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 be included. From the update:

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...

www.enworld.org

Last week we released a Changelog detailing how players would experience the 2024 Core Rulebooks on D&D Beyond. We heard your feedback loud and clear and thank you for speaking up.

Our excitement around the 2024 Core Rulebooks led us to view these planned updates as welcome improvements and free upgrades to existing content. We misjudged the impact of this change, and we agree that you should be free to choose your own way to play. Taking your feedback to heart, here’s what we’re going to do:

Players who only have access to the 2014 Player’s Handbook will maintain their character options, spells, and magical items in their character sheets. Players with access to the 2024 and 2014 digital Player’s Handbooks can select from both sources when creating new characters. Players will not need to rely on Homebrew to use their 2014 player options, including spells and magic items, as recommended in previous changelogs.

Please Note:

Players will continue to have access to their free, shared, and purchased items on D&D Beyond, with the ability to use previously acquired player options when creating characters and using character sheets.

We are not changing players’ current character sheets, except for relabeling and renaming. Examples include Races to Species, Inspiration to Heroic Inspiration, and Cast Spell to Magic.

We’re dedicated to making D&D Beyond the ultimate digital toolset for Dungeons & Dragons, continuously enhancing the platform to ensure you can create, customize, and play your game just as you envision it. From your first one-shot to multi-year campaigns and everything in between, we're grateful to be on this journey with you.

- The D&D Studio

 

[DEFCON 1]

This is a very funny thing to say, because you say with such assurance, and WotC 100% does NOT remotely agree with you, we can see that very easily from their actions.

WotC absolutely were grinding their teeth over the OGL 2.0 fiasco. It was absolutely skin off their nose, and they acted like it.

Well, skin off their nose in the short-term that this particular money-making decision didn't work, sure. I'll grant you that. But in the long run they will have discovered (and probably already have) that it didn't end up mattering and that they'll make their money in different ways instead. The OGL thing is already out-of-sight-out-of-mind for most of the playerbase and a lot of other companies too, so what did they really lose other than some short-term financial inroads and a handful of fan-people constantly complaining on Twitter, Reddit and some message boards?

As I said... they'll do a whole bunch of things to try and be a more profitable business, and a few of them won't work. It'll be annoying for them that those few things didn't... but they'll just pivot and move on because that's what agile companies do.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

As I said... they'll do a whole bunch of things to try and be a more profitable business, and a few of them won't work.

I think the issue I'd point out is that most of WotC's unforced errors re: D&D aren't really in the name of a "more profitable business".

The OGL 2.0 was, and it backfired incredibly hard. But let's look at other recent-ish WotC backtracks/errors:

1) Replacing the 2014 spells/items with 2024 spells/items. This wasn't really a profitability issue at all - this is like, literally maybe a work week's work for one guy, if he was going real slow. I wouldn't be so confident except we know for a fact (confirmed by both Beyond employees and 3PPs who have put stuff on Beyond), they basically just have a more powerful version of the same interface we do for adding/modifying content. That's not a decision where profitability ever factored in. It was just idiocy.

2) Accidentally including AI art in stuff. Again, not profitability, because they'd not asked for cheapo AI art, they just got some and didn't scrutinize it enough nor impress enough upon their artists that it was a no-no. That seems to have been fixed for now though.

3) Firing everyone basically so much as looked at Larian, let alone worked with or spoke to them - so you can argue this was about Hasbro looking good for the stock market, but the reality is, they turned a potential large future profit from a BG4 which was then still being worked on into a big fat ZERO (for the foreseeable future - any BG4 is now 5+ years away dead minimum and will be regarded which skepticism by the gaming press and gamers in general unless someone truly saintly makes it - maybe Obsidian?). So profit-minded but very stupid. They didn't walk it back though, I guess because it was Hasbro not WotC at the reins.

4) The Hadozee idiocy. Again, not profitability-related unless we're talking serious penny-pinching of a perverse and incompetent kind.

EDIT - If you include MtG, I don't feel like I know enough to comment, but I think you could probably construct a better case for profitability-chasing leading to the missteps and errors there.

 

[Gammadoodler]

Well, skin off their nose in the short-term that this particular money-making decision didn't work, sure. I'll grant you that. But in the long run they will have discovered (and probably already have) that it didn't end up mattering and that they'll make their money in different ways instead. The OGL thing is already out-of-sight-out-of-mind for most of the playerbase and a lot of other companies too, so what did they really lose other than some short-term financial inroads and a handful of fan-people constantly complaining on Twitter, Reddit and some message boards?

As I said... they'll do a whole bunch of things to try and be a more profitable business, and a few of them won't work. It'll be annoying for them that those few things didn't... but they'll just pivot and move on because that's what agile companies do.

You may be right. On the other hand, I wonder how they view something like the OGL controversy and the performance of the D&D movie which released a couple months later.

If they do see a link (I have no evidence one way or the other) then it's a faux pas that spoiled a multi-year investment that's cost over $100 million dollars.

Pure conjecture, but I do wonder.

 

[Oofta]

This black background to white text, "YOU CAN KEEP THINGS AS YOU LIKED, WE LISTENED TO YOUR FEEDBACK." message from D&D is starting to become too much of a regular thing. I'm starting to have the same Pavlovian "oh what did they mess up again?" reaction to it as CDPR's yellow background "whoopsie daisy, Cyberpunk 2077 got delayed again" messages.

In other words "WOTC IS TERRIBLE BECAUSE THEY LISTEN TO FEEDBACK!!! AAAARRRGGHHH!"

I seem to remember reading a book long ago that had a wise saying "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." They made a mistake and they're correcting it before it impacted anyone.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

You may be right. On the other hand, I wonder how they view something like the OGL controversy and the performance of the D&D movie which released a couple months later.

If they do see a link (I have no evidence one way or the other) then it's a faux pas that spoiled a multi-year investment that's cost over $100 million dollars.

Pure conjecture, but I do wonder.

I don't think the OGL controversy was a major factor with DAD:HAT not making the money it could have, though it certainly didn't help D&D's brand.

The big screw-up there was the slot they released it into, where cinema-going was still not "back up to speed", and they sandwiched it between two movies likely to compete pretty heavily with it for audience, release-date-wise. I literally know D&D players who went to see John Wick or Mario over D&D, where, if DAD:HAT had been up against say, Twister or Trap or something (not to diss either of those), they'd have gone to DAD:HAT

 

[Nikosandros]

Well, skin off their nose in the short-term that this particular money-making decision didn't work, sure. I'll grant you that. But in the long run they will have discovered (and probably already have) that it didn't end up mattering and that they'll make their money in different ways instead. The OGL thing is already out-of-sight-out-of-mind for most of the playerbase and a lot of other companies too, so what did they really lose other than some short-term financial inroads and a handful of fan-people constantly complaining on Twitter, Reddit and some message boards?

As I said... they'll do a whole bunch of things to try and be a more profitable business, and a few of them won't work. It'll be annoying for them that those few things didn't... but they'll just pivot and move on because that's what agile companies do.

Some of your points are well-taken, but I feel, overall, it is a bit of a simplistic view. If I may be so arrogant as to use myself as an example, in both the OGL and this newest situation, I would have walked away from DDB, but since - in both cases - they back-tracked, I kept my subscription and I kept buying things on the platform. I'm confident that there are many others like me.

 

[TiQuinn]

Wizards management do things to start with that they think will produce their most beneficial results (in this case, more people buying the 5E24 books in DDB). Oftentimes those things go by without incident (other than a small handful of people griping, which happens withe everything and are easily ignorable). But on the few times where the complaints are loud enough and large enough (OGL, this DDB thing)... they will backtrack. Because why not? What skin is it off WotC's nose? If it's that big a deal for a lot of players, there's nothing wrong with just throwing them a bone.

But here's the thing... as is always the case, a huge percentage of players just don't care about any of this stuff. They buy what they want, they use what they want, and the inner working and policies of the company just goes right on by. So there's no real reason why WotC feels like they can't make these changes under the assumption that they probably will work out fine and they'll earn more money out of it. And if it doesn't work occasionally? They'll just revert back and it won't actually matter. Because most people never cared, and the ones that did either just continue to go along with the game anyway because they want to play it... or they "leave" the game, play some other game instead, but at the same time just can't seem to stop talking about the game and thus generating advertising for the roleplaying game business (and Dungeons & Dragons as the major part of it). And when it comes to fandom and the advertising of it to the outside "normal" world, there's no bad press. Because any "bad press" is usually seen (rightly, in many cases) as a select group of nerds getting way too bent out of shape over some inane perceived slight. Something like the OGL or this DDB thing will just roll right on past and not cause any major issues for anyone at WotC down the road more often than not.

I think this is an assumption based on how popular D&D has been the past ten years, and not based on how popular or profitable the game has been in the past. Meaning, I don’t take it as a foregone conclusion that the game’s popularity is here to stay, all publicity is good publicity, and most people just want to buy the next game. That wasn’t always the case. If it’s the case now, it could cease being the case.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

In other words "WOTC IS TERRIBLE BECAUSE THEY LISTEN TO FEEDBACK!!! AAAARRRGGHHH!"

I seem to remember reading a book long ago that had a wise saying "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." They made a mistake and they're correcting it before it impacted anyone.

You know better than this lol!

WotC aren't terrible here, they're just needlessly annoying, because we keep having to complain a lot to make them reverse really obviously silly decisions that should never have been made that way.

I am very pleased with them reversing this particular one because it bodes well for Beyond in the future, if this "UGH DAD WHY DO I NEED TO TAKE A SHOWER ILL JUST NEED TO TAKE ONE AGAIN TOMORROW" attitude from Beyond is ended. Maybe from 2024 onwards all the mechanical content in a book will actually be usable, rather than only whatever Beyond feels like, which has previously been the case.

 

[Ondath]

In other words "WOTC IS TERRIBLE BECAUSE THEY LISTEN TO FEEDBACK!!! AAAARRRGGHHH!"

I seem to remember reading a book long ago that had a wise saying "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." They made a mistake and they're correcting it before it impacted anyone.

They could've just... You know, not made these obviously terrible decisions and not needed to listen to feedback in the first place. You know, I see people defending every weird decision WotC takes since I brought up them banning LGBT+ dice in Turkey (even though Turkey has no law requiring them to do so) with an unmatchable fervour to the point that that thread got locked, and I just don't understand. Do you think people aren't allowed to be annoyed when something annoying happens after the perpetrator does the bare minimum to fix it? Do you think it is a virtue for a company to be continuously shepherded by a screaming mob of fans off a precipice when they didn't even need to take a step toward it in the first place? Why this sarcasm? Why this cynicism that assumes that companies are incorrigible, absolutely unaddressible entities to the point that even a slightest step towards doing the right thing should deserve our endless showers of praise and any further complaints are just being spoilt? Just, why?

 

[Gammadoodler]

I don't think the OGL controversy was a major factor with DAD:HAT not making the money it could have, though it certainly didn't help D&D's brand.

The big screw-up there was the slot they released it into, where cinema-going was still not "back up to speed", and they sandwiched it between two movies likely to compete pretty heavily with it for audience, release-date-wise. I literally know D&D players who went to see John Wick or Mario over D&D, where, if DAD:HAT had been up against say, Twister or Trap or something (not to diss either of those), they'd have gone to DAD:HAT

That may very well be true. I wonder if they feel the same way.