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 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.)

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...

www.enworld.org

 

[Chaosmancer]

you appear to believe that this means it is somehow lesser design work because of that.

Is 2024 therefore a lesser product than 2014? If not, is A5e or ToV then?

I never claimed it was lesser. I don't even know how you could get that. It is simply a different design process. If you start with a clock and design a better clock, you are doing something fundamentally different in design than starting with a blank piece of paper and inventing something new.

 

[mamba]

I'm saying that when people say "my game is 5e compatible" that they are saying "My game is an add-on or modification to Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition" not that you can somehow have 5e and that be completely different and separate from DnD as it currently stands.

of course not, then it would not really be based on the 5e SRD after all. They are all implementations of the 5e SRD, just from different companies.

It will only become truly distinct from the current D&D once WotC moves to 6e, until then there is little difference between being compatible with the 5e SRD and being compatible with the current edition of D&D.

 

[mamba]

I never claimed it was lesser. I don't even know how you could get that.

I'd say the below is what got me to that conclusion

5e DnD was created, whole cloth, without any SRD being referenced. There was not a single point in time where WoTC went "we need to look at the reference document for how to write this rule, to follow the "standard" set by a different company". WoTC set the standard.

A5e or Level Up, at the very least, has always been "You like DnD 5e, here are a bunch of houserules for it"

 

[Morrus]

And that this is part of the reason why A5e is more popular than some others.

Well, more popular than my own other game. I don’t speak to its popularity wirh regards anything else.

My question was just the extent of that benefit, in your estimation? Is it as large as the size of player base leads us to believe?

Umm. 7? I’ve no idea how to quantify it!

 

[Chaosmancer]

That's now I see it. And I choose to see that because I don't like the idea of any one company dictating my happiness with 5e and RPGs. I have lots of options. It doesn't matter to me which is the most popular. I own the books to all of these systems. I have one group very much enjoying Level Up Advanced 5e. I have another excited for Tales of the Valiant. I have a third still playing D&D 2014. None of us care what the market share for D&D 2014 or D&D 2024 is (ok, I care, but it doesn't matter for our own games).

You can decide to throw aside the idea of an independent 5e and demand that 5e == D&D but you're making that choice. You're choosing to tie the whole of 5e to just one company and whatever directions it takes with it. The rest of us aren't. I'm not – neither as a GM or as a publisher. I'll certainly be watching how the wind blows over the next year but I'm already writing products designed for 5e – all the 5es.

I hear some people tie all of 5e to D&D because they don't like D&D or WOTC or Hasbro and are fine throwing all of 5e out My guess is they're not fans of 5e anyway.

I hear others tying all of 5e to D&D because, I guess, they're huge fans of D&D, WOTC, and Hasbro regardless of how the company treated the brand and its customers in the past. They've tied their gaming identity to the whims of a single corporation. They have a playlist of layered defenses for Hasbro every time the company steps on a rake. That's fine, but you'll get what you get. You may love Hasbro but Hasbro doesn't love you back.

For me? I love 5e as an independent open platform on which several systems and thousands of awesome supplements exist. I love the D&D brand and have since I was a teenager many decades ago. I love many of the products published by WOTC. I don't trust Hasbro because we shouldn't trust big publicly traded companies, because of its previous behavior, and because of the clear indication that the suits want to turn D&D into a continuous subscription revenue stream. I definitely respect the designers, developers, editors, and art directors working on D&D. I bet they don't trust Hasbro either.

I don't understand what you mean about "choosing to tie the whole of 5e to just one company" or how recognizing the 5e is DnD 5e means that Hasbro gets to dictate my happiness. None of that makes a lick of sense to me. Again, to use the car analogy, just because I have bought a Honda Accord doesn't mean I am tying my happiness with my car to Honda, and just because I buy after-market parts to alter my car doesn't mean that the Honda Accord is not a Honda product.

You say you are making products for "all the 5es" but... not really? Your most recent project is the City of Arches, correct? And, as I understand that product it is mostly a setting and lore. I could use that product with Savage Worlds, or with a diceless system. Sure, the adventures might be harder to run that way, but you didn't design those adventures for Grimhollow, or for Ryoku's guide, or for Humblewood. You designed them to work fundamentally, with DnD 5e... which al of those things ALSO work with.

And none of this means WotC gets to determine anything. That doesn't mean my "gaming identity" is tied to Hasbro. I have plenty of products just like yours. I support plenty of creators who are making things or producing things that work with 5e... but when I sit down with people at the table, we are playing Dungeons and Dragons. If I backed your project and pitched a game to people, I wouldn't say "we are going to play Grimhollow in the City of Arches" I would say "I have some cool books for a DnD game, interested?" Because, at the core of this "platform" is Dungeons and Dragons. That is the core product that everything else is branching off of. 5e means "Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition" and you are not giving WotC anything at all, sacrificing none of your happiness or identity, by acknowledging that fact. And I don't think it is necessary to rip 5e away from Dungeons and Dragons and state "this ruleset has nothing to do with the people and company that created this ruleset". Don't trust WotC, don't give them an inch. That's fine. But 5e is their creation, they made it, and all the products that are modifying it, are modifying Dungeons and Dragons, not some nameless, ownerless ruleset that has no real connection to Dungeons and Dragons.

 

[mamba]

I don't understand what you mean about "choosing to tie the whole of 5e to just one company"

5e no longer is just WotC's only, it is a platform on which multiple TTRPGs have been built that are mostly interoperable. When you say that this is not the case and that only WotC's D&D is 5e, you are tying 5e to just one company

 

[Chaosmancer]

again, the scenario is a hypothetical 6e from WotC, there will be people staying with 5e at that point, and many of those will look for a product that is still supported, if that exists. Happened with 3e/PF1 vs 4e, I see no reason why it would be any different for 5e vs 6e.


nothing unique about them, it took a 4e that was not well liked and a product that was largely compatible with 3e thanks to its SRD. 5e has such compatible products already, all that is missing is a 6e dud

Right, so one big factor it is missing is a 6e that people hate and decide to flock to a game that is basically identical to 5e. Except, also, unlike Pathfinder all of the 5e equivalents already exist. 4e was released in 2008 and PAthfinder was released in 2009.

That means that, people had a chance to look at 4e, decide they didn't like 4e, and then within that time span someone offered SOMETHING NEW that was like the old thing they had liked.

Right now what would happen is that people have 5e, they look at 6e and decide they don't like it... so they decide to go back and buy an existing product that they didn't buy before? IF someone looked at Tales of the Valiant already and decided that they don't want it, then not wanting 6e isn't automatically going to make them go "oh, now I want Tales of the Valiant because it has new products". Remember, people stuck with 2e as it existed, they didn't flock to other games that were adjacent. And despite there being quite a few d20 system games similar to 3.5, it was Pathfinder which was a known and respected PARTNER of WoTC that was able to make a change by releasing a NEW product, not supporting an old product.

Not saying that it is impossible for some of the other 5e compatible systems to get some small bump, but most of them have been around long enough that they aren't going to see a massive swell, because most people who want them... already got them.

 

[Chaosmancer]

of course not, then it would not really be based on the 5e SRD after all. They are all implementations of the 5e SRD, just from different companies.

It will only become truly distinct from the current D&D once WotC moves to 6e, until then there is little difference between being compatible with the 5e SRD and being compatible with the current edition of D&D.

Okay, so, go back to the original thing that started this tangent, which was people claiming that Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition is a seperate thing from 5e, which is all the other things that are compatible with Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition. They were not talking about this as a "in the future when..." they were saying this was a truth right now.

So you and me? We are agreeing on the core thing that started this tangent.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I'd say the below is what got me to that conclusion

Well, I still don't understand why you would say that any of that means the design work was somehow "lesser". I've done both homebrewing and creating new systems whole cloth with no reference to anything else. They are both challenging in their own ways.

 

[SlyFlourish]

I don't understand what you mean about "choosing to tie the whole of 5e to just one company"

What I mean is there are many games built on 5e now – complete core games. Level Up A5e has its own completely independent 5e compatible SRD. I'm using this one for the City of Arches. Tales of the Valiant is 5e. Level Up Advanced 5e is 5e. FateForge is 5e. D&D has two different versions, both pretty different from one another, and both of them are 5e.

Again, 5e began as DYD 2014 whose core rules were put into the 5.1 SRD by WOTC. Absolutely.

But now 5e is something different. 5e has eclipsed WOTC and D&D and now it's the core platform for lots of RPGs and tons of supplements.

To use your car analogy. Saying 5e is just D&D is like saying your Honda Accord is really just a Ford Model T when it comes down to it. Really you're driving a Ford. Obviously that doesn't make sense.

You say you are making products for "all the 5es" but... not really? Your most recent project is the City of Arches, correct? And, as I understand that product it is mostly a setting and lore. I could use that product with Savage Worlds, or with a diceless system. Sure, the adventures might be harder to run that way, but you didn't design those adventures for Grimhollow, or for Ryoku's guide, or for Humblewood. You designed them to work fundamentally, with DnD 5e... which al of those things ALSO work with.

City of Arches is pretty system agnostic, true, but it's using 5e for a lot of it. I spent the morning working on a big table we're going to include in the back of the book that shows our bolded monsters and which variants you might want depending on which one of the four big 5e variants you might be playing: A5e, ToV, 2014 D&D, or 2024 D&D. Not all the names of all the monsters are the same so we clarify when a monster might have a different variant for one of those four systems. I'm guessing most GMs could figure this out but we figure we might as well help them out.

Also, A5e's SRD is awesome. It's like 5x bigger than the 5.1 SRD. Tons of awesome stuff in there, which is why we're using that SRD instead of the 5.1 SRD.

when I sit down with people at the table, we are playing Dungeons and Dragons. If I backed your project and pitched a game to people, I wouldn't say "we are going to play Grimhollow in the City of Arches" I would say "I have some cool books for a DnD game, interested?" Because, at the core of this "platform" is Dungeons and Dragons.

I don't have a problem with groups saying "we're playing D&D" when they're actually playing Tales of the Valiant of A5e. I doubt Morrus cares. That's like saying we made a Xerox of something. I don't think my Wednesday A5e group would describe it as A5e to outsiders but we might start with "we play D&D. Actually it's a variant called Level Up Advanced 5e." and people would figure it out well enough.

The reason I bothered to write all of this is because I think there's a real value in seeing 5e as an open platform independent of any one game or publisher at this point the same way Powered by the Apocalypse is an independent RPG platform for everything from Avatar the Last Airbender to Thirsty Sword Lesbians. We don't say Thirsty Sword Lesbians is Apocalypse World just because they are both Powered by the Apocalypse.

5e is the same way. It used to mean "the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons" but now 5e means 5e. It's an open platform for RPGs.

You don't have to agree with me, of course. However, I think saying "5e = D&D" ignores the awesome work other publishers have done and are doing to build their own awesome and independent RPGs around 5e and I think it projects too much power over this awesome open slice of TTRPGs to just one brand and one company.