Greetings Beyonders!
D&D is built around the concept that the published material is more of a set of guidelines for your games. In fact, we're encouraged to customize the content and rules as we see fit for our personal games. This idea drove the initial product design of allowing users on DDB to create homebrew data that would integrate into the toolset.
We also made the decision of having two categories of homebrew:
- private, which would only be accessible to the creator, and users in campaigns with the creator
- published, which would be accessible to any DDB user with an active subscription
We also wanted to have a process to ensure that published homebrew met certain criteria. Namely, that it wasn't copyrighted material and/or imagery, wasn't vulgar, etc. This requirement lead us to put a moderation queue in place, that would require all submissions be reviewed before being shared with the entire DDB community.
However, even with a team of up to seven moderators, the volume of data to be reviewed grew beyond our capabilities, and the amount of time items had to sit in queue became problematic. The nature of the data prohibits us from having a fully automated solution, so, we are updating the process to rely more on community reporting and rating to help ensure the quality of the publicly available homebrew.
What's Changing:
First off, your private homebrew is always accessible to you and any users in any campaigns you belong to. You DO NOT have to share it with the community for your campaign users to have access.
There are now a set of automated checks in place that will prevent you from sharing your homebrew with the community if it fails these checks. They are:
- A similarity check to WotC licensed 5e content.
- The text in the homebrew must be in English
- There can be no embedded images, external links, or iframes in any descriptive text.
- There is some required data validation checks for class features and racial traits.
Again, your private homebrew is allowed to be anything you want. The checks above are to prevent homebrew being shared with the community that does not meet the stated criteria.
If your homebrew does not meet any of the criteria above, you will see a message at the top of the page and will not have access to the "Share with Community" link.
If your homebrew meets the automated criteria, you can click the "Share with Community" link and it will instantly be shared with the community and be visible on the public homebrew listings.
Even though your homebrew may meet the handful of automated criteria checks, you are still bound to the other criteria in the Homebrew Rules & Guidelines for sharing your homebrew with the community. Violations of these guidelines will result in the homebrew being removed from the public listings, and possible bans from sharing in the future.
One of the major reject reasons for publishing homebrew in the past has been the use of copyrighted images. So, to facilitate a faster sharing process, any attached images will be automatically hidden for all users other than the creator and users in campaigns with the creator.
For all existing homebrew that was created before the process change (including any that are currently in the moderation queue), you will need to go to the Edit form for your homebrew and simply re-save the item to trigger the automated checks to process. You will be unable to share your homebrew with the community until that is done. If they pass all the automated checks, then you will then be able to click the "Share with Community" link on the details page and it will be immediately available.
Homebrew Reporting and Rating
Moving forward, the main ways to help promote quality content in the public homebrew listings will be the community's use of the reporting and rating features.
Reporting
Moderators will review reports that are issued on homebrew content. If the report is indeed a valid violation, then the homebrew item will be moved back to a private/rejected state. The creator and users in their campaigns will still have access, and the user will see a rejected reason note and be allowed to make changes to correct the item, or they can leave it as private.
Should you wish to make changes to fix the reported problem, then the resubmission will be placed in a queue so that the moderators can confirm the changes before making it public again.
Users that have repeated reports may be issued a ban from sharing any future homebrew creations with the community.
Rating
Rating homebrew content will help maintain the quality of the homebrew data in the listings. Each day a threshold "floor" value is calculated for each listing type (spell, monster, etc.) based on the current ratings. Any homebrew data that's been rated below the floor threshold will automatically be filtered out of the listing. The data is still accessible, we just pre-filter the listing using the new ratings filter. A user can reset the threshold value and re-filter the page should they wish to see the data below threshold.
Once we have more ratings data on the listings, we'll change the default sorting on the listings from alphabetical to descending by rating. Also, we will be changing the ratings value on the listings to be a weighted composite of the item being displayed and its previous versions (if any previous versions exist). This will prevent a new version of a popular item losing its relative rank in the listings.
These process changes will provide a more streamlined and faster process for users wanting to share their creations with the entire DDB community. However, the burden of trying to maintain a certain level of quality of the data is now also going to be shared with the community. Your help in reporting violating content and appropriately rating good and bad content will go a long way into helping the entire community.
As with everything on DDB, we will continue to monitor the homebrew system, and make adjustments and improvements when and where we can.
Happy brewing!
Thanks for the update Hartless, it makes sense to have the community manage it and hopefully this will take some burden off the moderators.
One of the things I’ve noticed in homebrew is there is standard language for things like shields and +1 items that not everyone includes. Would it be possible to add to the request list for future features some type of template insert or snippet for homebrew descriptions that would add that stuff in?
As always, thanks for the work all of you do!
You guys are doing fantastic work.
I hate this. You've made everything worse. Don't you know how to program? I want my money back!
Just kidding, I love you guys, great work :)
I've always found this a little odd. I always try to replicate the language used as best as possible to a) not reinvent the wheel, and b) save time and effort. The only time this becomes an issue for me is when I've diverged so completely from the standards offered, that I have to engineer my own style for it, and even then, the editing process for me is a continual one of trying to imitate the design paradigm in the game. Not making these attempts, to me, is counterproductive and counterintuitive to good design.
If I don't get my daily lashes from dropbear, I feel sad and depressed :)
This is great, now we'll see more fine tuned articles instead of joke articles that really shouldn't be there.
Giving is just a core part of my nature.
Out of curiosity, do you plan to add more control to the private homebrew? Like, there are some homebrew that I want to allow in one of my campaigns, but not in the other; or certain items and feats I want to create and work on / experiment with, but not let my players see them until I want to, for spoiler reasons (like, key plot items or NPCs).
Could you please expand upon what these checks are? Now some of us get a message about class features at correct levels and are groping about blindly...
Class features for Subclasses should be implemented at the appropriate class levels, based on the base class. For example, to have a proper Bard subclass, you would implement class features for the subclass at levels 3, 6, and 14. Anything outside of that would be non-balanced, as the base class is granting features at the other levels.
More granular control of sharing at the campaign level will be coming as part of the source management feature. This will be for licensed content and homebrew.
To hide something you're currently working on, or not yet ready to reveal, from all campaigns, remove it from your Homebrew Collection (that listing is what is actually shared with campaigns). Once you're ready to have it available, find it in your Homebrew Creations page, and click on the toggle button to add it back to your Homebrew Collection.
Can you explain why this Class wouldn't work then? I've put its features in comparison with the Cavalier's: https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1qDwDIQG9Tm6Lda9XMa0fKGGZRW3P8MlpNTd4mgnLiGk/edit?usp=sharing
The last feature I added to test if it would work with a level 18 class feature, but still it gave me the same error :0o
It appears a different site update made class features soft-deletes. So, the publishability check is being updated to take that into account. That fix will be deployed sometime today. Thanks for the report!
Thank you for fixing it in advance! Man, I was really worried it was something in the text or whatnot :) I can't wait to start sharing my stuff!
Thanks. Any ETA on this source management feature? Or at least, how far down is it in the priority queue? :)
It's on our short list, and we hope to begin work on it soon!
Awesome! This, an encounter builder, and an interactive combat tracker are the three main features that I miss from DnD Beyond to be my go-to tool.
I just went through a bunch of "in moderation" homebrew I had in the pipeline for a couple of months. Resaved, checked over it, hit share, and voila! Worked like a charm! This is great, thanks.
Although, I still really want that layering thingy that races have (see an unfinished prototype here where you can choose several tiered options that open up more options) for feats so that I can have options that open up different options (like with this feat where you would be able to choose one of the options that then gives you X, Y, Z, and then later change it to a different one that would give you A, B, C).
Sorry, I'm not very good at explaining it which is why I provided examples. I hope you can grok what I'm getting at from them.
Agreed and I do the same as you, even when an item diverges completely from what’s already there. I will confess that some of it is my personal preference for it to be matchy-matchy with what’s already there and some of it is to maintain integrity in the homebrew. I don’t want to be a turd and report an item because it didn’t follow the script, but my clicking finger gets itchy when I see it.
I love that you guys are continuing to support homebrew content, and this looks like a great way to take the burden off so you can focus on adding features. However, one thing I've been feeling is missing from homebrew is being able to make full classes (rather than just subclasses). I'm I have a feeling this is something that's either in the works, or at least planned for the future (I think I may have read as much in the forums at one point, but I can't remember). But I was just curious if this is actually in the works? Or better yet, if it is being worked on, are you at liberty to give a rough estimate of when it's coming?
Apologies if this has been talked about in a stream or post somewhere already, I don't often have time to browse through the posts or watch the streams :/.
In any case, thanks for all the great work!