When Hasbro purchased the D&D Beyond toolset in April 2022, it set off a series of events that effectively made this platform and its forums the front page of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition on the internet. Over the course of the pandemic, new users have been directed to this platform, to the point that it remains the main point of contact with the iconic game’s rulebook for many active groups. This is clearly intentional, as digital sales of the game’s rules have become increasingly important, but it’s also really convenient to have a fully functional character – dice and all – on your phone.
Unfortunately, interacting with this toolset will soon become much more difficult.
In a long, 2,411-word update on the D&D Beyond forums, the developers described for the first time exactly what the transition from the 2014 version of the Player’s Guide to the 2024 version. What it represents is a borderline Byzantine set of steps required to make characters based on the 10-year-old version of the game’s rules run perfectly in the modern, web-based app. They provide good guidance for many edge cases, but in the short term, workarounds will likely be required for each group of players.
The worst part, in my opinion, is the fact that you have to recreate some spells and magic items from 2014 to make them work with the digital character sheets from 2024. No, this is not a joke. Here is the relevant section verbatim:
If you want to use the old version of a magic item or spell that has been replaced by its 2024 counterpart, you will need to create a homebrew copy of it and enable homebrew content on your character sheet. You can then add it to your character sheet.
This isn’t the only inconvenience D&D Beyond users are facing, and reading this changelog thoroughly is highly recommended. The biggest problem I can foresee, however, is that there will suddenly be an assumption that players who have cut their teeth on the 2014 rules will need to understand the 2024 rules revision to make the most of the D&D Beyond platform at the table. The result will likely mean even more heavy lifting for already overworked Dungeon Masters.
Personally, the plan for my Aasimar wizard (former coldwater fisherman Sigismund “Sig” Haansuhn) is to find the new 5th Edition character sheets as soon as they’re available as a free download. Then I’ll recreate my character by hand and house-rule the rest on the fly until it all makes sense for my group.
More information on how these changes will be rolled out to D&D Beyond will be available after the maintenance period scheduled for August 27, during which the toolset will be unavailable for an entire morning – from 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. Pacific Time. Player’s Guide (2024) will be released digitally for early access and in local game stores in a special edition collector’s booklet starting September 3rd. The wide release will follow later, on September 17th, both online and at major retailers. An update to the freely available System Reference Document (the subject of last year’s OGL fiasco) is also in the works, which will provide some of these rule changes completely free of charge.
