D&D (2024) WotC is right to avoid the word "edition."

[MockingBird]

I don't use Beyond. How does it handle revised races, etc from MotM if you own that as well as Volo's, for example?

I experimented with the Tashas character rules, it works great and super easy. Volos is legacy material but you can turn it on or off.

 

[HammerMan]

Essentials characters worked perfectly fine together with earlier 4E characters. Apart from class specific rules everything else worked the same, and you could happily take feats and other options from previous books for essentials characters, and vice versa. The rules were IIRC a bit different, but many 4E rules had changed over the years, so that wasn't a new thing.

There wasn't really any "conversion" needed to move an existing 4E game to Essentials, it was in many ways a huge splatbook, though a slightly confusing one as it reused a lot of class names from previous books.

This was my experience too. I never saw a table say “we are only useing essentials” or “we aren’t useing essentials” although on here I do hear it happened.

If I showed up to a new game after essentials came out with my PHB 1 warlord or PHB 3 battle mind I would resnobly be able to assume I could play it.

I however not only didn’t see but can’t imagine showing up to a 3.5 or PF1 game with a 3.0 ranger and the dm just saying “okay”

 

[TwoSix]

If you see feats without levels save your money.

I'm like 99% sure that there will be a sidebar saying that any feat printed without a level is a level 4 feat by default. I'm also reasonably sure that most feats are going to be level 4, and higher level feats will be restricted to feats that give access to higher level spells or interact with higher level features.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I experimented with the Tashas character rules, it works great and super easy. Volos is legacy material but you can turn it on or off.

Just to add to this, this is not DM-controllable, and like a lot of elements of D&D Beyond, it's not consistent.

DMs have zero ability to control what options players see/have. If content is owned or shared, players see it. Even if you disable the sharing, it's still shared for character creation and so on (it just blocks them from reading the entire book), which is a little surprising though there is a note on Beyond carefully explaining it.

And the "show legacy content" toggle is in a weird place in character generation in Beyond. When you create a character initially, you get a giant page full of toggles, most of them controlling what content you see (this is for the player to pick, not the DM, surprisingly), like Eberron, Rick & Morty, Critical Role, etc. - and there are two Tasha's toggles, one for "customizing your origin", and the other for "optional class features", which default to off. One would expect "show legacy content" because literally everything else that controls content is - but in fact it's on the race choice screen, as a toggle there (and not entirely well-explained).

I personally wouldn't characterize the Tasha's origin customization as "super-easy" myself. If you know how it's supposed to work, it's easy with a little fiddling to get the right result, but I feel like a new player or one who didn't "get" it might be somewhat confused by it. Long-term that's not sticking around though, it'll be replaced by One D&D so not a huge deal I guess. The MotM races work good though.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I'm like 99% sure that there will be a sidebar saying that any feat printed without a level is a level 4 feat by default. I'm also reasonably sure that most feats are going to be level 4, and higher level feats will be restricted to feats that give access to higher level spells or interact with higher level features.

This seems very likely now you say, yeah I'd be surprised if that wasn't the case.

 

[Mercurius]

WotC's initial strategy of planned obsolescence turned the word inside out.

Is this actually true? Meaning, was 3.5 planned from the beginning, or was it the result of things learned in the first year or two of wide distribution of 3E?

 

[delericho]

Is this actually true? Meaning, was 3.5 planned from the beginning, or was it the result of things learned in the first year or two of wide distribution of 3E?

A little of both. Apparently they'd always planned for a revision, but the intent was for it to be 5 years out, not 3. (And, I think, for it to include a lot less than was actually done.) Monte Cook used to have a good write-up of this on his site; I have no idea if it still exists.

 

[Mercurius]

A little of both. Apparently they'd always planned for a revision, but the intent was for it to be 5 years out, not 3. (And, I think, for it to include a lot less than was actually done.) Monte Cook used to have a good write-up of this on his site; I have no idea if it still exists.

OK, thanks. I just don't like the pejorative implications of "planned obsolescence"...it implies more deception than I think was actually involved in WotC's decision-making process, as if they're a used car salesman trying to get a lemon out the door.

My sense is that they released the best game they could in 2000, and then quickly found tweaks they wanted to make. Any artist knows that "tweaking" can go on indefinitely, so most of those further changes were probably just that: "Well, we could also make this a bit better, and tighten this, oh and let's add a bit here..."

 

[Parmandur]

They were trying out bits of 4e design in the late 3.5e books (notably "Book of 9 Swords"), and even Star Wars Saga Edition. That's probably not a good barometer of the compatibility of the finished works.

But in this case, the early crypto OneD&D books are meant to keep selling with the new Core books, such as Mosnters of the Multiverse.

 

[Parmandur]

Essentials characters worked perfectly fine together with earlier 4E characters. Apart from class specific rules everything else worked the same, and you could happily take feats and other options from previous books for essentials characters, and vice versa. The rules were IIRC a bit different, but many 4E rules had changed over the years, so that wasn't a new thing.

There wasn't really any "conversion" needed to move an existing 4E game to Essentials, it was in many ways a huge splatbook, though a slightly confusing one as it reused a lot of class names from previous books.

I mean, not only can OneD&D characters work with 5E characters, they want us to mix the rules within a single character set by the eaybtheyndesigned the playtest.