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

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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 Player's Handbook.
  • Existing home-brew content will not be impacted.
  • These 2014 rules will be accessible and will be marked with a 'legacy' badge: classes, subclasses, species, backgrounds, feats, monsters.
  • Tooltips will reflect the 2024 rules.
  • Monster stat blocks will be updated to 2024.
  • There will be terminology changes (Heroic Inspiration, Species, etc.)
 

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So glad I went all-in with 5E 2014 on Roll20.net. The only item I have on D&D Beyond is the 2014 5E PHB that I got with the Essentials Kit. Nothing will change with my two 5E 2014 online games. My buddy uses Above VTT for his game so he and his players have some work to do - hope the Uber fans enter all that 2014 homebrew soon…
 

yea... the thing about them ONLY killing 5.0 spells and items is thats what they are changing SO FAR.
They have a good legacy system and could easily mark the 5.0 versions of them as legacy, but they dont want to. This is a very standard marketing strategy in software - making things annoying and difficult to force users to upgrade. Apple does this by killing battery life of older devices for example.
If not enough buy 5.5 books, expect more 5.0 stuff to become unavailable in ddb in 6 months.
This is 100% a marketing strategy to neg and force players to upgrade and pay more money
 


This is 100% a marketing strategy to neg and force players to upgrade and pay more money
I don't think it is, but I don't mean that in a nice way.

Rather, Beyond, since 2020, have shown an absolutely rank inability to do certain things in what they regard as a "proper way" (despite continually promising to improve their tech), and have also consistently since about then taken an "if we can't do things the 'proper way', we won't do them at all!".

I would bet money that there is no way in their current DB system to flag a magic item or spell as Legacy, and control its availability on that basis. Now, a normal company, run by sane people, would simply go through and put (Legacy) or (2014) after the names of all the 2014 versions of items/spells, and just make them available on that basis (because they definitely could - and do - link them to ownership of the 2014 PHB/DMG). But that isn't how Beyond have operated since 2020 - they've been completely resolute in refusing to do anything sensible/sane/reasonable/helpful-to-paying-customers about stuff they can't trivially do the "proper way" (a nebulous and largely meaningless concept) using their current tools. They've moaned and moaned that doing things like this would cost time they could be spending working on newer material, and that one day they'll have a "proper" way to do this, and maybe then they'll do it. For example, the Supernatural Gifts from the Theros setting, which could easily have been rendered as Feats for people who had that book - esp. given Beyond has an easy-to-use override to arbitrarily add Feats to a character (and has done since early on) - the Beyond team absolutely point-blank refused to do this, whilst simultaneously saying that if anyone else did it via the custom Feat system, and shared those Feats, they'd be deleted/unshared. So the Beyond team's solution to their own combination of technical incompetence and frankly, best case laziness, worst case impossibly bad management/prioritization, was to force literally every DM/group who wanted to have those supernatural gifts to INDIVIDUALLY use their fiddly and annoying system to build each one out, and then carefully not share them outside their group(s). And their excuse was "Well one day we'll be able to do it 'properly', so it'd be wasted effort to do it the wrong way!". I mean, as someone who works with IT in a professional capacity, this is one of the most insane and not just unprofessional but actively anti-professional answers I've ever heard, but they've been consistent about it.

So I strongly suspect the same demented mindset is at work here with the spells/items.

It doesn't actually benefit them financially, note - because they're kind of giving away 2024 content for free (indeed you need to spend effort, not money, to retain the 2014 versions). So that doesn't make sense as an explanation. But if we consider this incredibly perverse attitude they've displayed before, which seems to be cultural to Beyond management, then it's quite familiar.
 

I don't think it is, but I don't mean that in a nice way.

Rather, Beyond, since 2020, have shown an absolutely rank inability to do certain things in what they regard as a "proper way" (despite continually promising to improve their tech), and have also consistently since about then taken an "if we can't do things the 'proper way', we won't do them at all!".

I would bet money that there is no way in their current DB system to flag a magic item or spell as Legacy, and control its availability on that basis. Now, a normal company, run by sane people, would simply go through and put (Legacy) or (2014) after the names of all the 2014 versions of items/spells, and just make them available on that basis. But that isn't how Beyond have operated since 2020 - they've been completely resolute in refusing to do anything sensible/sane/reasonable/helpful-to-paying-customers about stuff they can't trivially do using their current tools. They've moaned and moaned that doing things like this would cost time they could be spending working on newer material, and that one day they'll have a way to do this, and maybe then they'll do it. For example, the supernatural gifts from the Greek setting, which could easily have been rendered as Feats for people who had that book - esp. given Beyond has an easy-to-use override to arbitrarily add Feats to a character (and has done since early on) - the Beyond team absolutely point-blank refused to do this, whilst simultaneously saying that if anyone else did it via the custom Feat system, and shared those Feats, they'd be deleted/unshared. So the Beyond team's solution to their own combination of technical incompetence and frankly, best case laziness, worst case impossibly bad management/prioritization, was to force literally every DM/group who wanted to have those supernatural gifts to INDIVIDUALLY use their fiddly and annoying system to build each one out, and then carefully not share them outside their group(s).

So I strongly suspect the same demented mindset is at work here with the spells/items.

It doesn't actually benefit them financially, note - because they're kind of giving away 2024 content for free (indeed you need to spend effort, not money, to retain the 2014 versions). So that doesn't make sense as an explanation. But if we consider this incredibly perverse attitude they've displayed before, which seems to be cultural to Beyond management, then it's quite familiar.
You're right. That's not better.
 



I think it's actually worse, yeah. Honestly I'd rather they were competent and reasonable, and just trying to squeeze money out of me, than incompetent and unreasonable and giving me 2024 stuff for free whether I liked it or not!

Hey now! I have on good authority that they are also giving you a free U2 song that you can't delete with your DDB account as well.
 

So you expect they will eliminate the motivation to purchase the MM (2024 still 5e somehow) book entirely?
no, you do not get all monsters, only the SRD ones, just like with the 2014 MM

If you have the 2014 MM then yes, I would not rule out you get the new ones based on what is happening with spells, but still not the ones that are new in 2024

Could be wrong, their PHB approach already does not make sense to me, so the MM one not making much sense is basically expected ;)

It seems to be mostly driven by system limitations that they should have worked on since they bought the thing, esp the last two years, so who knows
 
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