also, it's a magical fantasy kingdom. Species makes more sense than "race", even if it sounds wrong to me too after 30 years of playing.
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Other hybrids, like red wolves (wolf-coyote hybrids) are fertile. The problem is that the species concept is an artificial concept, like planets vs planetoids, and so forth. Nature isn't nearly as clean, and hybridization doesn't always lead to sterile offspring.
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Well, there aren't 1/4 or 3/4 elves.
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> Species makes more sense than "race", even if it sounds wrong to me too after 30 years of playing.
Nah - we're all of "the race of Man". Except for the AC's - they're from the race of Gnomes.
But in general D&D has been very unifying for humans.
WoC is woke garbage and wants us to know we're a species and many /different/ races. Very divisive.
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Realistically race has been a bit ambiguous for a long time. (Modern) Humans are all the same species, but there are variations amongst the populations in physical traits that we've deemed ethnicities, or races. Sometimes there's a dictionary difference but in common usage they're synonyms.
In animals we'd probably use the term sub-species or breeds (as in dogs, horses, etc), but that DOES have a bit of an offensive tone.
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I find it weird how people get hung up on the scientific justifications for these fantasy settings. Star Trek gets it too, despite most of the "science" being either entirely made-up (e.g. subspace) or extremely speculative at best.
They are rarely even internally consistent.
Plus the language around species, race, and breeds is largely just a product of historical factors, rather than accurate scientific terms. Biologists use different words when writing academically.
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Yeah exactly. It's like, OK you're fine with playing your 1/4 human, 1/4 orc, 1/2 dragon character, but you're gonna get hung up on the semantics of whether it would make sense to for those creatures to cross-breed if we call them species instead of races? It's a game, make up whatever magical sperm head canon you want.
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They used a word that has a meaning.
If they don't want that meaning to apply, they should use a different word.
They should just borrow something more applicable from some foreign culture like they did almost everything else in the game (except for what, like three monsters?)
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Not to be pedantic, but at least in the real world, the species concept is more flexible than that. Coyotes and wolves are viewed as two different species due to behavioral differences and genetic distance, but coyotes and wolves do interbreed enough that there exist hybrid species like the red wolf, and there is some gene flow between North American canids (including domestic dogs, which are basically a sub-species of gray wolf).
In short, our species concept is an attempt to take what is a typical fuzzy me
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Tigers and Lions are different species (Panthera Tigris vs Panthera Leo), and they can reproduce.
Same with Horses (Equus ferus caballus) and Donkeys (Equus asinus).
Polar bears (Ursus maritimus) and brown bears (Ursus arctos).
Some of these off spring are sterile and not capable of further reproduction, and others are not. All in all though you can have two species breed if they're similar.
Also, not sure if this is the same batch of changes but apparently the "half" races were going to be removed too, as cal
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The community (specifically D&D Beyond) are full of asshats and morons who are too stupid to ever actually leave WotC regardless of what they do. WotC does not need to cater to these people.
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I'm sorry but I feel like you've perhaps missed something about the customer/role playing game designer relationship.
WotC never owned the vast majority of the content that is used to play D&D, because it's made up by people for their local tabletop group and they never have to use tools like D&D beyond, and never have any plan of distributing it.
It's really kind of ironic that you'd claim that this community is full of asshats. The majority of people who play D&D aren't in it, and don't need Wot
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WotC never owned the vast majority of the content that is used to play D&D, because it's made up by people for their local tabletop group and they never have to use tools like D&D beyond, and never have any plan of distributing it.
These people aren't complaining and don't care about the changes until they decide to buy (or steal) the updated books and adopt the changes, so I'm not referring to them. Or did you just miss that I was calling out the D&D Beyond community specifically?
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Please, do keep bringing up completely pointless groups of people that I neither care about nor was ever referencing to begin with.
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> The majority of people who play D&D aren't in it, and don't need WotC's input in the first place
But they still choose and support WotC.
Look, every last one of those GMs (usually the GM picks the system) made a conscious choice. They could run Basic D&D, AD&D 1, 1.5, 2, 2 .5, 3, 3.5, or 4. They could also pick from literally hundreds of competing role-playing systems which can do fantasy (Pathfinder, Worlds Without Number, etc.). Objectively-speaking, there is nothing about D&D 5 that
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I really can't see how it would be 5th ed GMs asking for this if there's been so much pushback that they needed to reverse these changes
Frankly it looks like yet another Hasbro-guided money making bait and switch, and this time they're trying to make the community fight itself so they can claim control of the product.
They really don't seem to understand how much... integration work the GMs have to do with their product, and how unsustainable locking players into their specific canon is in the face of that.
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There are many "objective" things about 5e that make it better than other D&D versions. And many that make it worse.
The 5e rules are better organized and more consistent than the 1e rules - that can be a good or a bad thing depending on what you want, for example. The 5e rules are less "crunchy" than the 3.5 rules for example (again can be a good or a bad thing). There is a *very* low probability that 5e is the "best" system for anyone - there's almost certainly some other ruleset that suits their speci
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Re:Panic? (Score:4, Informative)
The backlash wasn't about the changes in the game, it was about the changes to D&D Beyond. They were going to remove all of the spell and item definitions from the 2014 rule books, and replace them with the 2024 versions. The 2014 content was paid content, and the 2024 content is also paid content: They said they wanted to delete paid content. That's what made people upset.
"Forget YOU, Realms!" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not really WotC's choice. Papa Hasbro is desperate for cash and has been squeezing WotC especially hard after COVID hit.
To the point where WotC makes up over 60% of Hasbro's revenue. (not hard - WotC sells lots of high-margin things that cost practically nothing to produce - Magic cards and D&D books).
Papa Hasbro needs revenue to make up f
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Pokemon Cards
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But remember the Order of the Stick, or whatever that comic was called.
This should generate lots of hits for its sequences where the characters are hit by rule changes mid battle and such . . .
Dumb (Score:2)
>Erm, remember folks, even in D&D. You're all exactly the same, from the 3 foot Person Of Stature to the 7 foot Pigmented Arbor Elf
When did D&D get shitty?
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When was it not?
You don't even know. I ought to get a D&D tatt (Score:2, Funny)
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Emphasis on the lot more. One of them taught me to kiss in high school. I still get kudos and I remember her, 40 years later.
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When did D&D get shitty?
For me, never. I'll always think fondly of Gary Gygax and my first-edtion D&D kit (RIP my brother, you rocked). I played AD&D a lot in middle school. It was a bit over-complicated compared to some other systems but it was popular and I DM'd a number of campaigns. Once I got into high school I had met enough serious traditional RPG fans and players (now with cars!) that could meet and play. I started bringing a lot of drugs to the campaigns in college and we switched to Palladium RPG (my personal fav
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I have a group that plays once every 3 weeks or so. I make dinner for them and they bring drinks and appetizers. A few couples and two straggler guys whose wives won't play. Mostly first edition rules, with some "Adventures Dark and Deep" rules spliced in. They're in the Elemental Nodes of the Temple of Elemental Evil right now. Some have been playing with me for 15 years now. No one under 40-45. It's a good time.
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So sick and tired (Score:5, Insightful)
Give him a year or two and they will try again. They always try again.
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You are just jealous that you don't own a rug to pull out from under anyone.
The real point....? (Score:1)
Is to build a setting and share ideas with others, so growing the setting. It's hard to make a playable setting if you are not creating your own game and sharing. Plenty people in the arts understand how vital a contributing community is to anything they do. My opinion is they'd rather keep the players clueless and frustrated while the they benefit from the collective creative efforts..... My take on the digital content changes? It's the publishers making their own changes to a standard set long ago in 5th
well the company seems to have an affinity (Score:3)
Re:well the company seems to have an affinity (Score:5, Insightful)
Ironically the issue is probably poor profitability; you'd think a more enlightened approach would make more money. Every time they lose people, they lose $$$. You'd think preserving the existing audience would be the wisest move.
Games workshop tried that and it doesn't work (Score:2)
Magic the gathering has done much the same. I think the difference is they have more lock-in than dungeons & dragons does. Investing in and painting up an army for 40K is the kind of thing that's going to trigger a sunk cost fallacy and they do have the best models in the industry hands down. Magic the g
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yes but how does help quarterly profit reports? which the golden parachute or yearly bonus for the c suite depends on.
Hasbro is trying to milk what it can
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Sell more books/get more subs for their online stuff? In other words, the obvious. Having to make the market over and over again is not only tiresome but also harder.
Par For the Course For Them (Score:4, Interesting)
This is not an an accident or outlier: Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast has a long history of doing stuff like this. They've gotten away with 95% of the insane things they've pulled, and whenever they push too far, they just make a big show of contrition and roll that one change back.
Even if you like Dungeons and Dragons, there are so many similar competitors and old editions which are equally good (if not better) than D&D 5 it just makes no sense to pick that particular system... but people are sheep and want "the latest and greatest official version", so WoC not only keeps getting away with bad behavior, they are rewarded for it.
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This.
I feel like they don't understand how tentative their grip on the market is.
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Tentative? It's all what anyone I know plays and no one has any interest in playing anything else.
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I guess they have had a "tentative" grip on the market since they began?
Any game that makes big changes that have enough player push back will be redone or rolled back.
This is not an example of a tentative grip on the market, since that would mean that EVERY GAME has a tentative grip on the market.
These people will still happily play now.
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Knowing the history of the market, I can't make sense of your rhetoric. Sorry.
Just a bunch of woke changes (Score:2)
Available here:
https://dungeonsanddragonsfan.... [dungeonsan...onsfan.com]
Abusive relationship (Score:4, Insightful)
Why are people even playing D&D any more? Hasbro has made clear they're in it for the money and don't give AF about the players unless there is an existential threat to their bottom line. So they'll push, and push and monetize and generally do everything to screw every last penny. They may be more skittish about it since the backlash over their OGL licensing changes, treading more lightly, testing the waters, but nothing has really changed. They'll do something, test for a reaction and back down if they get one, otherwise the screw tightens a little bit more.
The OGL furore should have shown people their true colors. Just move over to Pathfinder or something. The terms are more liberal and the makers seem genuinely more interested in delivering what the players want than what some toy company CEO expects as profits from one of his divisions.
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D&D has the brand name recognition. With 5e's popularity there are a lot of people playing nowadays who've never even played anything else.
Plus, learning a new rule set to the point you generally dont have to think about it while playing takes time and a certain period of uncomfortableness and that can put people off from trying new things. I do think that's a shame though as there are a lot of great rule sets out there offering a lot of fun and original game play mechanics not to mention different sett
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It does have brand name recognition but I assume anyone in the scene is aware of Pathfinder or other D20 style games and might at least try them given the way D&D has gone.
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Of the dozen or so friends I play table tops with on and off only one has ever expressed interest in at least switching to Pathfinder. It's a bummer.
On the other end of it though it's encouraged me to dust off the ol' GM hat and I'm currently working on putting together a sci fi game I can hopefully get some players on board with.
Vote with your wallet. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Agreed. I started playing table tops with D&D 2e as a kid but after branching out I've always considered D&D one of my least favorite rule sets (it's not bad and I still have fun playing, it's just most of the other ones I've played are better) and that continues to this day with 5e. They've got the brand name recognition though.
The series of screw-ups in the "Ampersand Game"... (Score:2)
... brinks on the comical. Ever since the OGL scandal 18 months or so ago there has been eff-up after eff-up and they keep on going. The newest stunt being bizarre censoring rules for youtube reviews that just caused facepalms all over the Dungeontuber scene last week and an abandoning of reviews for ampersand. Nice work, WoTC.
I never really liked DeeNDee and TSR, always looked down upon them (German old-school 80ies Dark Eye Snob here :-) ), but I have to say that current generation of indie TTRPGs and kic