Dungeons & Dragons Dumps Disclaimers From Book Credits Page

Disclaimers will no longer appear in D&D books.
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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.
 

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Christian Hoffer

Christian Hoffer


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This is a perennial problem, even on these boards.

Which is weird, considering that I can't think of a single successful "serious" actual play...
I have a theory.
A lot of people have their identities wrapped up in their hobbies and fandoms. If that thing is not treated seriously and as a thing innately worthy of respect, are they?

I think this resounds doubly so with 'nerd activities.'
A lot of people into these activities spent ages 5 to 22-25 or so doing nerdy things* and getting direct validation** for it (grades, scores, access to the next level of that life journey, etc.). Come adulthood, and one gets significantly fewer gold stars for being 'such a bright young ______.' It's harder even to rate yourself -- there's no analog to 'taking [specific level of subject] two years early' when no one agrees on what you're supposed to have accomplished by 26 (or 40, or...). *academics and associated secondary pursuits like math league or teaching themselves coding outside of class, etc., along with fandom in nerd-related media and IP.
**and while we all had at least one picked-on-for-being-a-nerd story, there were also always plenty of the important people who made clear what bright young kids/young adults we were, and how we were on the right track.


I'm a manager of a department at the intersection of computers, healthcare, and law (mostly programming). I have worked with a lot of incredibly bright people at the early stages of their adult life, and figuring out how to define 'am I doing well?' seems to be a consistent personal journey and challenge. And often they are fiercely protective of that thing (GPA, ACT/SAT/GRE* score, IQ, skipped a grade, taught themselves C++ in middle school, etc.) that used to be their defining victory. *apologies to the non-USA readers. I tried to generalize this paragraph to not use our academic acronyms and it became an absolute mess.

And that's people who are doing those nerd-coded activities in their career. If you're a postal clerk or own a restaurant or are in marketing (or management...), you may well rate an 'N/A' on the previous scale of how you rated how you were doing in life.

For those reasons, I think a lot of people cling to their nerd-coded passions as evidence that they are, in fact, still one of the smart people. And thus are as fiercely protective of it as they are of those childhood victory metrics. Unless said nerd passion is comedy*, then laughing at it is an insult to that self-definition. So unless the game is inarguably silly**, including silly bits can be met with strong resistance. *and even then, you are supposed to laugh at it the right way. And Life of Brian is actually the superior Monty Python film, or you're really supposed to prefer Black Adder, or similar self-defined rules.
**Tunnels and Trolls undoubtedly counts. Warhammer did, but sometimes the authors seemed to forget to make the satire clear and some people have grown up not viewing it through a dark comedy lens.


I've been slowly working on a Snarf-like Thread Post on the subject for ages. Kind of a side project to the 'No one is more horrible to nerds than other nerds trying to establish dominance/mark their territory' theory. They're both touchy subjects that could hurt feelings unless done absolutely perfectly, so they sit perpetually in the rough draft folder.

 


Makes sense they’d stop - it takes creative juice to make, and there’s none of that at Hasbro.
To be fair, I think there's still some creative juice at Hasbro - what we don't and can't see is whether (or how much of) that creative juice is being soaked up by corporate issues before we get to see it.

One of the endearing virtues of the Gygax-era game is that it held a certain underlying sense of whimsy, which started to disappear in 2e before WotC-Hasbro later pretty much wiped it out completely as the Very Serious Business types took over. Plaudits to @mearls for at least trying to bring a bit of that whimsy back.
 

To be fair, I think there's still some creative juice at Hasbro - what we don't and can't see is whether (or how much of) that creative juice is being soaked up by corporate issues before we get to see it.

One of the endearing virtues of the Gygax-era game is that it held a certain underlying sense of whimsy, which started to disappear in 2e before WotC-Hasbro later pretty much wiped it out completely as the Very Serious Business types took over. Plaudits to @mearls for at least trying to bring a bit of that whimsy back.
It could very well be the difference between a required whimsical disclaimer vs an inspired whimsical disclaimer. Making it optional could maybe result in more of them.

That said, I just remembered Office Space and scenes encouraging Jennifer Aniston to “wear more flair.” 😂
 
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This discussion reminds me of how The Simpsons writers would regularly lament that the gags with the least amount of payoff (the opening "couch gag" and chalkboard joke and, to a lesser extent, Bart's prank phone calls) required the most amount of effort. The team of writers would sometimes sit there for hours trying to come up with these measly gags that had become an obligation. (They eventually just started making the new writers handle these chores.) I was a fan of the D&D book disclaimers, but I get why they might want to move on.
 

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.
That's understandable. I, for one, appreciated the whimsy your disclaimers added, along with things like Richard Whitters' dice goblin sketches and some of the funny little Easter eggs in the trinkets table and the spell component descriptions and such.

As much as I like a lot of the reorganization with the 2024 books, I feel like they've stripped out almost all of those fun little whimsical elements. The 2024 books feel more like "Very Serious Business" than the 2014 books did.
 

I finally got the new MM and started browsing it last night. The first thing I looked for was the disclaimer in the credits and was a little bummed that there wasn't one. Overall, not a big deal. But I did enjoy them.
 

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