D&D Next - 5e Discussion

D&D Beyond has been garbage since the start (the shitty double-dipping business model where you pay both a subscription and for individual content—imagine if Netflix worked that way!) and got considerably shitter when they ripped out all the stuff you had paid for with no recourse after WotC put out a "patch" to remove whole pages worth of lore.

Genuinely, my advice is switch to Pathfinder. The shitty behaviour from WotC with the OGL is what finally got me to pull the trigger, but that mid-2022 deletion of content had me already on the edge of the cliff regardless. It's similar enough that most D&D players won't have trouble migrating. It has some aspects that I can reasonably see some players might not like: undoubtedly it is a little more complicated to build a character.

But it has other aspects which are just straight-up better. For starters, this. When they released a major update that removed some older content, all the old content was made still available at the flick of a switch in Archives of Nethys. It's also all free. No need to buy each individual book one at a time and then pay a subscription on top of that. You can see all the books' content without paying a cent. And tools like Pathbuilder let you build characters conveniently online for free with very few restrictions, and those restrictions (like animal companions) can be lifted for a single one-time purchase of less than $10. Or, because the rules are free, there are other software options that integrate well with the game, if you prefer, including one from the original developers of DDG with the same predatory pricing model.

There are also a few aspects to the rules that I think very few people could possibly see as negatives, including a few of those most core to the game: 4 degrees of success and the 3-action economy. 4DoS means if you roll 10 over the target, you get a critical success even without a natural 20, but a critical fail if you get 10 under. This allows your basic spell save damage spells to have double damage, regular damage, half damage, or no damage. And allows some other effects to have cool extra effects depending how how high you roll. 3AE gives you more control over your turn and solves the weirdness of D&D's bonus actions, and allows you to make more interesting turns, especially as a martial.