D&D Beyond Rolls Out Controversial Change With Marketplace Redesign

D&D Beyond, the online hub for Dungeons & Dragons, has just introduced a controversial pricing change that makes the game a lot more expensive for some players. As part of a new marketplace design, D&D Beyond announced that it was doing away with "a la carte purchases," which allowed users to purchase individual subclasses, monster statblocks, spells, feats, and magic items from individual sourcebooks. No reason was given for the change. Users who have already purchased individual items from a sourcebook and wishes to buy the entire sourcebook at a discounted rate (a previous feature of D&D Beyond) can still do so by contacting customer service. D&D Beyond also announced that it was now selling physical copies of books directly to users, a first for the Hasbro-owned marketplace.

The change removes a cost-affordable option for obtaining new player-facing content without purchasing a full sourcebook. While a subclass on D&D Beyond only cost $2-$3, a full sourcebook typically costs $29.99 on the site's marketplace. So, while players could previously simply purchase the content they needed to create a new character from D&D Beyond for a somewhat affordable price, they'll now need to buy full sourcebooks or have content-sharing enabled with a friend who has that content in order to create the same character. 

The "Basic Rules" for Dungeons & Dragons, which includes rules for 12 of the game's 13 current classes, remains free to access on D&D Beyond. Each core class comes with access to one subclass, which also appears in the Basic Rules. These rules allow players to build characters for free on D&D Beyond using the site's character builder.

D&D Beyond is making this move ahead of the release of Wizards of the Coast's 2024 Core Rulebook release, which will feature significant revisions to Dungeons & Dragons' 5th Edition ruleset and major class re-balances. The first of these rulebooks, the Player's Handbook, comes out this fall and will include 48 subclasses, which is significantly more than any other book published by Wizards of the Coast for 5th Edition.