WotC Devs, ‘No Really, 2024 D&D is Backwards Compatible’
Backwards compatibility is still on the brain at Wizards of the Coast, if you believe their latest highlight reel. Here’s why that matters.
A new “highlight reel” of D&D’s new studio update wants to reassure players that the 2024 Edition of the D&D Core Books will still be backwards compatible. If you didn’t catch the Studio Update, the biggest message WotC hopes you take away from it is that you can still grab the new books that are coming out (or the old ones you haven’t bought yet) and play with the core rules.
They don’t necessarily explain how it’ll work. But in a 5-ish minute highlight reel backwards compatibility is at the forefront of the game. And the fact that compatibility is such a big issue outlines the challenge that 5th Edition faces.
For Real Though, 2024 D&D has Backwards Compatibility, Source, Trust Me
The video is even titled “How D&D’s 5E 2024 Core Rulebooks Works With All 5E Books | Studio Update”, which should tell you right away what the important thing is here. And it’s the sense of not losing the goose that laid the golden egg.
5th Edition D&D is monumentally popular. It’s a goliath unto itself. D&D has always been the continental shelf upon which rests the rest of the tabletop RPG industry, thanks to being there first and more recently having the power of a toy giant’s billions behind them. Hasbro and WotC are leagues above any other publisher, which was one of the “pain points” behind the OGL debacle earlier this year.
But despite all that, there’s still this sense of not wanting to leave behind 5th Edition. Now there might be some truth to “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” But they are fixing it. They’re updating the rules, they’re changing the game, and trying to keep it a “living edition” which means change. And risk. Two of the things that corporations hate more than having record profits and not laying off employees.
And it’s not hard to see why. When 3rd Edition Digivolved into 3.5 Edition, backwards compatibility was one of the biggest sticking points. Of course, less time had transpired between editions, coming out just three years after the release of 3rd Edition. But it was different enough that there was a digital update booklet you could download as a PDF back in 2004 when people still bought digital cameras and phones as separate devices without being ironic.
Likewise, there was a conversion guide for 2nd to 3rd Edition. And very pointedly, the devs state you won’t need one. The game will just work. Where it’s different, the new PHB will just walk you through the changes. And when different Editions are enough to make gamers fight for years over it—people still get mad, one way or the other about 4th Edition—it’ll be interesting to see how this all shakes out. It’s a difficult needle to thread. Can WotC do it?
What do you think? Will 2024 D&D be backwards compatible? Does it really matter as much as WotC seems to think?
