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.

 

[Weiley31]

Also, since Barbarians is Nomads now, then the class should now become the Nomad. Gotta make it fair and equal now.

 

[Staffan]

I know the conventional wisdom is that mechanics sell better than settings, and settings sell better than adventures, but I'm wondering if WotC knows something we don't on that front. They've released more adventures than settings, and more settings than mechanics books - even to the point where Strixhaven was ~60% adventure despite being nominally a setting book. Although there's clearly a strategy of releasing mechanics sparingly to prevent 3e-style option bloat and power creep, I don't think they'd be doing this if it wasn't working for them on a sales front.

I wonder if perhaps this particular conventional wisdom isn't true any more.

The difference, I think, is that classical adventures were short little things that would rarely even get you a whole level (particularly in the days of AD&D when getting enough XP to level up could take ages), often focused on a single dungeon. On one level that kind of thing can be useful for a DM wanting some filler, but on the other hand it can be hard fitting it into a campaign – particularly a more "modern" campaign that's not just the early Gygaxian "We heard there's treasure over there, let's go and take it." So that sort of adventure can be hard to sell.

But that's not what we're getting, for the most part. Instead, they're selling campaigns. They may be short campaigns, but to a large degree the intent is that you make a bunch of characters to play e.g. Out of the Abyss, start them at a fairly low level (usually 1 or 3), and then keep playing until that campaign is done at level 8-15 or so, and then either keep playing with those characters or move on to a new campaign with new characters. That's a lot easier to sell, and it's also a lot easier to provide a more distinct experience – there's the "exploring the Underdark" campaign, the "fey carnival" campaign, the "arctic survival horror" campaign, and so on.

Do these appeal to the widest possible audience? No. But D&D is now big enough that it's OK to appeal to a niche, because that niche is enough to turn a profit in itself, and it widens the appeal of the game overall. Strixhaven might not be for those who prefer the "kick door, kill monster, take loot" cycle, or even more epic campaigns like classic Dragonlance, but it adds something new to D&D which will (hopefully) bring in players who like other things.

Allow me to be the first to welcome our Taco Bell overlords!

Or Pizza Hut overlords for us Europeans.

I wish that they would add in another pillar of character creation, culture. Just like background and race, also being able to pick that. But it would need to be setting specific, and it could hit into the same Planet of Hats issues plus possible reintroduction of sensitivity issue they removed racial ability scores - "why are everyone from X proficient in athletic skills while those from Y culture are intellectual skills" or whatever mechanical expression gets picked.

Sounds like you might be interested in Level Up, which both adds a culture component to your character's origin and moves the ability bonuses from heritage (formerly race) to background.

 

[Scribe]

Now if only they’d remove the murder is the best path to power stuff, the home invasion for fun and profit stuff, the kill everything and steal everything stuff, and all the conquistadors & colonizers stuff.

Give it a few years.

 

[Blue]

I cannot support claims I've never made nor ideas I don't have.

Can you tell me how you meant your post then, since I must have misunderstood it.

You said: "I cannot fathom looking at the Realms or Eberron and thinking that though a player character's race doesn't determine culture Amn, Chult, the Dalelands, Sharn, Waterdeep, etc are all now the same."

The "now" strongly implies this was the change, and you are saying that you can't imagine how races doesn't imply culture in all of those locations.

Please, what did you mean?

 

[Staffan]

That seems counter to Hasbro's general business practices: they bought DnD for the IP, they know how to monetize IP's, and their most valuable assets are ultimately IP's. They wouldn't want to dilute the brand... they do want to expand it, and make the game as popular as possible, but they really want to make a successful movie because they will never make a billion dollars selling rpg splatbooks.

Hasbro bought Wizards primarily for the Pokémon money, and secondarily for the Magic money. D&D was just along for the ride, and was for quite a while in danger of being shelved. That's part of why 4e was made, and for some of the decisions made regarding 4e (such as D&D Insider and the attempt at making a VTT) – Hasbro wasn't happy with the money D&D made and Wizards were trying to make it more profitable.

 

[Weiley31]

and they choose music hall?

You know what they say bout Bards.

 

[Von Ether]

This is fascinating in the way that D&D’s “official” stance is an implied endorsement or gameplay “correctness.” Suddenly some of the people in the past who said, “Why fret, do whatever in your home game,” are suddenly feeling very different.

Especially since the need for people to have the most official of official 5e products is one WotC’s biggest selling points. I know people who refuse to buy DMs Guild Adept pdfs because they are “ official” enough.

(Most Adepts are WotC freelancers now. You can’t get more official than that without walking into the lobby.)

Depending on my table and adventure, I will use some of these changes and sometimes I won’t. Mostly because I’ve already been doing something similar for years. (Egalitarian steampunk vs vanilla high fantasy)

 

[Professor Murder]

It's like this.

I've been DMing for over 3 decades now and around 2/3rd of the time, I run a homebrew setting. When I do run a published setting, I adapt it for my needs and the needs of the group. I'm about to run Ravenloft again, the first time in 5th ed for me. I'm using a mish-mash of previous cannon, 5th ed Van Richtens, and my own takes.

There is only one time that book cannon really matters, and that is when you are running in some organized play capacity like Adventurer's League. In your home game, run it how you and your table appreciates. I have been keeping up with the discourse and find it all enlightening and yeah, it has affected how I frame aspects of setting to seek to move past things like the part racism plays in race construction in rpgs.
But in the end, it's a game and you can do with it what you will. Are they "watering things down?" Possibly. But then again, doing straight lines of uncut 70s white males nerditry for 50 years, somethings got to give.

Dungeons and Dragons is becoming mainstream. This is part of what mainstreaming looks like folks. So yeah, I'm going to keep having some cultures be clearly evil, but I will keep in mind that individual creatures should be expected to deviate from those cultural norms, just as people do in this real world of ours.

Play the game. Have fun. Respect the people at your table. Respect each other. If your game has to have "problematic" elements to feel like gaming to you, perhaps you should ask yourself why.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Now if only they’d remove the murder is the best path to power stuff, the home invasion for fun and profit stuff, the kill everything and steal everything stuff, and all the conquistadors & colonizers stuff.

How about 1,000,000,000% less slavers and ex-slave peoples?

I omit the Underdark entirely in everything I run and design because that's the only thing down there.

 

[DarkCrisis]

This whole thing reminds me of the South Park episode with the non-offensive Christmas play.