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.

 

[Mind of tempest]

Things a person likes being harmful does not mean the people who like them are harmful or bad people. The problem arises when they make the thing so big a part of their identity that it blinds them to the actual issues at hand because they are so set on defending 'themselves' from 'attack' rather than accept the truth that sometimes we like things that aren't perfect or even all that great.

I liked a lot of people who have sense shown themselves to be just absolute garbage human beings (now that I think about it, almost inevitable if you liked sitcoms in the 90's). I just don't throw myself to their defense because I'm worried that liking their work somehow makes me bad.

wise I had you detachment it would make life so much easier.

 

[Faolyn]

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.

It's the horns and tails. That's the draw. (And for those of us who knew them from Planescape, the other bits of weirdness as well, like hooves or no nose or having snakes for eyes.)

 

[Weiley31]

Keep in mind the bunnies encountered in Witchlight are Chaotic Evil bandits and that they were only made a PC race at the popular request of playtesters.

And said leader of the Chaotic Evil rabbit bandits carries around a Branding Iron that he uses on his victims. Combine that image with the cold dead animal stare of the rabbit face and you pretty much got a terrifying image if your on the receiving end of it.

Unless your that "particular" kind of 4E Shadar-Kai that's probably into that or something.

 

[Professor Murder]

It's also imprecise to call the history of DnD "Harmful". More accurate would be "contains harmful elements." It contains harmful elements now. In 20 years, things that people feel are fixed and good will be seen as regressive and harmful by the people coming up. People who see themselves as just and fair often end up resting on their laurels. I get it. It's tiring, the constant change. Just learn to take a pause when someone says "Hey, this thing you like, it hurts me."

 

[Ruin Explorer]

We're potentially on the cusp of that. Critical Role is getting long in the tooth and slowing down production, doing 3/4 weeks instead of their normal 4/4. WotC is in the process of an edition change / revision which will be the first time the majority of current players have gone through an edition chance / revision. They change too much and the fan base fractures again; they don't change enough and they potentially lose fans to boredom or system complaints. WotC has the numbers and they aren't sharing much of the finer details. We know the demographics of the game is wildly skewed younger and so that's the dollars the company is chasing. I think that's fundamentally a different stance than the Satanic Panic and D&D being under attack. The results might end up basically the same. We don't know yet.

So, from here, the only way to go is down.

This is well-explained and yeah, there are quite a few challenges D&D faces over the next few years. There will probably be unforeseen ones too.

I honestly feel like we may well see a '90s-ish situation where a huge number of younger players have been introduced to the game, and then start to move on to other RPGs or just drop out of TT RPGs. But a lot will depend on how WotC play the next few years. At least this time the rise of video games isn't likely to be a short-term threat, though by 2030 maybe VR roleplaying games will be. Whatever VR game is the "EverQuest of VR" (as opposed to the Meridan 59 of VR) is going to be pretty huge, I suspect, but I'd guess we'd be looking somewhere into the 2030s at current progress rates, and things like switching from physical machines to streaming (which can't play nice with VR because of physical constants) might slow it further.

Not for nothin, but it seems like you are itching for failure.

I don't think that's really fair. Honestly and openly explaining/listing the challenges something faces is extremely different to "itching for failure". The job I do, I often have to make big lists of things that could go wrong with projects, but it doesn't mean I want them to happen - quite the contrary.

 

[overgeeked]

I believe it was about killing monsters and taking loot in the beginning.

or a platinum age or it just plateaus.

Far less likely, but sure. Both possibilities. I'm generally a cynical and pessimistic person, so the idea of D&D properly breaking into the mainstream (basically the only place it has to go that's "up") is not something I'm even going to entertain as a likely possibility.

Not for nothin, but it seems like you are itching for failure.

No, just being honest that there's a lot more room for D&D's popularity to go down than up.

 

[Remathilis]

I don't expect to see Druid go anywhere any time soon. No-one uses it abusively. There's no major world religion which uses the term, and the neo-pagan groups which do have zero clout (of any kind, including on Twitter). It's been very well-established by TT RPGs and more importantly video games to represent a very specific kind of magic-user (and not uncommon in TV/movies either).

You say this now, but people would have had the same opinion of samurai or shaman 10 years ago.

Maybe not yet, but I expect a that those "culture-based named" classes are either going to get renamed or diminished (or both) at some point in the future to make D&D more culturally generic and able to support more diverse settings. You won't see cultural oddities like Maztica paladins, Wa druids or ffolk monks. Maybe not in 2024, but eventually.

 

[Zardnaar]

I don't beat myself up over stuff done in the past that I had no control over.

Products just reflected the culture at the time.

The changes will either go down well or they won't. If it doesn't work they generally backtrack with the following edition.

That's actually more the pattern they dial up the changes every second edition and dial it back the following one.

 

[Professor Murder]

This is well-explained and yeah, there are quite a few challenges D&D faces over the next few years. There will probably be unforeseen ones too.

I honestly feel like we may well see a '90s-ish situation where a huge number of younger players have been introduced to the game, and then start to move on to other RPGs or just drop out of TT RPGs. But a lot will depend on how WotC play the next few years. At least this time the rise of video games isn't likely to be a short-term threat, though by 2030 maybe VR roleplaying games will be. Whatever VR game is the "EverQuest of VR" (as opposed to the Meridan 59 of VR) is going to be pretty huge, I suspect, but I'd guess we'd be looking somewhere into the 2030s at current progress rates, and things like switching from physical machines to streaming (which can't play nice with VR because of physical constants) might slow it further.

I don't think that's really fair. Honestly and openly explaining/listing the challenges something faces is extremely different to "itching for failure". The job I do, I often have to make big lists of things that could go wrong with projects, but it doesn't mean I want them to happen - quite the contrary.

Far less likely, but sure. Both possibilities. I'm generally a cynical and pessimistic person, so the idea of D&D properly breaking into the mainstream (basically the only place it has to go that's "up") is not something I'm even going to entertain as a likely possibility.

No, just being honest that there's a lot more room for D&D's popularity to go down than up.

Cynics always boast of their honesty.

 

[Mind of tempest]

You say this now, but people would have had the same opinion of samurai or shaman 10 years ago.

Maybe not yet, but I expect a that those "culture-based named" classes are either going to get renamed or diminished (or both) at some point in the future to make D&D more culturally generic and able to support more diverse settings. You won't see cultural oddities like Maztica paladins, Wa druids or ffolk monks. Maybe not in 2024, but eventually.

two of those classes are super popular so it is far more likely they will evolve monks I fear for their future as I like the class and mystical martial artists are too cool a concept to be left in the dustbin.