D&D 5E Latest D&D Errata: Drow, Alignment, & More

Sage Advice is a series of articles in which Jeremy Crawford, one of the D&D Studio’s game design architects, talks about the design of the game’s rules and answers questions about them.

Book Updates | Sage Advice | Dungeons & Dragons

This Sage Advice provides updates and errata for a number of books, as well as answers to rules questions.

dnd.wizards.com

D&D books occasionally receive corrections and other updates to their rules and story. This Sage Advice installment presents updates to several books. I then answer a handful of rules questions, focusing on queries related to Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons and Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos.

Official errata has been published for the following books:

• Curse of Strahd
• Dungeon Master’s Guide
• Player’s Handbook
• Storm King’s Thunder
• Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide
• Tales from the Yawning Portal
• Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything
• Tomb of Annihilation
• Volo’s Guide to Monsters

Here's some of the highlights.

• Alignment is removed from the Racial Traits section of races.
• Drow have undergone lore changes which reflect the different types of drow. The 'darkness of the drow' sidebar which portrays them as only evil has been removed.
• Storm King's Thunder alters references to 'Savage Frontier' and 'barbarians'; Curse of Strahd alters references to the Vistani.
• The controversial Silvery Barbs spell has been clarified.

As a drow, you are infused with the magic of the Underdark, an underground realm of wonders and horrors rarely seen on the surface above. You are at home in shadows and, thanks to your innate magic, learn to con- jure forth both light and darkness. Your kin tend to have stark white hair and grayish skin of many hues.

The cult of the god Lolth, Queen of Spiders, has cor- rupted some of the oldest drow cities, especially in the worlds of Oerth and Toril. Eberron, Krynn, and other realms have escaped the cult’s influence—for now. Wherever the cult lurks, drow heroes stand on the front lines in the war against it, seeking to sunder Lolth’s web.

 

[Bacon Bits]

I cannot fathom looking at the Realms or Eberron and thinking that though a player character's race doesn't determine culture Amn, Chult, the Dalelands, Sharn, Waterdeep, etc are all now the same.

Alright, now fit Aasimar, Dragonborn, Genasi, Goliath, Owlin, Triton, Tortles, and Verdan into each of those realms. Give each of them their own racial origins, unique political and cultural interactions through history with the existing dozen races on Toril, and then make them distinct and memorable from each other and the existing lineages.

Like there's a reason WotC just dumps the new races on FR with the generic, "Oh, they came through a magical portal from another world! But they have basically no culture or history and are a total sponge, absorbing what's already here, except for these specific 3-5 novelty characteristics! They want to live just like everybody else already does, already all speak the language, already know all the customs, totally accept the status quo of the existing authorities, and somehow hundreds of thousands of new people don't cause any war or strife by settling on already occupied lands."

Instead, they dump whole populations of people into the kitchen sink and gives them no culture. No gods of their own. No histories or mythologies or teachings passed down through their families. They're just new people who are magically there when they never were before. They magically never had anything to do with history before, and now they just magically co-exist and incorporate across the lands and are accepted without question. All three dozen of new species. It's an offensive level of hand-waving and laziness. A lineage is a culture. A lineage is an ancestry. It's not a world if that's not there. It's barely a stage performance.

They don't do anything for them. They just say, "Here's another rubber mask for ya." They do it like that because integrating a new lineage is hard and they don't really care about the setting.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Alright, now fit Aasimar, Dragonborn, Genasi, Goliath, Owlin, Triton, Tortles, and Verdan into each of those realms. Give each of them their own racial origins, unique political and cultural interactions through history with the existing dozen races on Toril, and then make them distinct and memorable from each other and the existing lineages.

Like there's a reason WotC just dumps the new races on FR with the generic, "Oh, they came through a magical portal from another world! But they have basically no culture or history and are a total sponge, absorbing what's already here, except for these specific 3-5 novelty characteristics! They want to live just like everybody else already does, already all speak the language, already know all the customs, totally accept the status quo of the existing authorities, and somehow hundreds of thousands of new people don't cause any war or strife by settling on already occupied lands."

Instead, they dump whole populations of people into the kitchen sink and gives them no culture. No gods of their own. No histories or mythologies or teachings passed down through their families. They're just new people who are magically there when they never were before. They magically never had anything to do with history before, and now they just magically co-exist and incorporate across the lands and are accepted without question. All three dozen of new species. It's an offensive level of hand-waving and laziness. A lineage is a culture. A lineage is an ancestry. It's not a world if that's not there. It's barely a stage performance.

They don't do anything for them. They just say, "Here's another rubber mask for ya." They do it like that because integrating a new lineage is hard and they don't really care about the setting.

So very this. Welcome to the future of official D&D.

 

[Malmuria]

So very this. Welcome to the future of official D&D.

and its past? When all goblins, for example, have the same characteristics, same customs, same patterns of settlement, and same language, even if they are on opposites sides of a world, then you have a homogenized culture. True complex world building would disassociate species from culture and invent a variety of cultures for each species. I agree that wotc is doing the first step, but not the second. And they aren't likely to do the second as it is very complicated! It would be like a dnd setting having a realistic economy...

 

[Scribe]

Instead, they dump whole populations of people into the kitchen sink and gives them no culture. No gods of their own. No histories or mythologies or teachings passed down through their families. They're just new people who are magically there when they never were before. They magically never had anything to do with history before, and now they just magically co-exist and incorporate across the lands and are accepted without question. All three dozen of new species. It's an offensive level of hand-waving and laziness. A lineage is a culture. A lineage is an ancestry. It's not a world if that's not there. It's barely a stage performance.

This is where I'm at with Wizards handling of FR, and with the canon change, I simply dont care what they have to say anymore, because they refuse to say much of anything other than 'you can do whatever'.

 

[overgeeked]

They don't do anything for them. They just say, "Here's another rubber mask for ya." They do it like that because integrating a new lineage is hard and they don't really care about the setting.

Mechanics sell better than settings. Which is why even if a setting doesn't need any mechanics, you'll always find mechanics in WotC setting books. They're also including mechanics in adventure books...even if they don't need to...because mechanics sell better than adventures. Something to hook the players into buying product, too, instead of just the DMs. WotC is also in a position where no matter what they do, someone will complain about it. So they do what is best for themselves as a business. That's not always going to be what's best for the game nor what's best for the players and DMs of the game.

 

[overgeeked]

This is where I'm at with Wizards handling of FR, and with the canon change, I simply dont care what they have to say anymore, because they refuse to say much of anything other than 'you can do whatever'.

You can't have a big tent game without a lot of flexibility. "You can do whatever" with the lore sells books. WotC will do whatever it takes to sell books.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

On the other hand, having a singular monolithic culture makes everything feel the same.

Sure. I think the solution is for wotc to hire some writers and depict actual cultures, talk a bit about how different demographics might shift certain priorities and biases within those cultures, and then we can have goliaths and gnomes living side by side in one culture, very low goliath populations in their neighbor to the south but plenty of gnomes, etc, without those demographics being the primary defining factor of those cultures.

One thing I've always liked to do is play around with Dwarves and the whole "gruff mountain folk" vibe. Humans who live in mountain communities tend to be descended from people who split off from a larger valley dwelling culture in order to order their lives how they saw fit. Dwarves, OTOH, just live inside and on the mountain. It's not about breaking off from a larger culture, it's just where they evolved to be most comfortable. So why not have them be kindof annoyingly social and open and ready to syncretize their culture with others'?

My wife and I had a blast figuring out the collective and respective cultural elements of the people of The Mountain that our characters both grew up on with our DM who built the world. There are Dwarves, Gnomes, Goliaths, and Humans, with very small populations of others. They each have stuff that is particular to their place in the region and their natures, but they all participate in a shared culture.

I'm surprised they didn't replace the Kobold trait:

• Grovel, Cower, and Beg. As an action on your turn, you can cower pathetically to distract nearby foes. Until the end of your next turn, your allies gain advantage on attack rolls against enemies within 10 feet of you that can see you. Once you use this trait, you can't use it again until you finish a short or long rest.
  
  I always thought it was a poor trait for a whole species.

Agreed. I think the suggestion further down that they should have abilities taken from the Kobold stat blocks in the book would have been a great way to go.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Another fun thing to learn from this Sage Advice is that SCAG is still being reprinted.

It's very popular, in spite of what the forum discourse might suggest.

 

[Scribe]

You can't have a big tent game without a lot of flexibility. "You can do whatever" with the lore sells books. WotC will do whatever it takes to sell books.

I know, thats what I finally came around to after all of these changes.

To me, it makes the game much worse 'out of the box' unless you are already invested in a setting that is supported (Eberron and such) or you have already built up your own.

What they have done to FR, is not good, to me.

 

[humble minion]

Mechanics sell better than settings.

I know the conventional wisdom is that mechanics sell better than settings, and settings sell better than adventures, but I'm wondering if WotC knows something we don't on that front. They've released more adventures than settings, and more settings than mechanics books - even to the point where Strixhaven was ~60% adventure despite being nominally a setting book. Although there's clearly a strategy of releasing mechanics sparingly to prevent 3e-style option bloat and power creep, I don't think they'd be doing this if it wasn't working for them on a sales front.

I wonder if perhaps this particular conventional wisdom isn't true any more. Maybe it was true back in 2e when TSR was spitting out far more adventures than the most diligent gaming group could ever hope to play, but perhaps with the slow 5e release schedule, perhaps more groups are able to actually keep up playing through the adventures at or near the pace they get released?

Anyway, sorry for thread hijack.