D&D (2024) Wizards of the Coast Backtracks on D&D Beyond and 2014 Content

Wizards of the Coast posted an overnight update stating that they are not going forward with previously released plans to require those wishing to use some 2014 content on D&D Beyond to use the Homebrew function to manually enter it. Instead, all the content including spells and magic items will be included. From the update:

D&D (2024) - How D&D Beyond Will Handle Access To 2014 Rules

D&D Beyond has announced how the transition to the new 2024 edition will work on the platform, and how legacy access to the 2014 version of D&D will be implemented. You will still be able to access the 2014 Basic Rules and core rulebooks. You will still be able to make characters using the 2014...

www.enworld.org

Last week we released a Changelog detailing how players would experience the 2024 Core Rulebooks on D&D Beyond. We heard your feedback loud and clear and thank you for speaking up.

Our excitement around the 2024 Core Rulebooks led us to view these planned updates as welcome improvements and free upgrades to existing content. We misjudged the impact of this change, and we agree that you should be free to choose your own way to play. Taking your feedback to heart, here’s what we’re going to do:

Players who only have access to the 2014 Player’s Handbook will maintain their character options, spells, and magical items in their character sheets. Players with access to the 2024 and 2014 digital Player’s Handbooks can select from both sources when creating new characters. Players will not need to rely on Homebrew to use their 2014 player options, including spells and magic items, as recommended in previous changelogs.

Please Note:

Players will continue to have access to their free, shared, and purchased items on D&D Beyond, with the ability to use previously acquired player options when creating characters and using character sheets.

We are not changing players’ current character sheets, except for relabeling and renaming. Examples include Races to Species, Inspiration to Heroic Inspiration, and Cast Spell to Magic.

We’re dedicated to making D&D Beyond the ultimate digital toolset for Dungeons & Dragons, continuously enhancing the platform to ensure you can create, customize, and play your game just as you envision it. From your first one-shot to multi-year campaigns and everything in between, we're grateful to be on this journey with you.

- The D&D Studio

 

[Oofta]

You know better than this lol!

WotC aren't terrible here, they're just needlessly annoying, because we keep having to complain a lot to make them reverse really obviously silly decisions that should never have been made that way.

I am very pleased with them reversing this particular one because it bodes well for Beyond in the future, if this "UGH DAD WHY DO I NEED TO TAKE A SHOWER ILL JUST NEED TO TAKE ONE AGAIN TOMORROW" attitude from Beyond is ended. Maybe from 2024 onwards all the mechanical content in a book will actually be usable, rather than only whatever Beyond feels like, which has previously been the case.

No, I don't "know better". I stated my opinion, they made a mistake and changed direction before anyone was impacted. To err is human and all that. What matters is that they do listen and respond to feedback.

 

[DEFCON 1]

You may be right. On the other hand, I wonder how they view something like the OGL controversy and the performance of the D&D movie which released a couple months later.

If they do see a link (I have no evidence one way or the other) then it's a faux pas that spoiled a multi-year investment that's cost over $100 million dollars.

Pure conjecture, but I do wonder.

There is zero connection between any games and Hollywood endeavors. Because game players make barely any dent in the financial well-being of a movie project.

Say there are currently 100,000 people playing D&D right now. Even if every single one of them bought a ticket for the movie, at $20 a ticket that's merely $2 million dollars. A movie's success or failure does not hinge on 2 million dollars. It's the millions of times the movie gets seen by the entire world that its success hinges. D&D players pissed because of the OGL did nothing to affect the movie's success or failure.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

What matters is that they do listen and respond to feedback.

I mean, that's the most positive takeaway yes. WotC seemingly are paying some significant attention to people complaining about stuff now. Long may that continue.

However, it would be great if they could decrease the unforced errors that lead to feedback!

I'll be interested to see how well they handle feedback around Sigil.

Say there are currently 100,000 people playing D&D right now.

WotC says there are 30 million people playing D&D currently.

So by your same math that's be 600 million dollars, not 2 million. $600m would have made this into a huge success with guaranteed sequels and likely spin-offs.

I'm not saying you're wrong in principle, but WotC 100% does not agree that there are as few as "100k" people playing D&D now.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I think the issue I'd point out is that most of WotC's unforced errors re: D&D aren't really in the name of a "more profitable business".

The OGL 2.0 was, and it backfired incredibly hard. But let's look at other recent-ish WotC backtracks/errors:

1) Replacing the 2014 spells/items with 2024 spells/items. This wasn't really a profitability issue at all - this is like, literally maybe a work week's work for one guy, if he was going real slow. I wouldn't be so confident except we know for a fact (confirmed by both Beyond employees and 3PPs who have put stuff on Beyond), they basically just have a more powerful version of the same interface we do for adding/modifying content. That's not a decision where profitability ever factored in. It was just idiocy.

2) Accidentally including AI art in stuff. Again, not profitability, because they'd not asked for cheapo AI art, they just got some and didn't scrutinize it enough nor impress enough upon their artists that it was a no-no. That seems to have been fixed for now though.

3) Firing everyone basically so much as looked at Larian, let alone worked with or spoke to them - so you can argue this was about Hasbro looking good for the stock market, but the reality is, they turned a potential large future profit from a BG4 which was then still being worked on into a big fat ZERO (for the foreseeable future - any BG4 is now 5+ years away dead minimum and will be regarded which skepticism by the gaming press and gamers in general unless someone truly saintly makes it - maybe Obsidian?). So profit-minded but very stupid. They didn't walk it back though, I guess because it was Hasbro not WotC at the reins.

4) The Hadozee idiocy. Again, not profitability-related unless we're talking serious penny-pinching of a perverse and incompetent kind.

EDIT - If you include MtG, I don't feel like I know enough to comment, but I think you could probably construct a better case for profitability-chasing leading to the missteps and errors there.

Unforced "errors" how? What's the "error" if not making money? Bad PR? Is that the "error"? If bad PR doesn't effect their bottom line, then it's not an "error".

Yes, to all us scrubs we think "WotC keeps messing things up!!!"... but who gives a rat's ass what WE think? What do our complaints mean? Nothing! If they can do things that get "bad press" (and ONLY "bad press") and then change course to "fix" things... what have they lost?

I think too many people here on these boards give ourselves WAY too much credit. We individual people are not important. Because for every one of us who says "That's it, I'm out!" because of some perceived slight... there's someone from outside who gets into the game and just plays.

We individuals do not matter. Our individual opinions do not matter. All that matters is when a mass of opinions grow to be the size that WotC needs to address, then they just do whatever it takes to deflate that mass. And once that happens, it's business as usual.

 

[Oofta]

I mean, that's the most positive takeaway yes. WotC seemingly are paying some significant attention to people complaining about stuff now. Long may that continue.

However, it would be great if they could decrease the unforced errors that lead to feedback!

I'll be interested to see how well they handle feedback around Sigil.

It would be nice if nobody ever made a mistake. But I also give them credit for listening to feedback.

 

[TheSword]

I think I might be right in saying that this is the first case of WotC officially supporting obsolete edition rules from the point a new edition released (as opposed to offering very old pdfs once the new edition was bedded in).

That’s welcome and not nothing.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

You know, I see people defending every weird decision WotC takes since I brought up them banning LGBT+ dice in Turkey (even though Turkey has no law requiring them to do so) with an unmatchable fervour to the point that that thread got locked, and I just don't understand.

Yeah that's what gets me a bit - people will defend the most obviously dumb and unnecessary decisions WotC takes, then where WotC does flip them, suddenly the same people are often like "Well, they listened, didn't they?" and it's like sure, but why were you so vehemently saying they didn't need to 10 minutes ago lol? (To be clear I am NOT referring to anyone in this thread, for example, I have not seen @Oofta defend them overwriting the 2014 stuff, only fixing the problem, which makes more sense to me, so please do not include yourselves in this critique!)

I will say fewer people defended this particular decision than usual, but it was still more than rationally should. And people have defended truly atrocious stuff, include the minstrelsy stuff with the Hadozee, which was like, laughably bad! The very second I saw the art, I, an old (46) British cis(ish)-hetero white male went "OH NOOOOOOO" even before I knew it was "controversial". But people were like "No it's fine!" and coming up with the most ludicrous reasons lol.

We individuals do not matter. Our individual opinions do not matter. All that matters is when a mass of opinions grow to be the size that WotC needs to address, then they just do whatever it takes to deflate that mass. And once that happens, it's business as usual.

What you seem to be missing from your equation here is that this isn't separate coinflips or something.

The more errors WotC makes the the shorter-tempered people get with them. The more errors WotC makes, the faster opinions grow to the size where they need to be addressed. Even from a cynical POV, reporting/Tweets/etc on this get more and more clicks as WotC makes more and more errors.

We've seen a real change in social media about WotC, from a situation where the best way to get clicks and so on was to praise D&D/WotC, to one where being somewhat critical (not hateful, but critical) and skeptical of WotC is much more likely to get clicks.

That publicity may not have immediate negative effect on WotC/D&D's performance, but it doesn't help, it really does help, and it builds up. It doesn't go away just because they fix something. It's like if you have neighbours who keeps doing stupid stuff, like, leaving his trash out and the foxes rip up the bags, cuts his tree and then just dumps the branches in the streets, plays ultra-loud music at 2am because he was drunk and not thinking. No maybe every time he fixes this - he tidies the bags, he removes the branches, he apologies for the music and commits to not doing it again, so you don't hate him like the other neighbour who tried to put a massive helium tank in your bin and fled when you saw him doing it (real example lol), but you now think this guy is, at best, a flake, and you expect him to do more stupid stuff, and with good reason!

 

[Belen]

I fear making a 2024 PC will bemore work and searching for 2024 monsters will frequently pop up 2014 monster.

They have a toggle to turn off 2014 rules.

As for monsters, that already happens with legacy.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

This may sound weird/crazy, but hear me out. Over the past few years it has become obvious that WotC has a problem. There have been several times recently where they do something stupid and/or terrible (Hadozee, OGL, copyright strikes against YouTubers covering the new PHB, and now this), then there’s a public outcry from the community, and then they (normally) backpedal and reverse the stupid thing they did to get people to stop yelling at them. Then everyone forgets about it until a few months later when WotC does something else that makes everyone angry again and the whole situation repeats.

I’m starting to think, just maybe, WotC has an addiction to bad PR. It’s just a theory, but it would explain their weird consistency in repeatedly generating extremely avoidable and idiotic controversies. They must get high off of making the community mad. I don’t get it, it’s not my thing, but maybe it just makes them feel in control. Or like someone is listening to them for once.

I shudder at the thought of what will happen if we allow this viscous cycle to continue for too long. If anyone knows of a 12 step recovery program that could help, please send it to WotC’s management ASAP. We need to stage an intervention before it’s too late.

 

[Daztur]

There is zero connection between any games and Hollywood endeavors. Because game players make barely any dent in the financial well-being of a movie project.

Say there are currently 100,000 people playing D&D right now. Even if every single one of them bought a ticket for the movie, at $20 a ticket that's merely $2 million dollars. A movie's success or failure does not hinge on 2 million dollars. It's the millions of times the movie gets seen by the entire world that its success hinges. D&D players pissed because of the OGL did nothing to affect the movie's success or failure.

100,000 is far too low: How Many D&D Players Are There Worldwide?

In any case for a movie like that the point of making fans happy isn't to get money from fans buying tickets but more from fans being excited and talking to people and them providing a lot of free word of mouth advertising. Despite the D&D movie being lovely the fans being rather cranky right before release certainly put a dent in its box office.

Just personally I often organize a movie night for some of my son's friends and and their fathers. Since WotC backed down about the OGL I took my sons to see D&D movie in theaters but I wasn't enthusiastic enough to organize a movie night so D&D lost out on 5+ tickets just because of me being cranky about the OGL fiasco.