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.

dnd.wizards.com

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.

 

[HammerMan]

Just had the final villain of my game be the Conquistador pastiche Paladin who was killed at the game's halfway point, only to be raised up as an avenging angel by the will of the God Emperor.

OMG I have been useing Paladin villain's since 2e too.

 

[Scribe]

how is he not grimdark space batman/punisher (turns out that is a real character the grim knight)

In some of the fiction, he could be seen as such, if you have read the Primarch Series entry for him, it shows things in quite a different light, imo.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Moving from intrinsic evil to cultural and individual experiences making a given sentient foe evil is moving in the right direction. I feel that the existing framing and implementation is hamhanded. It's likely that cleaner writing isnt really possible until the upcoming revision. I like the intention, but I can grasp being critical of the implementation. I have my own reservations.

What reservations? A handful of paragraphs in a 200 page book will be different than the one you currently own... and as you'll never buy the new version that gets printed anyway since you already own it, you'll never actually see or notice the change?

 

[Mind of tempest]

In some of the fiction, he could be seen as such, if you have read the Primarch Series entry for him, it shows things in quite a different light, imo.

yeah, he was more broken inside than me and that is saying something, somehow more fatalistic as well.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

And that would be a great topic for a Dragon Magazine article, if Dragon Magazine was still around. Or a blog article of your own, if you have a blog.

Although I have to wonder why they would be judged at all, if the brothels were mostly or entirely religious in nature.

If I had to take this topic seriously (which I am loathe to do), I think that there is a fundamental divide because people both do, and do not, want to take into account "real world" values.

To use a quick and less-loaded example: everyone agrees (I hope?) that slavery is bad. Everyone also agrees that slavery has existed in older times that some fantasy worlds model in part. People also, generally, acknowledge that many seminal fantasy works have the existence of slavery. So the issue is whether including "slavery" in a D&D campaign world should be allowed (with the implicit presumption that players would be fighting against it, or it would otherwise be a plot point), or if it should not be allowed because slavery is "bad" from a modern perspective. In other words, what is the reason for the inclusion or exclusion of this subject matter?

That's why I think issues regarding brothels is just as fraught. Because brothels have always existed. So we are left with a few ways to look at it from the modern perspective-
A. Brothels (and associated sex work) are "bad" (like slavery) because of issues involving violence, human trafficking, and so on.
B. Brother (and associated sex work) are only "bad" because they are stigmatized and often operate in a gray area which allows criminal elements (such as violence, human trafficking, and so on) to flourish. If we didn't treat it with so much stigma, then it wouldn't be such a problem.

From a modern perspective, then, there are reasonable issues and concerns from both points of view. I do think that a game like D&D becomes ... well, it's even more fraught because it is so relentlessly combat-centric, and because it features concepts like the Thief and the Assassin and the Necromancer up-front. In short, I find it odd that it tends to reinforce a cultural belief that issue of violence and poison and even murder-for-hire are perfectly acceptable within the game, but the mere mention of the possibility of sexual activity is being stamped out- I think that this is typical, but also strangely weird.

Then again, I think that most players and tables are also much more comfortable with the violence. So there's that.

Anyway, what it likely boils down to is the fact that D&D is skewing much younger. It's more about marketing, and about appealing to the current fanbase, than any deep philosophical concerns.

 

[Professor Murder]

And the end result of that "think of the children" period was the near-demise of the game.

Trying to market D&D to kids, while perhaps good for sales, IMO doesn't make the game any better at all.

Indeed. Let's hope the repeat pattern doesn't continue much longer, though, else we'll be into mid-90's TSR flounderings all over again and I think we can all do without that.

Not for nothing, but right now is the actual golden age of TTRPGs. They have never been more popular.

 

[ART!]

One of my ongoing complaints about the 5e races is that they have little design space to be interesting. The ability score modifier has the largest differentiator, and the features were small. That's caused issues before when designing races that are powerful. For example the Centaur in the MM is large, the while playable one is medium, which has a number of ripple effects including breaking the trope about riding them. If all of the races had more features, then there would be room to include more powerful features, because there would be a valid opportunity cost of not taking other races.

But now with the ability scores gone, one of the largest mechanical differentiators is gone, and I am left with the same feeling - that the races don't have much mechanical meaning. This isn't a push to return racial ability score modifiers - I am thrilled that I can match any race to any class and not be at a disadvantage. It's that all of the races need more. Unfortunately I want 2024 to be fully compatible, because if not this would be the very second thing I would be clamouring for. (The first would be a recalibration of rest-recovery models to match how people actually run).

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.

Basically, I agree with all of this. "Race" and culture and background should be a rich design space, I think. It's already part-way there, and I'm mostly cool with the changes it seems like they'll be making. But to make "races" richer, I think they'll need to think about them very differently. Making them more modular is the only way I can think to do that, but that makes them more complicated. I don't have a solution, but it's something I think about, and I look forward to seeing how they handle it.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

yeah, as a teen way back when the dinos roamed the earth in the evils of the 2e days, I had good orc tribes. I also ran into good gnolls in a game once. by 3e Kobolds were allies as often as enemies (I blame Sunless citadel) and by 4e Hobgoblins were roman armies and samari in the games I played... so 'not all' has not been the case for me for ever in D&D.

Heck, I have heard stories of good demons, evil angels, and once we had a DM try (didin't go way he wanted) to have a neutral Flayer fighting against teh change....

Hell it occurs to me not only was I running it that way from the start of 2E, but part of the reason I was that literally the first setting for 2E, Taladas, features such things as:

1) Dragons with no fixed alignment (all dragons on Taladas have non-fixed alignments).

2) Playable Ogres, Lizardfolk, Goblins, Minotaurs, and probably a couple of other generally "Evil" races, all of which do not default to Evil alignments on Taladas.

3) A general vibe that "culture shapes who you are, not race" (indeed a number of culture-based kits allow multiple races to choose them).

4) Also, amazingly far ahead of it's time, probably the first mention of transgender people in D&D, as the big Steppe Nomad-style tribe only allows female Wizards, but, if you're born male, you can decide to identify (I kid you not!) as a woman, go live with the women (and as one), dress like a woman, and so on, and to them you now are a woman, and can cast spells (not entirely PC but still waaaaay ahead of it's time - and based on some RL traditions I believe).

This was in 1989. 32 years ago. The very first official setting for 2E. So from year one, less than six months after the PHB came out, D&D was doing this. And people are acting like this is some crazy new idea. Hell, I bet at least one person moaning about this on the internet (not here) wasn't even BORN when Taladas came out lol.

 

[Professor Murder]

What reservations? A handful of paragraphs in a 200 page book will be different than the one you currently own... and as you'll never buy the new version that gets printed anyway since you already own it, you'll never actually see or notice the change?

I think you may be mistaking reservations for complaints. Honestly, getting worked up about these errata feels premature overall, for good or ill.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Indeed. Let's hope the repeat pattern doesn't continue much longer, though, else we'll be into mid-90's TSR flounderings all over again and I think we can all do without that.

This might be a scary thought if it wasn't for the fact that the bottom is going to drop out of D&D anyway at some point, with or without any changes. Because anything popular always has a bubble burst somewhere down the line.

Whether that bubble bursts because the influx of younger new players over the next 20 years doesn't like the tropes of what D&D is... or doesn't like the removal of the older tropes of D&D that we are currently seeing... doesn't matter. The bubble will have burst regardless.