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

 

[Scribe]

They were "repulsive" because many 3.X fans were absolutely unwilling to accept anything but the horrible broken, buggy mess they had, because they loved it and didn't want to part with any piece of it. It took 4e's lifespan--and Pathfinder carrying the torch for them--for them to finally start admitting, okay, yeah, this is really buggy and broken and needs fixing.

But because the edition warriors won, we're still stuck with the HORRIBLE, TERRIBLE design of 3e, almost 25 years later.

If carrying the torch gets us to PF2, I'm still sticking to 3.5 or PF1, forever.

There are many branches, many paths, and many forms this game type can take, and its not even remotely factual that your preference of 4e/PF2, is objectively better than 3.5/PF1, or the OSR lineage.

To say nothing of 5e/5.5 which just somehow despite being apparently HORRIBLE and TERRIBLE design of 3e (??) is played and enjoyed by many if not millions.

4e just wasnt, and isnt, it.

 

[Hussar]

Huh.

WotC announces something. People hate it and demand that it get changed. WotC changes it in response to what fans say they want. And now we're retreading 4e edition wars.



Now that's some thread drift.

 

[Daztur]

If carrying the torch gets us to PF2, I'm still sticking to 3.5 or PF1, forever.

There are many branches, many paths, and many forms this game type can take, and its not even remotely factual that your preference of 4e/PF2, is objectively better than 3.5/PF1, or the OSR lineage.

To say nothing of 5e/5.5 which just somehow despite being apparently HORRIBLE and TERRIBLE design of 3e (??) is played and enjoyed by many if not millions.

4e just wasnt, and isnt, it.

I honestly think 4e or something like 4e could've been very popular if it was published in different circumstances. The main things holding it back that wouldn't have been an issue in a different set of circumstances including:

1. Having it be what people expected. I remember my first reaction to seeing 4e rules was "bwuh? They changed everything? Why did they change everything?" I think if there was a 3.75e that looked (in very broad outline) like PF 1e or Star Wars: Saga Edition and that was around for a while people would've been ready for a more back to the drawing board game (like they very much were in 2014) but most people didn't want a back to the drawing board game in 2008 (or 2024). We can see this with PF 1e vs 2e. People really weren't ready for something like PF 2e when 1e dropped but they were a while later after the d20 system had finished wearing out its welcome more completely.

2. A more mature version of 4e. With more time cooking and more lessons learned from a somewhat 4e-ish theoretical 3.75e the lessons learned by the end of the 4e cycle could've been in core. I think the biggest ones were simply keeping monster HPs down and damage up. Things like keeping the PHB and MM design more in tandem would've gone more smoothly if there weren't the rushes and changes of plans that marked a lot of 4e's development cycle.

3. A better match with the default play style. 4e is good if you have a plot heavy game and maybe 1-2 big fights per session, but it isn't the best fit extended dungeon crawling. Meanwhile 5e really needs more encounters for things to work well and can sometimes be a bad fit with more plot heavy games with fewer bigger fights and more long rests. One of the biggest issues I've seen newbie DMs have with 5e is that they just have too many long rests and struggle with putting in more fights per long rest. That's just not a problem in 4e. I think that a lot of 5e DMs wold honestly be happier with a theoretical streamlined 4.5e than with 5e or 5.5e. WotC would then have to write adventures what 4e is good at instead of Keep on the Shadowfell which a lot of people found to be a real slog that didn't do a good job of showcasing 4e's strengths.

4. A bit of tweaking of 4e fight pacing doing things like having a bit less abilities to interrupt things at higher levels as that could gum up the flow of a fight. I would have also liked to see more encounter and daily power that have some kind of requirement to use them (such as use only when bloodied, or use only when your ally is KOed, or use only immediately after downing an enemy, or you can use it any time but using it costs ALL your healing surges) so that you have more cool powers being used later in a fight instead of usually unloaded right at the start with the fight ending a bit anti-climactically with at-will spam. Not a big change to 4e, could've been done with some minor tweaking.

5. No murder-suicide. That was a really horrible tragedy that set back 4e's online tools a lot and there's nothing WotC could've done to prepare for something like that, no can anyone really...

 

[Vaalingrade]

It’s fine that you liked it. I found it great for minis or board games but not for tabletop.

In a mad quest to get to a stale, ISO standard insult, you somehow forgot that minis and board games are tabletop games.

 

[Belen]

In a mad quest to get to a stale, ISO standard insult, you somehow forgot that minis and board games are tabletop games.

I am so sorry, I should have said tabletop RPG.

 

[Oofta]

I honestly think 4e or something like 4e could've been very popular if it was published in different circumstances. The main things holding it back that wouldn't have been an issue in a different set of circumstances including:

1. Having it be what people expected. I remember my first reaction to seeing 4e rules was "bwuh? They changed everything? Why did they change everything?" I think if there was a 3.75e that looked (in very broad outline) like PF 1e or Star Wars: Saga Edition and that was around for a while people would've been ready for a more back to the drawing board game (like they very much were in 2014) but most people didn't want a back to the drawing board game in 2008 (or 2024). We can see this with PF 1e vs 2e. People really weren't ready for something like PF 2e when 1e dropped but they were a while later after the d20 system had finished wearing out its welcome more completely.

D&D 4E shared very little with every previous version of D&D other than mostly cosmetic trappings. They were trying to capitalize on the name brand. It didn't work and actually turned off some people.

2. A more mature version of 4e. With more time cooking and more lessons learned from a somewhat 4e-ish theoretical 3.75e the lessons learned by the end of the 4e cycle could've been in core. I think the biggest ones were simply keeping monster HPs down and damage up. Things like keeping the PHB and MM design more in tandem would've gone more smoothly if there weren't the rushes and changes of plans that marked a lot of 4e's development cycle.

It needed more time in development, perhaps simply smaller scope. Release something that only went up to level 10, which in general worked better in my experience without attempting to go to 30 in one shot. For many reasons such as the amount of errata, it was obvious the dev team wasn't given enough time. We know they were pushed to use the same basic powers structure for all classes which had been initially designed for just wizards and so on. Essentials gave us a lot more variety of play, but it was too late.

There were other aspects that just needed revision, but it goes back not enough development and testing time.

3. A better match with the default play style. 4e is good if you have a plot heavy game and maybe 1-2 big fights per session, but it isn't the best fit extended dungeon crawling. Meanwhile 5e really needs more encounters for things to work well and can sometimes be a bad fit with more plot heavy games with fewer bigger fights and more long rests. One of the biggest issues I've seen newbie DMs have with 5e is that they just have too many long rests and struggle with putting in more fights per long rest. That's just not a problem in 4e. I think that a lot of 5e DMs wold honestly be happier with a theoretical streamlined 4.5e than with 5e or 5.5e. WotC would then have to write adventures what 4e is good at instead of Keep on the Shadowfell which a lot of people found to be a real slog that didn't do a good job of showcasing 4e's strengths.

4. A bit of tweaking of 4e fight pacing doing things like having a bit less abilities to interrupt things at higher levels as that could gum up the flow of a fight. I would have also liked to see more encounter and daily power that have some kind of requirement to use them (such as use only when bloodied, or use only when your ally is KOed, or use only immediately after downing an enemy, or you can use it any time but using it costs ALL your healing surges) so that you have more cool powers being used later in a fight instead of usually unloaded right at the start with the fight ending a bit anti-climactically with at-will spam. Not a big change to 4e, could've been done with some minor tweaking.

5. No murder-suicide. That was a really horrible tragedy that set back 4e's online tools a lot and there's nothing WotC could've done to prepare for something like that, no can anyone really...

The rest of my list would also include too many books with things like intentionally providing only the chromatic dragons in the first MM and not the metallics. The book of the month club was just too much.

Last, but not least, digital tools should be a nice to have and not critical to success.

 

[billd91]

From WotC's perspective it doesn't matter if these things are mountains or molehills. It doesn't even really matter what they have the legal right to do.

All that matter from their perspective is their ability to predict which of their actions will create enough blowback to force them to backtrack.

And they've shown themselves to be really, Really, REALLY bad at predicting which of their acts will provoke significant backlash and which won't.

This leads me to think that they don't have any clue about what their customers want or hate, which is kind of a problem.

Yeah, this is the red flag in this situation. Do they not have anyone actually using DDB among the decision-making team for DDB change management? And if they have any at all, are there none with an ongoing campaign likely to go past the D&D5.2024 release date? Because, if they did, this particular issue should have been a no-brainer.

When I worked for my prior employer (QAer for over 20 years), we had put out a new architecture for our main products and a lot of customers weren't happy (honestly, neither was QA, too much was rushed). So we converted our internal development, bug, and testing tracking system over to the new architecture as well. As a fellow lead QAer said to me, we were being forced to eat our own crap, which would give us a better perspective on it and get us to FIX it and make better decisions. WotC's decision making team, in this case, clearly lacked the perspective of their subscribers - the ones who had made DDB such a success with the 5e.2014 rules. And they had to be corrected by public outcry. Kudos to them to listening to the outcry, but if they don't fix the initial problem - the lack of perspective of actual users of DDB - they're going to continue to fail to make the right decisions from the outset or at least fail to incorporate that perspective.

 

[billd91]

Mate, speaking as a person who makes websites from tune to time... DDNB is just trash because they don't care.

The proof? They have a megathread asking about bugs/improvements/etc.

They have feats that are broken. I have remade these feats using the homebrew tool. I have fixed the feats, and provided them the link to my fixed version of the feat that does what their feat should do - eg, claims it gives you stats and a spell but only gives you the stat, not the spell, etc, etc, etc...

They will still not fix the feat, even with the solution handed to them where they can just copy what I did, where the work of figuring out "how" is already done for them.

And that's with me only having access to the homebrew feature, not even having access to their full creation portal because I don't have any special access.

They really give zero shits, and then they wonder why almost no one who isn't a DM isn't paying - why would we pay for such naughty word?

I think it's less that they don't care, it's probably more that they have a lot of priorities they consider higher than fixing a handful of feats and taking some rando-off-the-internet's solution to do it. They've probably got a project list a mile long and competing priorities from higher-up the WotC food chain to manage them with.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Stale insult achieved then.

Break out the cigars and the bubbly; we've officially reached 1 trillion of them

 

[Daztur]

D&D 4E shared very little with every previous version of D&D other than mostly cosmetic trappings. They were trying to capitalize on the name brand. It didn't work and actually turned off some people.



It needed more time in development, perhaps simply smaller scope. Release something that only went up to level 10, which in general worked better in my experience without attempting to go to 30 in one shot. For many reasons such as the amount of errata, it was obvious the dev team wasn't given enough time. We know they were pushed to use the same basic powers structure for all classes which had been initially designed for just wizards and so on. Essentials gave us a lot more variety of play, but it was too late.

There were other aspects that just needed revision, but it goes back not enough development and testing time.



The rest of my list would also include too many books with things like intentionally providing only the chromatic dragons in the first MM and not the metallics. The book of the month club was just too much.

Last, but not least, digital tools should be a nice to have and not critical to success.

What motivated my comment is not any love for 4e on my part (I REALLY don't like the basic philosophy of 4e) but constantly seeing comments from 5e newbies on Reddit who have never cracked open a 4e PHB that make me think "huh, these people would probably be happier with 4e than with 5e." Stuff like:

-How many people report constantly having long rests after just 1-2 fights.

-People wanting the rules to be clearer and with less wiggle room.

-People being more and more open to more magical martials.

-People wanting really fine-tuned CR.

-Relatively few people on Reddit etc. complaining about stuff that I see as 5.5e taking steps towards 4e take on what rules should be.

Etc.

Which makes me think that it's not the stuff that I don't like about 4e that held it back but more the year it was released, the lack of solid digital tools, it not having the polish of late 4e at release, KotSF being god-awful, etc.