D&D 5E Latest D&D Errata: Drow, Alignment, & More

Sage Advice is a series of articles in which Jeremy Crawford, one of the D&D Studio’s game design architects, talks about the design of the game’s rules and answers questions about them.

Book Updates | Sage Advice | Dungeons & Dragons

This Sage Advice provides updates and errata for a number of books, as well as answers to rules questions.

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D&D books occasionally receive corrections and other updates to their rules and story. This Sage Advice installment presents updates to several books. I then answer a handful of rules questions, focusing on queries related to Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons and Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos.

Official errata has been published for the following books:

• Curse of Strahd
• Dungeon Master’s Guide
• Player’s Handbook
• Storm King’s Thunder
• Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide
• Tales from the Yawning Portal
• Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything
• Tomb of Annihilation
• Volo’s Guide to Monsters

Here's some of the highlights.

• Alignment is removed from the Racial Traits section of races.
• Drow have undergone lore changes which reflect the different types of drow. The 'darkness of the drow' sidebar which portrays them as only evil has been removed.
• Storm King's Thunder alters references to 'Savage Frontier' and 'barbarians'; Curse of Strahd alters references to the Vistani.
• The controversial Silvery Barbs spell has been clarified.

As a drow, you are infused with the magic of the Underdark, an underground realm of wonders and horrors rarely seen on the surface above. You are at home in shadows and, thanks to your innate magic, learn to con- jure forth both light and darkness. Your kin tend to have stark white hair and grayish skin of many hues.

The cult of the god Lolth, Queen of Spiders, has cor- rupted some of the oldest drow cities, especially in the worlds of Oerth and Toril. Eberron, Krynn, and other realms have escaped the cult’s influence—for now. Wherever the cult lurks, drow heroes stand on the front lines in the war against it, seeking to sunder Lolth’s web.

 

[Oofta]

I don't think the alignment language changing is a huge issue because it's only for PCs, but I do wonder what it means for future MMs. The current way they label monsters can be misleading; it's made clear in the MM intro that alignment is just a default and does not always apply. I do think they should be expanded on that (including a section in the DMG) for each entry and do something like 3.5 did with "often" or "usually" clarifiers. I've always been kind of surprised they didn't do this for 5E.

When we've had this discussion in the past, the argument was always that humanoids should not have an "any" alignment listed but that if you wanted evil monsters you could always have thing like beholders.

Except now if, and this is still a big if, they remove the alignment from all monsters that are playable races what does that even mean? If beholders, which are about as far removed from humans as D&D get, are just humans in a different form I don't think that's a good thing for the game.

Ah well. Time will tell and we don't really know where they're heading with this. It's more that if we can have beholder PCs, why not demons, devils, ghosts, vampires all of which have the same generic lack of background and flavor? Maybe for me it's not that they're removing some things, it's that they're removing things and not replacing them with anything.

 

[sterndisgust]

The issue I think is as an "unique" trait for a minor npc, the urge to play it in a hyper-exagerated comical manner is huge. We're not looking for a nuanced depiction of speech disorders, we're looking for a memorable way to spice up an encounter with shopkeeper #1068.

In that light, I don't mind them moving things that can easily be used as mocking out of the suggestions.

This is why I said they should just add a line, or any pointer, saying that roleplaying needn't be vocal. Several other entries - fidgeting, twirling hair, speaking too loudly or softly - can be taken to the same extreme and turned into offensive "comedy" bits about ADHD, OCD, misogyny, or stereotypical Hollywood portrayals of mental illness in the 80's and 90's.

I believe we misunderstand one another so I'll see myself out on this one.

 

[John R Davis]

I'll still keep playing as long as breaking into a (not a) monsters home, killing them and all their kin, and robbing them of every fixture and fitting, is still allowed
Diverse adventurers have been doing that since the 70's so I'm assuming that may survive the Purge of 2024.

 

[Azzy]

(Does anyone know why yuan-ti have a vaguely Chinese-sounding name, anyway?)

I've always wondered this, too. I've never seen anything from 1e onward that actively presents them as particularly East Asian.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

what... are you kidding me? in a game where we regularly kill things with sharp or pointy weapons (or beat them to death with blunt ones) the word brothel offended someone?!? that is the most American thing ever... violence gets a pass but we can't even do a hint of sexuality...

I get the point you are trying to make but it's a bit... off the mark.
You think brothels are about sexuality? Think a bit more about it and get back to us...

 

[Azzy]

Like some others, there's some of the errata that seems a little out there (beholders, illithid, some of the DMG changes, etc.), but whatever. I'm fine with the rest of it, and it's providing some entertainment by seeing the hyperboltastic melodrama being expressed by some of the reactionaries over a game of playing-pretend.

 

[Azzy]

I don't know why anyone would be upset at this point. The all drow are evil stance hasn't been true since they were included in the PHB as a standard playable race.

Heck, it hasn't been true since the 1e Unearthed Arcana.

 

[HammerMan]

I get the point you are trying to make but it's a bit... off the mark.
You think brothels are about sexuality? Think a bit more about it and get back to us...

oh please explain what (other then sex) is wrong with a brothels'.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I wonder if the same people who are complaining about WotC's so-called laziness in making all the races generic and not culturally specific in each setting anymore... would respond to the question "If you need highly specific cultures for these races in these settings, why don't you just make them up yourself?" with "I'm buying a campaign setting! I shouldn't HAVE to!" Completely of course missing the irony of the potential laziness here.

But I mean in all seriousness... if anyone REALLY needs the races in Faerun to be culturally specific and concise, with all their own picadillos and customs... you already have that for yourself. A lot of it has been given over the 35 years of FR products and none of that has gone away. In fact you probably still own and reference those products and can easily remind yourself "Hmm... how do Humans react to Tieflings in the Dalelands?" by flipping through a few of your books. You've been playing with all these cultural ideas in your Faerun for years now... so any changes that appear in these errata'd books going forward (books you won't actually buy because you already own a previous version of them)... do not impact you and your game at all. Your game and your setting will not change with these book reprints. All these reprints do is change the starting point of any new player for whom this will be their first product and thus will learn of this new baseline as their standard. And that is absolutely no different than any single change that has ever happened over the course of these past 40 years. An older player knows of a previous thing... a new player coming from a new book has a new idea about said things.

And what happens when the two of you get together? Whichever one is DMing determines their truth for the game, and the other one either plays it that way, or they choose not to play at all. Just like any D&D game ever.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

oh please explain what (other then sex) is wrong with a brothels'.

Well, given that some of the base subclasses in the PHB include Thief and Assassin, I am somewhat at a loss as to why brothels are worse than people who kill for hire.

Of course, what I'm most curious about is the decision to try and scrub the word Barbarian, which I would think makes it more interesting in terms of choosing classes in the future ...