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.

 

[jmartkdr2]

As a true Canadian I too will stand behind hockey, maple syrup and Molson all day long.

I draw the line, however, at supporting pineapple on pizza; instead I can only apologize to the world that our country was the source of such a big mistake and promise we'll do better next time.

You also gave us Nickleback, but we probably deserved that.

 

[HammerMan]

I think you mean the 20s. And while I think it’s a false equivalence, I do agree that the game will survive. It will likely continue to grow even more, since the aim here is inclusiveness, not purity.

stop making me feel old by reminding me what year it is...

and tell those kids to get off my lawn

 

[Oofta]

Combine a couple of individual aspects from several cultures (don't just make a race into your not-Celts or not-Feudal Japanese or your not-Apache; instead, take an interesting tidbit from each culture), file off the serial numbers, and modify for fantasy elements and for unusual physical aspects of the race.

Which still has nothing specific to orcs though. I mean, it's fine. A lot of people like playing (the random race generator picks ...) tieflings even though for me there's nothing really there other than the mechanical benefit of hellish resistance. On the other hand a race created specifically to wage never ending war gives them an interesting trait for me, even if in a specific campaign world many of them rebel against their creator. It's not going to change anything for my campaign, but if it wasn't for the old lore I would have no more use for them than I do for dragonborn which don't exist in my campaign world.

As far as mixing and matching, that's difficult to do as well. Just look at how well Oriental Adventures has aged. I feel sympathy for people that publish this kind of stuff. If I include something and realize that it was mind-numbingly bad I can just blame it on an unreliable narrator.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The game survived the satanic panic of the 80's. It will survive the woke panic of the oh-20's. Just keep playing your old books.

That's a pretty bad analogy, given the same part of society that was "panicking" about "Satanists" is currently "panicking" about "Woke" people, and we're seeing laws being made to fight "Critical Race Theory" and so on, but not to "cancel" "un-woke" people (quite the contrary).

So if we look at it as analogous, then this is like WotC doubling-down on Demons, Devils, and Daemons.

But it isn't analogous.

However D&D will survive it however you look at it, and honestly, for me, most of the changes reflect changes that mostly occurred 30+ years ago, and just never got codified as the default.

 

[HawaiiSteveO]

There are times (moreso as of late) when I look around and think to myself:
Whhaaaat?!
Then I get back to doing my thing

 

[CleverNickName]

Yikes...two mod warnings on Page Friggin' One.

I don't think we're going to lose that with these changes. But I wonder if more tables will just take the easy way out, and not think of lineage as anything more than a package of abilities.

That doesn't mean that you can't have a setting with a more homogenous or monolithic culture. Star Wars does a pretty good job of pulling that off, I think. I just don't think that's as interesting to me as a world to explore.

I don't disagree. But the rules aren't responsible for creating an interesting setting. Humans are humans all the world over; it's the culture, traditions, and history that make us unique. And in the game, that's where the DM's imagination comes in.

They don't do anything for them. They just say, "Here's another rubber mask for ya." They do it like that because integrating a new lineage is hard and they don't really care about the setting.

This isn't a bad thing. The rules are the rubber mask, but a rubber mask isn't a complete costume. I like the push toward creativity, instead of asking me to just rely on a table of traits.

Since DMs are no longer being told: "this is how it is" there is no need to tell them "but you can do it differently".

I agree. Still, there are plenty of people who play this game strictly as-written, and they will need to see those last six words in print.

Walking away from the discussion about sex work, and false equivalences to criminal behavior. Nope, not going there.

And full-on sprinting away from the discussion of slavery being "just as bad" as literally anything in history. Nope, nope, nope, all the nope.

@DEFCON 1 speaks the truth in Post #141. @Vaalingrade made me laugh out loud in Post #175.

Terms like "barbarian" and "druid" are certainly problematic from certain cultural (and historical) perspectives. But they are not "just as bad" as alignment, and Wizards of the Coast is not under nearly as much pressure to update them as they have been for alignment. Will they be revised/amended in the future? Possibly...maybe even likely. But they're focused on a more prevalent issue at the moment.

And regarding Alignment, my favorite post was written by @Professor Murder :

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.

And @Snarf Zagyg hit the nail on the head here, dealing a critical hit at max damage that almost dropped the whole thread to zero hit points. DAAAAAANG Snarf, microphones are expensive...stop dropping them.

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.

But what about how they put in a paragraph basically saying "Volo is a dumbass and these are his dumb opinions!"? Surely Volo has been cancelled and needs to get on Twitter right now to complain about this betrayal. Perhaps he can become the new Twitter guy for TSR3?

Meh, Twitter doesn't exist in my game world. (I'm not running Descent into Avernus.)

 

[Ruin Explorer]

As far as mixing and matching, that's difficult to do as well. Just look at how well Oriental Adventures has aged.

Not trying to be difficult but OA absolutely did not mix and match.

To paraphrase ancient Ford adverts, OA was "Adventures in any oriental culture, as long as it's Japan". I mean, that was it. OA was "Japanese Mythology". Like there were some tiny bits of other stuff in there, but they were absolutely tiny.

Whereas Legend of the 5 Rings is exactly the "mixing and matching" that's described. Indeed that's the key difference between the two. Lot5R hasn't aged perfectly either, but it's the one that matches the description.

 

[HammerMan]

As far as mixing and matching, that's difficult to do as well. Just look at how well Oriental Adventures has aged. I feel sympathy for people that publish this kind of stuff. If I include something and realize that it was mind-numbingly bad I can just blame it on an unreliable narrator.

I am sure the fact that I have parts of the Orient style traits to both Hobgobins and Dwarves would be problmatic if I published them.
(in the case of the Hobgoblins it's part Roman Empire, Part Japanese feudalism, and part Celtic nature/heroic god) (incase of Dwarves mixing some Russian Chinese and English)

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I am sure the fact that I have parts of the Orient style traits to both Hobgobins and Dwarves would be problmatic if I published them.
(in the case of the Hobgoblins it's part Roman Empire, Part Japanese feudalism, and part Celtic nature/heroic god) (incase of Dwarves mixing some Russian Chinese and English)

I mean, if you can avoid calling them "Orient style traits" (!!!) then you'd probably be fine if they're not just crude cut-and-pastes from real cultures, but actual adaptions of ideas/concepts. Especially as almost no ideas/concepts are actually unique to any one culture if you look hard enough.

 

[HammerMan]

Terms like "barbarian" and "druid" are certainly problematic from certain cultural (and historical) perspectives. But they are not "just as bad" as alignment, and Wizards of the Coast is not under nearly as much pressure to update them as they have been for alignment. Will they be revised/amended in the future? Possibly...maybe even likely. But they're focused on a more prevalent issue at the moment.

yeah I don't know if Barbarian is as problematic in that sense (but in the just confusing terminology it is)