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Any tabletop roleplaying game going through the transition process of launching a new edition is bound to have growing pains. But when Wizards of the Coast made a major selling point out of how easy its 50th-anniversary-celebrating new edition would make it for current players pick up their characters and campaigns and venture forth into the new ruleset, it’s hard to see its latest bit of drama feel like nothing more than the latest in the company’s increasingly long line of unforced errors.
Ahead of the incoming launch of the new revised Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook next month, last week Wizards of the Coast announced how it planned to have its digital marketplace/virtual tabletop system D&D Beyond present to players both new material from the next evolution of the game, and the Fifth Edition rules and details they’ve had access to in their Beyond accounts over a decade’s worth of D&D material. While overall some of the changes made sense, in some regards, it was… not as good at that.
While many elements of D&D‘s 2024 ruleset were made in mind so that players could keep use the versions found in Fifth Edition and its many sourcebooks–like playable species, certain classes and subclasses, background choices and particular feats–Wizards planned on drawing a hard line on the rules for spells and magical items available on Beyond. All of those would be updated to their 2024 versions, and the 2014 versions would simply be wiped off of Beyond entirely, regardless if your account had purchases access to the new Player’s Handbook or not. If you wanted to use those 2014 versions? Well, do it yourself, so sayeth one of the biggest roleplaying game publishers in the world. “If you wish to use the old version of a magic item or spell that has been replaced by its 2024 counterpart,” Wizards’ original changelog read in part. “You will need to create a homebrew copy of it and enable homebrew content on your character sheet. Then, you can add it to your character sheet”.
Suffice to say people were not pleased. Given how important Wizards sees Beyond and its use as a digital ecosystem for future of the game heading into the new edition, the idea of completely wiping away access to Fifth Edition’s spells in this regard–plenty of elements from Fifth Edition were otherwise being retained, with a badge to mark their status as “legacy” material–and leaving it up to individual players to catalogue a decade’s worth of spells and items manually, made no sense. Especially given that the change would impact a player regardless of whether or not they had purchased the new 2024 rulebooks on their account. Again, as it did before however, it took fans speaking up for Wizards to realize what a mistake it was making.
Last week we released a Changelog detailing how players would experience the 2024 Core Rulebooks on D&D Beyond. We heard your feedback loud and clear and thank you for speaking up.
Read the full update here: https://t.co/o6wDEwjBs1 pic.twitter.com/IKNRsOcXIp
— D&D Beyond (@DnDBeyond) August 26, 2024
“We heard your feedback loud and clear and thank you for speaking up,” an updated statement from D&D Beyond released last night reads. “Our excitement around the 2024 Core Rulebooks led us to view these planned updates as welcome improvements and free upgrades to existing content. We misjudged the impact of this change, and we agree that you should be free to choose your own way to play.”
According to the updated addendum to the changelog, now players who only have access to the 2014 version of the Player’s Handbook in their Beyond accounts will retain the ability to use 2014 versions of spells and magical items with their characters, while players who have both the 2014 and 2024 Player’s Handbooks on their accounts will be able select either the former or updated version of a spell via a native option, rather than having to manually homebrew the old version themselves.
“We’re dedicated to making D&D Beyond the ultimate digital toolset for Dungeons & Dragons, continuously enhancing the platform to ensure you can create, customize, and play your game just as you envision it,” the updated statement concluded. “From your first one-shot to multi-year campaigns and everything in between, we’re grateful to be on this journey with you.”
It’s good that Wizards learned the lesson relatively quickly this time (compared to how, for example, it initially handled the backlash against its planned changes to the Open Game License last year). But considering how Dungeons & Dragons‘ new edition wants to treat itself more like a living game than ever before–where its ruleset can be regularly tweaked and updated as necessary–while also maintaining a level of continuity with players still using the Fifth Edition rules they’ve had over the course of D&D‘s massive popularity boom in the last 10 years, the fact that it initially didn’t see that making this process a manual one where the onus was on players, rather than Beyond as a platform, to make the intended compatibility smooth, is kind of wild. At least they’re listening!
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