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My limited understanding is that the D&D 2024 PHB is still 5th edition, just a revised version. And yet, many of the core rules will be different. For question-writers moving forward, how should they designate questions?

Will it be best practice to specify whether answers are restricted to revised content, old content, or they are open to any version of 5e?

Do we need new question tags to reflect these possibilities?

I don't know how the distinction between 3e and 3.5 is made on this site, but someone with experience in that might answer with whether that would serve as a good model for use or not.

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    \$\begingroup\$ I dont think we have enough information to provide anything concrete to this question now, but I am keeping up with things and will hopefully be able to suggest some guidance soon. We still have several months before we get the new PHB. \$\endgroup\$ Commented Jun 29 at 23:45
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    \$\begingroup\$ I think we'll definitely need a new tag. Has WotC used any official terminology to refer to this new revision/ruleset? \$\endgroup\$
    – Oblivious Sage Mod
    Commented Jun 30 at 0:57
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    \$\begingroup\$ @ObliviousSage Orignally it was called "One D&D". Currently they are calling them the "New Core Rule Books - 2024 Edition" on dndbeyond.com \$\endgroup\$ Commented Jun 30 at 19:13
  • \$\begingroup\$ There is already a Meta Questonabout whether we need a Tag for the new Edition: rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12506/… \$\endgroup\$ Commented Jun 30 at 19:14
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    \$\begingroup\$ @TreeSpawned And my answer to it applies here as well. \$\endgroup\$ Commented Jun 30 at 23:12
  • \$\begingroup\$ @TreeSpawned Thank you - I did not see that when I searched before posting my question. Part of my question is about the tag - and I think that is a duplicate - I would be happy to link as a duplicate. However, the other part of my question that is not duplicated is about what advice we give querents - what are our expectations in terms of announcing what sort of answers the querent is looking for, and does 'having done research' mean they need to state both sets of rules? \$\endgroup\$
    – Kirt
    Commented Jul 1 at 6:55
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Kirt then you should probably edit your question to remove the part about the tag and limit it to a single answerable question, currently "how de we handle x" appears very broad to me \$\endgroup\$ Commented Jul 1 at 9:35
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    \$\begingroup\$ @Kirt I’m going to create a chat room and get a working group started this week. I think this is something that will benefit from a more collaborative effort than meta posts offer. \$\endgroup\$ Commented Jul 1 at 9:54
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    \$\begingroup\$ @ThomasMarkov One question from me that I was pondering to ask on meta and that would now probably be something for that group to discuss is: "Would it be okay to answer an old 5e Question with information from the new Books?". \$\endgroup\$ Commented Jul 1 at 10:10
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    \$\begingroup\$ We can discuss that. My take is that we should avoid that. If someone has a question about the new material, let them ask a new question. The new material is not like Sage Advice or errata. SAC and errata are intended to address confusion about specific problems, so updating old questions about those problems makes sense. But the new core books are not addressing old context directly, they’re instead creating a new context in which to play the game. New books, new contexts, new questions. \$\endgroup\$ Commented Jul 1 at 10:35
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    \$\begingroup\$ @ThomasMarkov Sounds reasonable. That would then also mean, that if someone asks 'How to do X' within the new ruleset and we already have the same question, but for the old books, that this question would not be a duplicate, as it's asking about different content (and will probably have a different tag then aswell) \$\endgroup\$ Commented Jul 1 at 10:41
  • \$\begingroup\$ @TreeSpawned Yes, that’s how I’d do it. \$\endgroup\$ Commented Jul 1 at 11:15
  • \$\begingroup\$ @TreeSpawned I think Thomas' chat group answers the first part and Nobody's answer answers the second part (querents should be clear about what they are asking for, and it would be rare for someone to ask for both). I'm pretty satisfied with the responses this question has already received. \$\endgroup\$
    – Kirt
    Commented Jul 1 at 16:40
  • \$\begingroup\$ Followup from July 2: D&D 5e 2024 Working Group and Question Collection \$\endgroup\$
    – V2Blast
    Commented Jul 10 at 16:40

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We'll need a new tag

I think from what I have heard about the new PHB, it is obvious that we will need a new tag, because many of the answers that are based on the D&D 5e 2014 rules are just going to be plainly wrong once the new rules come out, and it is assured that the new rules will supersede and replace the old rules — that is how WotC has done it for all their other new publications, like Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse vs the older Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes. And it will sell more books.

Just one example, in the new rules, wild shape does not assume the hit points of the new form any more like it did, it now retains the caster's hit points, and gives them temporary hits on top. This invalidates a lot of the old Q&As about wild shape. Or Rangers and Paladins now have spells from level one, and their features have been massively rewritten, so much so that Crawford claims the ranger is essentially a new class. Or, all classes with fighting styles now get access to all the fighting styles, and there are more fighting styles than in the old core rules. All classes that focus on weapons now get new weapon mastery features. There are so many old answers that are based on the rules that will be plain wrong once you play with the new rules.

Whether they call it that or not, this is essentially a new edition of the game, one that is just backward compatible enough that you supposedly still can use old splat books and adventure modules with it. It is like vs . I also think that like with those two, there will be very, very few questions that are about both editions, and if you have them, you can just use both the old and the new tag. I'm not aware of a single tag that refers to all the various flavors of 3e, and think if it is not needed there, it will not be needed here.

Thomas' old answer is "let's cross this bridge when we get there", and that still applies, but we are nearly there. I almost would have posted a question already, because a lot has been disclosed in promotion videos, but I refrained just because the exact rules wordings are not yet public, and also because there was no tag for it, and I did not want to just bash ahead and create a one. In that sense it is good to discourage premature questions, but it still might make sense to have some discussion about how to tag this new version of the rules.

The way the designers talk about it is they call it D&D 5e 2024 vs D&D 5e 2014. I'm not sure how to handle this new tag need, and there are community members that have a lot more experience with it than me.

  • My naive approach would be to just create a new tag called or , for questions that are about the new rules set specifically, which we might get a lot of, once the established and well understood rules set has been replaced, and continue using the existing one for the existing rule set, so we do not need to retag over 25,500 questions.

  • Maybe retagging can be done programatically and would not be an issue at all, so that we could retag all the old ones with , and then use for the current edition. Especially for people who have no clue there even are other rulesets than D&D, or that there are other version of D&D than the one they just bought, having be the current version may save us a lot of cleanup work and typing.

  • Or, for some transition period of a year or so, we only supply the year-based tags, renaming all current to and offer that and , then migrate that one to again later on, or make that an alias for it, when most of the incoming questions are about that version.

I agree with @Kirt in the question, and would be happy to have someone with more experience and battle scars of this make an experience-based suggestion how to best handle this, instead.

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    \$\begingroup\$ Mods have secret sauce for mass retags. I agree we’ll probably need a new tag. I’ll try to get a working group chat set up and a question collection meta thread today. There will be lots of moving parts here, and having multiple proposals related to the problem in a single meta answer will cause confusion. \$\endgroup\$ Commented Jul 1 at 16:40
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    \$\begingroup\$ The main thing I want to avoid is people posting 2024 rules answers to old questions, when those question were not asked, and have not been asked, in the context of 2024 rules. \$\endgroup\$ Commented Jul 1 at 16:59
  • \$\begingroup\$ "I'm not aware of a separate tag for the various flavors of 3e, and think if it is not needed there, it will not be needed here." You listed them two lines earlier. What did this mean? \$\endgroup\$
    – fectin
    Commented Jul 2 at 0:59
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Fectin I mean something like “dnd-any-3.x" \$\endgroup\$ Commented Jul 2 at 3:31
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    \$\begingroup\$ I'm inclined to agree with making a new tag; personally, I lean towards "dnd-5e-2024" (with "dnd-5e-revised" as a possible synonym?). Mods can rename the original dnd-5e tag to "dnd-5e-2014", without leaving [dnd-5e] as a synonym (since it could equally refer to either ruleset). If there are questions that intentionally relate/apply to both versions, they can just include both tags – there's no need for a single tag encompassing both versions of 5e. (But I also defer to those with more experience dealing with similar tagging problems in the past.) \$\endgroup\$
    – V2Blast
    Commented Jul 2 at 4:10
  • \$\begingroup\$ @NobodytheHobgoblin fair enough. \$\endgroup\$
    – fectin
    Commented Jul 2 at 4:10
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    \$\begingroup\$ @ThomasMarkov I agree that a new answer to an old question, entirely based on 2024, is an answer to a question OP did not ask. OTOH, taking an existing answer and updating to say BTW if you are running 2024 rules, the answer is now (different)(not different) might have value - especially for someone who landed on the question from a post 2024 google search thinking it was what they wanted. Certainly confusing and messy. \$\endgroup\$
    – Kirt
    Commented Jul 2 at 15:40
  • \$\begingroup\$ I think a chat to hash this out is a good idea, because there are many different aspects -- for example, if we go and update old answers, there are a lot of old answers, and in many cases for the most used ones, the people that wrote them are not around any more. I can see that a statement "This still works" would be useful to avoid replicating everything. Less so for "This does not work any more.". But I also do not see a snowballs chance in hell we will do that for 25K questions before the next edition is out and we have to do it all again. \$\endgroup\$ Commented Jul 2 at 15:54
  • \$\begingroup\$ Was 3.5e ever officially referred to as 3.5, during its publication run? My faint recollection, is that the later books still called it 3rd edition, with 3.5 being a community-assigned appellation. If so, that would lay precedent for this altered "5th edition" ruleset to be referred to as 5.5e, regardless whether WotC calls it that or not? (That said, I think 5e-2014 \ 5e-2024 are more futureproof.) \$\endgroup\$ Commented Jul 9 at 18:00
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    \$\begingroup\$ @ProphetZarquon It was very prominently and very officially called 3.5: see the cover of the PHB, for example - it's there at the bottom. On the thing that looks a bit like a plaque. Other 3.5 books also have the same thing - MM, DMG. It's featured on most core books. I can't remember if all books have that on the front cover but usually it's mentioned somewhere inside, at least. \$\endgroup\$
    – VLAZ
    Commented Jul 9 at 18:36
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    \$\begingroup\$ @ProphetZarquon with that said, 4e also had an "upgrade" edition of sorts called Essentials. Not quite what 3.5 was but in the same vein - it attempted to stay compatible with 4e but also provide new options for characters. Usually a bit more streamlined (hence the "Essentials" name of the line). That was unofficially called 4.5 by some but never official. The 4.5 label also didn't quite stick with everyone. So, there is definitely not a strong tradition of going with "half" edition numbers. \$\endgroup\$
    – VLAZ
    Commented Jul 9 at 18:40
  • \$\begingroup\$ Fascinating; even more reason to go with a year marker, then? \$\endgroup\$ Commented Jul 9 at 20:27

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