Dungeons & Dragons Dumps Disclaimers From Book Credits Page

Dungeons & Dragons is no longer including its humorous disclaimers in the credit section of its rulebooks. Polygon recently received confirmation from Wizards of the Coast that the small disclaimers, which had appeared in 5th Edition books dating back to the 2014 Player's Handbook, would no longer appear in D&D rulebooks moving forward. The disclaimers were missing from the 2024/2025 Core Rulebooks released over the past several months. No additional explanation was given for their removal.

The disclaimers typically had a tongue-in-cheek reference to the big bad of a campaign or the focus of a rulebook, usually with a tease of disaster. They were a long-running Easter egg for D&D players, a fun tradition that was almost always pointed out on Reddit threads while flipping through the book for the first time. I always enjoyed the disclaimer, although some were a bit more clever than others.

 

[J.Quondam]

Now it is official, this is a new edition

"Disclaimer: This disclaimer-free rules update is is not a new edition."

.

 

[Weiley31]

Sad. I always got a kick outta em.

 

[sevenbastard]

Maybe in reprints they should update the disclaimer.

For example

Dragon Heist: Yeah the only well executed elaborate plan to separate folks from thier money related to this book was by our marketing department tricking all of you.

Spelljammer: Look we didn't really have a plan but you guys wrote "Spelljammer Confirmed" on every frigging post on the internet that our bosses got confused and thought it was confirmed. Yikes our bad. Anyway we rushed something out. We know it ain't great but at least you can move on with your lives. Isn't that worth the $80 you just dropped?

 

[Azzy]

I'll miss them, but I can understand that it takes more and more effort to keep them fresh.

 

[mearls]

I'm glad they made folks happy, but the staff basically resented them from the start. I'm surprised they didn't stop them earlier.

 

[Mournblade94]

Now hopefully they will stop writing the silly quotations like they included in Xanathars and the Dragonbook. They were most definitely not immersion and felt like monster tweets. I'm ok with losing the disclaimers and encourage them to include less things like this.

 

[overgeeked]

That's too bad. It was a welcome minor bit of levity in a game that otherwise takes itself far too seriously.

 

[pukunui]

Now hopefully they will stop writing the silly quotations like they included in Xanathars and the Dragonbook. They were most definitely not immersion and felt like monster tweets. I'm ok with losing the disclaimers and encourage them to include less things like this.

Yes, those little aside from Xanathar, Tasha, Mordenkainen et al are mostly not funny. They're mostly a waste of space.

 

[Lanefan]

I'm glad they made folks happy, but the staff basically resented them from the start. I'm surprised they didn't stop them earlier.

Curious why the staff would resent them - can you elaborate at all?

 

[mearls]

Curious why the staff would resent them - can you elaborate at all?

The disclaimers were my idea, and I was always tickled that people liked them. In the early days I wrote all of them. There were two main reasons why I think I was the only person who liked them:

Some people saw them as an annoying extra step in the production process. They'd be working on a book and then hit this step that they had to deal with.

Some people thought D&D was Very Serious Business and that they were going to make people upset. There was always a group of people - the size varied over the years - who were convinced that we were one misstep of any size away from the entire game collapsing.

Most people just didn't care, but there wasn't anyone else who saw the value in them.