D&D General Is D&D Beyond Exclusivity Bad for D&D?

[SlyFlourish]

How much errata should change is open to debate - but some people found parts of the original version of the books offensive. If I really cared that they might change something I'd buy the book. I never looked at the Eberron book since while I find the setting interesting I run a homebrew campaign so I didn't need it. But yeah, it would have been better to give you a heads up.

You can see what they changed if you look up the errata. They did remove a whole 2 paragraphs from Volo's on half-orcs. I don't see anything to get particularly upset about. If I happened to buy a printing of the book after the errata you would also be missing the original text. Should they have left the text and imagery for the Hadozee in the book as well?

My understanding is that it wasn’t so much that the content was problematic (the beholder stuff was hard to see that way) but that they decided to change what was world specific versus whole game. This was also one of the reasons to stop selling Volos and Mordenkainens tome of foes completely which not only has some awesome lore but that lore made it into Baldurs Gate 3.

Regardless, you don’t get to decide what you want to keep or toss aside. They do. For any reason they want. It’s right there in the Terms of Service.

 

[cbwjm]

I'm definitely against the changing of books to take out lore and such. If they were just correcting things like stats because they'd messed up a calculation somewhere, not a problem, but to edit out sections for no real reason, not a fan. I don't think I'll be buying anything on DnDBeyond anyway, but if I was thinking of returning to 5e, I'd definitely be reconsidering buying additional books on the platform.

 

[Distracted DM]

I do not recall that personally. All I remember is approximately 2 dozen printer pages of errata people would talk about having stuck in their books because of how often WotC did make errata. So if there was indeed a gap between Character Builder fixes and it getting written down in an errata document for the first time, it wasn't much of one to be rememberable.

Yeah I don't remember there being a noticeable delay there either. If there was a delay, it was single-digit days, and so I think unless you played D&D like, most days, you probably wouldn't have noticed it. Certainly we were playing almost weekly at times in 4E and using the DDI, and I don't remember ever like, booting up the DDI and seeing a change that I didn't see in the errata document until later.

It was definitely a problem that they were updating pretty often, and making both huge changes to how abilities worked, and ton of minor fiddly changes, because it caused players to be having to double-check their abilities and so on, or I was having to pour over the errata and see if any PCs would be impacted and so on.

No noticeable delay; single-digit days?
Short memories, is all I'll say.

September 2024 is when the unannounced changes (stealth patching) started.
April 2025 is when they posted errata, and you can see folk in this thread saying how it would've been helpful for them to list the changes so DMs/players didn't have to hunt for them.

There were reddit threads trying to keep track of all the unannounced changes and when they were rolled out.

 

[AlViking]

My understanding is that it wasn’t so much that the content was problematic (the beholder stuff was hard to see that way) but that they decided to change what was world specific versus whole game. This was also one of the reasons to stop selling Volos and Mordenkainens tome of foes completely which not only has some awesome lore but that lore made it into Baldurs Gate 3.

Regardless, you don’t get to decide what you want to keep or toss aside. They do. For any reason they want. It’s right there in the Terms of Service.

Books go out of print as well but I can still access my book online, even if they did apply errata. As far as lore, I get to decide what the lore is or is not for my home campaign. They've always decided what errata to apply or not, if I was concerned about it I'd make a backup.

 

[saviirkad]

My understanding is that it wasn’t so much that the content was problematic (the beholder stuff was hard to see that way) but that they decided to change what was world specific versus whole game.

It wasn't an either or situation, but both. In the act of removing problematic content, they shifted from giving world-specific lore to a more game-wide style.

Releases since then have clarified that shift further, with world-specific releases having world-specific lore.

MToF and VGtM were world specific, but were ground zero for the changes, while the replacement MPMotM was game-wide.