June 26th, 2018
No, it's not the new character sheet.... :P
With DDB being a fairly large product, in scope, and only getting larger, we always have multiple paths of development occurring simultaneously. This particular change-log, while not as exciting as the imminent character sheet revamp, is for an area of the product that has fallen victim to its own success - homebrew.
Knowing that a large part of D&D is about customization, we set out at launch wanting to give users the ability to add their own custom data to the site for use in their own games. We started with Magic Items, Monsters, and Spells. And since launch, expanded the feature to cover Feats, Backgrounds, Races, and Subclasses.
Your private homebrew creations have always been free for you to do with what you will, knowing that the accessibility of that data is very limited (to you and people in your campaigns). But to share your creations with the entire community, we wanted to moderate that data for several reasons; copyright infringement, civility, quality, etc.
However, with the overall success of DDB and it's substantial increase in users and users using the homebrew system, the amount of homebrew data being requested to be shared with the community has increased beyond the capability of the existing methods of approval. With that being said, we have started deploying some smaller changes to the feature that will be leading up to a more significant update shortly.
BadEye will expand upon the overall feature update in an upcoming post, and we will also follow-up with another detailed change-log when all the parts of the update are rolled out.
Here's what we've deployed so far over the past week:
- All detail pages for private homebrew (excluding monsters) are now accessible to players in your campaigns. We had originally done this only for Races and Subclasses, but have now opened up accessibility to Magic Items, Spells, Backgrounds, and Feats. We can do monsters as well, but thought that more DMs would opt to keep those hidden versus visible, but we can quickly change that should feedback dictate. Once we deploy the Source Management feature, monsters will be opened up as well, as the DM will be able to toggle accessibility on everything.
- The Report and Ratings buttons have been added into the expandable descriptions on the listing pages, as well as being present on the details pages. This should make the reporting and rating of content more accessible.
- We've deployed a censorship module, which was a little too aggressive at first, but this is a feature we can modify on the fly, so if you see something getting blocked (words will get replaced with asterisks) that is fairly harmless, just let us know.
- The link for submitting a request to share your creation with the community is now blocked if your creation falls outside an acceptable similarity threshold - (to licensed D&D 5e content). This threshold is a starting point and something we can tweak overtime as we get feedback. The message displayed will inform you that your creation is too similar to another item and what that item is.
We are still in development of some additional enhancements and intend to deploy them over the next couple of weeks.
Happy dragon hunting!
:(
I honestly don't mind. We got a preview of it a while back in one of the development livestreams so we know it's real and I'm glad they're taking the time to refine it. Better to have it not rushed to prevent as many comment threads from becoming bug reports as possible.
Could you provide an example of the Similarity Threshold? Copying and pasting something like Trasmuter's Stone would definitely be flagged. But what if they changed the word "stone" to... "coin"?
It's not just based on the title of the item, it's an amalgamation of all the text.
We went from "very soon" to "imminent". Be still my heart!
Seriously, though, I am so glad about the first bit. It felt a little weird that a player couldn't see the shiny new custom item until they added it to the sheet and examined it there (plus, no large image).
Can't wait for Source Management. :D
Wait, I don't see the first bullet point working? Am I doing something wrong? Is it not deployed yet?
If I click on the relevant item name, or click "Details page", I can see it. If I copy/paste that URL to someone in my campaign, they don't - they get a 404 (not 403).
On a possibly irrelevant case, "Angelic Protection" (the BadEye feat) used to get me to the details page when clicking its name, like everything from my collection. Now it gives me a 404 as well (but if I go to its "Details Page" it works).
PM me a link to one of the items in question, please.
This stuff looks good. Homebrew is one of my favorite things about DDB, looking forward to seeing it get more powerful (and anything that can reduce turnaround time on publication is good in my book.
Hope imminent means before i get back from hollidays in 2 weeks ;-p . But my next session Only end of jully so crossing my fingers before then
Love that homebrew is accessible to campaign members! This is all I needed for that as I don't generally care to make mine public but I want to share with my group. Looking forward to Source Management too!
Thanks Hartless! Glad to see homebrew getting some love and looking forward to the upcoming features.
Regarding the first bullet, does this mean players in the campaign I’m DMing can now use the omnisearch to find homebrew items I’ve made?
This is not the JUNE BUG I was looking for.......
:P
I can't wait. I end up making a lot of NPC's that I can't share with the group. For instance, in ToA, I have about two dozen custom NPC's, from Azaka to Zagrima. They're all somewhat useless, though, because I can't share them with the players to run.
Also... ASS BUTT!
Excited for monster accessibility! Would love monsters to be shareable, for custom familiars or animal companions.
I’m not sure when it happened, but one of the more recent updates to the site have completely broken the page layout of the entire site on iOS Safari, and I’m not sure why. The top navigation bar is completely unreadable, and the character sheet layout is super weird.
Seems to work fine in Chrome, but I’m not a huge fan of using Chrome on iOS unless i’m forced to.
Can we get a switch on each creature's edit page that determines if it is visible to the players or not?
Like if I make custom companion for PC the players can see that creature only, but they can't see any of my homebrewed bosses.
That level of granular sharing will be part of the source management feature.
Similar question. I tried poking around to see if this is possible. It doesn't appear so now. Would that ever be considered? Allowing players in a campaign to search through the homebrew collection of the DM, if the DM has a Master Sub or something?
Currently all homebrew is excluded from being stored into our search indexes. We do know that a revamp to search will be a part of the overall source management feature, so we'd evaluate that use-case during the development of that feature.
Understood.