UPDATE: Q&A Stream for November is complete. If you missed it, you can watch it here.
Hail Travellers, and well met!
BadEye will be hosting the next Developer Stream on Tuesday the 21st of November. This stream will provide further updates from the D&D Beyond team and allow you to have your questions answered. Get info straight from the Beholder's mouth!
Please post questions you would like BadEye to answer in the thread below. We will be collating these, and BadEye will do his best to answer as many questions from the forums as well as Twitch Chat.
Miss out on October's Developer Stream? Watch below!
WotC has said that they will be, at some point, making the revised ranger available and that they don't want it to be paid content. How will Beyond be handling the integration of a revised ranger class, and any other future added classes?
In the first update Adam answered a question of mine about adding more than 12 character slots to a campaign and was confused as to why we would want/need to have more than 12 players, then the team learned about West Marches style games. In addition to those, if we are running multiple groups through a home brew campaign and are using the future campaign management tools, then it would be nice not to have to duplicate all that information across several campaigns. Is there a more robust idea about adding more campaign slots and/or adding more player slots to existing campaigns? And what would that look like and potentially cost?
It was mentioned in a thread by, I believe, Adam that adding private forum functionality within the campaign management secion is something that would be relatively easy to implement, if it was wanted. Did you receive enough support for the idea of private campaign forums to consider adding them?
Would it be possible to add a "Take me to the top of page button" to the header (with the search bar and notifications) and make it "fixed-sticky header" so you can see it no matter where you scroll on the page?
What improvements are planned for the search engine? I was trying to find the lycanthropy rules the other day and searching them gave no usable results within the first couple of pages, I ended up googling it and then having to go through the compendium to finally find it, all while trying to run the game.
If you can release the information, can we get stats on total users, those who have made characters, and other information like that? (Not high hopes for this one and I understand why not, just curious)
If not that, could you give us stats on how many people appear to be actively using Beyond for in-character play? Such as a percentage of users that add damage to, and take away from, a character each week/month?
Would you mind telling a personal story from your gaming career so we can get to know you better?
Will the UA version of sub-classes be added even if there is a revised version in a released book? I've seen several people say they want to continue using the UA version on forums.
Would it be possible for the team to change the random name generator for characters from the current engine to instead use the names, based on race and/or ethnicity (primarily for humans) and/or even gender, from the SRD/PHB, Volo's, SCAG & Xanathar's?*
Are you sick and tired of all the "give us a code we don't want to pay for the books twice" type of threads that pop up daily on this, and every other RPG, forum?
There are a lot of (still) minor formatting errors scattered throughout a lot of the content on DDB and a lot were (and still are) in Xanathar's. These seem like unforced errors and things that could be fairly easily rectified, but currently it seems that instead of putting out a finished product, you're relying on the (I assume) volunteer moderators to do these for you only after they've been pointed out in a type/error thread on the forums. I realise you're busy people, but this also seems like it should be a priority given that they're the type of thing one person could do in a couple of days and really should've been done before release. Will this ever happen or will we continue to have to rely on volunteers?
Did you, or have you ever, done anything to, or even glanced at, possibly side-ways, Sylgar?
*Assuming of course you own those sources through DDB.
Would it be possible for the team to change the random name generator for characters from the current engine to instead use the names, based on race and/or ethnicity (primarily for humans) and/or even gender, from the SRD/PHB, Volo's, SCAG & Xanathar's?*
Are you sick and tired of all the "give us a code we don't want to pay for the books twice" type of threads that pop up daily on this, and every other RPG, forum?
There are a lot of (still) minor formatting errors scattered throughout a lot of the content on DDB and a lot were (and still are) in Xanathar's. These seem like unforced errors and things that could be fairly easily rectified, but currently it seems that instead of putting out a finished product, you're relying on the (I assume) volunteer moderators to do these for you only after they've been pointed out in a type/error thread on the forums. I realise you're busy people, but this also seems like it should be a priority given that they're the type of thing one person could do in a couple of days and really should've been done before release. Will this ever happen or will we continue to have to rely on volunteers?
Did you, or have you ever, done anything to, or even glanced at, possibly side-ways, Sylgar?
*Assuming of course you own those sources through DDB.
I'll cover the rest in the stream, but I thought I would go ahead and chime in on #3 here. I've mentioned this before, but you guys have no idea how complex it is to take data that is 100% made for physical publishing and digitize it for a platform like DDB.
It is absolutely not something "one person could do in a couple of days" - that's just a false statement. It also seems to presuppose that there weren't already thousands of points of manual manipulation/ correction on this data during our internal QA pass prior to release.
I've said before that one of the reasons no one has been successful pulling off something like what we're doing with D&D Beyond is that Wizards of the Coast has not operated their business with digital mediums in mind - they are game designers and book publishers. I feel they do an incredible job at both of those things. Taking data not meant for the web and making it work has been quite the challenge. We have created a great deal of automation, but it still takes several members of the team (I even chip in as much as possible to meet our targets) many, many hours to get something like XGtE into a format that can be consumed on the site.
We are working internally and with Wizards to improve this process, but there will always be manual intervention needed. Our hope is that we can minimize that in time as much as possible.
I'll leave it at that for now - just wanted to elaborate here because I see these assessments every once in a while, and I want to be sure that it is known it's not as simple as many imagine it is.
I would like to know if you're thinking about adding the ability to create non magical homebrew item. I'm playing ToA and I had to make the Salve of Insect Repellent as a wonderous item... it's okay, but it feels like I should be able to create item for every kind, like Adventure Gear or tool (also the ability to have proficiency with homebrew tool).
Edit: Seeing the price of an item in the character sheet would be cool and a buy button even more cool.
If, while going through all of that, instead of me listing those errors for a moderator to fix, a moderator was fixing them, they all would've been done in the last hour it took me to find them all.
I would like to know if you're thinking about adding the ability to create non magical homebrew item. I'm playing ToA and I had to make the Salve of Insect Repellent as a wonderous item... it's okay, but it feels like I should be able to create item for every kind, like Adventure Gear or tool (also the ability to have proficiency with homebrew tool).
Edit: Seeing the price of an item in the character sheet would be cool and a buy button even more cool.
Just my thoughts on this, i do think there needs to be a way to add in items to your inventory more than just writing them in the other possessions tab however i feel having something like the home brew magic items is over kill (not sure if its exactly what you are saying but i have seen it said in other places). For me i think the best solution will be to create a "Add custom item" Button, almost like the custom attack add where you can add in a few things about it maybe even designate its as weapon, armour or wondrous item and if DDB are really good have the options change depending on what you select. I feel like this will cover almost all items that one could need and that aren't already listed and if anyone needs anything more sophisticated than that they can just use the magic items home-brew system. This would avoid clogging up your homebrew collection with mundane items that you only need once. But happy to know what others think and keen to hear about how the DDB team are thinking of tackling this.
I also have a few other questions.
A while back you added the ability to add in quick custom movement speeds, i asked a question then about adding in similar custom senses (darkvision, blindsight) and defences (resistances, immunities) in a similar fashion and it was mentioned that they would be added soon after. just hoping to understand if they are expected soon or if they have been put on the back burner
I know i have asked this both streams but Im still really keen to understand the current position of Wild Shapes I know you have a dev on the team who is super keen to get on this so just hoping to hear some good news that you have let them run Wild with it.
Cheers, keep up the amazing work. The Xanathars release was so awesome
First off, I love D&D Beyond. I've bought all of the content and will most likely continue to do so. I mostly play over-the-table Adventurers League, but also sometimes non-AL, often times with DMs that don't use the campaign features of D&D Beyond. With that said, here's my list:
What's the timeline for adding Adventurers League logsheet tracking?
What's the timeline for adding Adventurers League adventures to the compendium? I've been considering buying the whole pack on DMs Guild, but have been holding off for now in hopes they will be available here instead, and don't want to have to buy twice.
Will there be some way of marking temporary/semi-permanent/permanent boons/curses like the Dark Gifts or Touched by the Mists in DDAL04 for characters?
Can we get folders or categories for our characters?
Can we get public view URLs for our characters (and logsheets when we get them)?
Can we get a selector in the character editor to restrict to, and/or badge on completed characters to indicate that, PHB+1 in DDAL?
Can we get an option for printing spell cards when we export to PDF?
Can we get history for characters so we can see older versions of our characters or see how they've changed over time and/or revert them to older versions?
Can we get the ability to share write access to or transfer a character to another user?
Can we get the ability to make copies of our characters for experimentation?
Can we get tools for XGtE's background roll tables (and other roll tables)?
Can we get character sheet export PDFs to include all of the spells known/in the spellbook rather than just prepared spells?
I would love to have a little more detail (not a lot, but like a sentence) for the items in the Features & Traits for character export PDFs, closer to what the official pregen character sheets have, so that I don't have to reference source material as often.
I would love to have a better solution for taking notes or keeping notes with the character, or better yet with a category or grouping of characters. Right now I use Google Docs, but it would be nice to have that all in one location and I'm fine using markdown. Bonus points if it can be rendered like homebrewery. Grid-based map drawing would also be amazing here for notes of dungeons.
The ability to annotate or add personal notes to entries in the compendium would be cool, for example, for notating certain ways that a DM has said they interpret the rule or ways that they handle a given case differently.
Sometimes when exporting a character sheet to PDF, a € symbol appears in places of spaces in some of the free-text fields, like backgrounds.
For games played with pre-gen characters (for example, our group played Xanathar's Underworld Speculation today with pre-gen characters from that adventure), it would be nice to be able to clone that pre-gen character into our characters so we can track items/spell slots/etc, and get the rich information that the digital character sheet provides. I ended up copying my pre-gen character in by hand, but it would have been nice to be able to search the pre-gen characters.
I'd prefer if racial/class attack abilities like Dragonborn's Breath Weapon could be notated in the Attacks & Spellcasting section of the exported character sheet PDF.
I think that's pretty much my list. I know it is long, and I don't necessarily expect answers to each and every one, but that's what's been on my mind since I started to use this tool. Don't get me wrong, I love the tool, but think these could improve it even more. I'm also happy if you want to answer/address any of these questions either in this thread or in private messages with me rather than during the video/stream.
I've deleted a couple of posts because they weren't questions for the dev stream.
Please stay on topic here, we ONLY want questions for the dev stream - otherwise I WILL be deleting your post!
Now look - you made me use bold AND red! Seriously though, thank you for your contribution to discussion, but we need to be able to go through this thread for questions for BadEye, so every post that isn't a question, just makes that harder.
In my game at the weekend my party and I entered a dungeon and fought a range of undead creatures. One of my companions was affected by a Wight's Life Drain ability and we had difficulty working out how to adjust his hit point maximum because it is not intuitive that you have to go into the character builder to apply temporary in game effects.
Will the character sheet redesign make it easier to apply temporary stat adjustments such as from the Shadow's Strength Drain or the Wight's Life Drain abilities without having to go into the builder?
Last time you showcased that the app will have smaller pages to better display content on mobile devices. Are there any plans to also update the pagination for the website as well (i.e. dividing larger sections, better navigation buttons, etc.)?
Do we have any updates on Twitch Integration? Is it still slated to be like the original video had shown, or will it be more like the Destiny 2 Overlay where you can select the character from a dropdown and it displays all their info?
I will propose here a question I asked during the last livestream (but go obviously lost in the hundreds of other questions being asked at that moment): Aside from supporting DDB through our purchases/subscription and help by flagging issues and errors in the website, is there any other way we the community can actively help DDB improve?
Does the overhaul also includes the possibility of importing a character portrait, and for the portrait image to also appear in the exported PDF sheet? (I am not sure this had been discussed previously or in another thread)
Would it maybe be possible to have the implementation (in the future, not necessarily with this overhaul) of a system to sort created characters (as in, divide them into categories/folders/etc)?
I also second the questions about pop-up for skills and characteristic description in the DDB sheet, as well as the possibility of having easier access to temporary modifiers and maybe conditions (mostly from a DM point of view) and news on the Twitch integration (+1ed all these posts, but wanted to reiterate :P).
As a final note: thank you very much for all the hard work you guys are doing, I wish I had the possibility and the skills necessary to join and help you more actively.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Born in Italy, moved a bunch, living in Spain, my heart always belonged to Roleplaying Games
Aside from supporting DDB through our purchases/subscription and help by flagging issues and errors in the website, is there any other way we the community can actively help DDB improve?
I second this. With the avalanche of requests I see on the forum and being a dev myself for sure I want to help in some way.
Has often some kind of free new content, will these be added to Beyond?
For example this issue we have the new general Spider Shark monster, some new adventure specific monsters in the D&D Classic section and stats for DiceCameraAction Diath and Paultin.
Another that comes to mind is Belaphoss the Mad the extra Demonlord from issue 4.
There are more examples in the issues and these are free content made by the D&D team.
I would like to know an ETA on the Character Builder update? I've only recently seen posts that say "it's coming but no ETA".. Can we get a sense of when that might happen at least? not necessarily an exact date.. 1 month? 2? After Season 8 of Game of Thrones? :P
Doomsphere (aka Todd) has been making and uploading all these awesome videos, which I crave every weekday. And all the recent ones reference parts of the books mostly XGtE. So I was wondering are you going to insert these videos inside the books as extra content. Like all the subclass videos with all the subclasses. What would be even cooler is if there are videos that link to a character that I am creating, there is a button asking if you would like to watch a video about that subclass or whatever.
WIth the new rules/features of tools, would it be possible to add the ability to tool tip tools. The tool tip would include a basic description if XGtE was not purchased but if it was it would include all the elements and ideas for how it can assist skill checks.
On a similar note, what is the timeline for allowing the tool tipping of homebrew stuff, i know it has been mentioned that you might be able to set it up where a user tool tips the unique id of their item, so just wondering how far off this might be.
On the character sheet side of development I would like to know when the issues around it will be ironed out and improved? Things like lengthy character background not showing on the export sheet unless you re-open it using Adobe Viewer, and then it only shows when you click in the box. Also the character appearance, again if you open the export sheet in Adobe Viewer it will only let you 'open' PDF's to add to it which doesnt work. Needs to be a .jpg or .png etc. Thanks
UPDATE: Q&A Stream for November is complete. If you missed it, you can watch it here.
Hail Travellers, and well met!
BadEye will be hosting the next Developer Stream on Tuesday the 21st of November. This stream will provide further updates from the D&D Beyond team and allow you to have your questions answered. Get info straight from the Beholder's mouth!
DATE: Tuesday 21st November
TIME: 2pm PST (when is this for me?)
LOCATION: D&D Beyond Twitch
*Note: Time and Date have changed from original post
Please post questions you would like BadEye to answer in the thread below. We will be collating these, and BadEye will do his best to answer as many questions from the forums as well as Twitch Chat.
Miss out on October's Developer Stream? Watch below!
Pun-loving nerd | She/Her/Hers | Profile art by Becca Golins
If you need help with homebrew, please post on the homebrew forums, where multiple staff and moderators can read your post and help you!
"We got this, no problem! I'll take the twenty on the left - you guys handle the one on the right!"🔊
WotC has said that they will be, at some point, making the revised ranger available and that they don't want it to be paid content. How will Beyond be handling the integration of a revised ranger class, and any other future added classes?
In the first update Adam answered a question of mine about adding more than 12 character slots to a campaign and was confused as to why we would want/need to have more than 12 players, then the team learned about West Marches style games. In addition to those, if we are running multiple groups through a home brew campaign and are using the future campaign management tools, then it would be nice not to have to duplicate all that information across several campaigns. Is there a more robust idea about adding more campaign slots and/or adding more player slots to existing campaigns? And what would that look like and potentially cost?
It was mentioned in a thread by, I believe, Adam that adding private forum functionality within the campaign management secion is something that would be relatively easy to implement, if it was wanted. Did you receive enough support for the idea of private campaign forums to consider adding them?
Would it be possible to add a "Take me to the top of page button" to the header (with the search bar and notifications) and make it "fixed-sticky header" so you can see it no matter where you scroll on the page?
What improvements are planned for the search engine? I was trying to find the lycanthropy rules the other day and searching them gave no usable results within the first couple of pages, I ended up googling it and then having to go through the compendium to finally find it, all while trying to run the game.
If you can release the information, can we get stats on total users, those who have made characters, and other information like that? (Not high hopes for this one and I understand why not, just curious)
If not that, could you give us stats on how many people appear to be actively using Beyond for in-character play? Such as a percentage of users that add damage to, and take away from, a character each week/month?
Would you mind telling a personal story from your gaming career so we can get to know you better?
Will the UA version of sub-classes be added even if there is a revised version in a released book? I've seen several people say they want to continue using the UA version on forums.
The most memorable stories always begin with failure.
*Assuming of course you own those sources through DDB.
I would like to know if you're thinking about adding the ability to create non magical homebrew item. I'm playing ToA and I had to make the Salve of Insect Repellent as a wonderous item... it's okay, but it feels like I should be able to create item for every kind, like Adventure Gear or tool (also the ability to have proficiency with homebrew tool).
Edit:
Seeing the price of an item in the character sheet would be cool and a buy button even more cool.
If, while going through all of that, instead of me listing those errors for a moderator to fix, a moderator was fixing them, they all would've been done in the last hour it took me to find them all.
Cheers, keep up the amazing work. The Xanathars release was so awesome
Mega Threads - Staff Quotes - Useful Resources - Homebrew FAQ - Pricing FAQ
First off, I love D&D Beyond. I've bought all of the content and will most likely continue to do so. I mostly play over-the-table Adventurers League, but also sometimes non-AL, often times with DMs that don't use the campaign features of D&D Beyond. With that said, here's my list:
What's the timeline for adding Adventurers League logsheet tracking?
What's the timeline for adding Adventurers League adventures to the compendium? I've been considering buying the whole pack on DMs Guild, but have been holding off for now in hopes they will be available here instead, and don't want to have to buy twice.
Will there be some way of marking temporary/semi-permanent/permanent boons/curses like the Dark Gifts or Touched by the Mists in DDAL04 for characters?
Can we get folders or categories for our characters?
Can we get public view URLs for our characters (and logsheets when we get them)?
Can we get a selector in the character editor to restrict to, and/or badge on completed characters to indicate that, PHB+1 in DDAL?
Can we get an option for printing spell cards when we export to PDF?
Can we get history for characters so we can see older versions of our characters or see how they've changed over time and/or revert them to older versions?
Can we get the ability to share write access to or transfer a character to another user?
Can we get the ability to make copies of our characters for experimentation?
Can we get tools for XGtE's background roll tables (and other roll tables)?
Can we get character sheet export PDFs to include all of the spells known/in the spellbook rather than just prepared spells?
I would love to have a little more detail (not a lot, but like a sentence) for the items in the Features & Traits for character export PDFs, closer to what the official pregen character sheets have, so that I don't have to reference source material as often.
I would love to have a better solution for taking notes or keeping notes with the character, or better yet with a category or grouping of characters. Right now I use Google Docs, but it would be nice to have that all in one location and I'm fine using markdown. Bonus points if it can be rendered like homebrewery. Grid-based map drawing would also be amazing here for notes of dungeons.
The ability to annotate or add personal notes to entries in the compendium would be cool, for example, for notating certain ways that a DM has said they interpret the rule or ways that they handle a given case differently.
Sometimes when exporting a character sheet to PDF, a € symbol appears in places of spaces in some of the free-text fields, like backgrounds.
For games played with pre-gen characters (for example, our group played Xanathar's Underworld Speculation today with pre-gen characters from that adventure), it would be nice to be able to clone that pre-gen character into our characters so we can track items/spell slots/etc, and get the rich information that the digital character sheet provides. I ended up copying my pre-gen character in by hand, but it would have been nice to be able to search the pre-gen characters.
I'd prefer if racial/class attack abilities like Dragonborn's Breath Weapon could be notated in the Attacks & Spellcasting section of the exported character sheet PDF.
I think that's pretty much my list. I know it is long, and I don't necessarily expect answers to each and every one, but that's what's been on my mind since I started to use this tool. Don't get me wrong, I love the tool, but think these could improve it even more. I'm also happy if you want to answer/address any of these questions either in this thread or in private messages with me rather than during the video/stream.
Thanks!
I've deleted a couple of posts because they weren't questions for the dev stream.
Please stay on topic here, we ONLY want questions for the dev stream - otherwise I WILL be deleting your post!
Now look - you made me use bold AND red! Seriously though, thank you for your contribution to discussion, but we need to be able to go through this thread for questions for BadEye, so every post that isn't a question, just makes that harder.
Pun-loving nerd | She/Her/Hers | Profile art by Becca Golins
If you need help with homebrew, please post on the homebrew forums, where multiple staff and moderators can read your post and help you!
"We got this, no problem! I'll take the twenty on the left - you guys handle the one on the right!"🔊
Will there be popup information on character sheets on skills, abilities, gear and such?
I'm not stupid. I'm just unlucky when I'm thinking.
In my game at the weekend my party and I entered a dungeon and fought a range of undead creatures. One of my companions was affected by a Wight's Life Drain ability and we had difficulty working out how to adjust his hit point maximum because it is not intuitive that you have to go into the character builder to apply temporary in game effects.
Will the character sheet redesign make it easier to apply temporary stat adjustments such as from the Shadow's Strength Drain or the Wight's Life Drain abilities without having to go into the builder?
Last time you showcased that the app will have smaller pages to better display content on mobile devices. Are there any plans to also update the pagination for the website as well (i.e. dividing larger sections, better navigation buttons, etc.)?
Do we have any updates on Twitch Integration? Is it still slated to be like the original video had shown, or will it be more like the Destiny 2 Overlay where you can select the character from a dropdown and it displays all their info?
I will propose here a question I asked during the last livestream (but go obviously lost in the hundreds of other questions being asked at that moment):
Aside from supporting DDB through our purchases/subscription and help by flagging issues and errors in the website, is there any other way we the community can actively help DDB improve?
Does the overhaul also includes the possibility of importing a character portrait, and for the portrait image to also appear in the exported PDF sheet? (I am not sure this had been discussed previously or in another thread)
Would it maybe be possible to have the implementation (in the future, not necessarily with this overhaul) of a system to sort created characters (as in, divide them into categories/folders/etc)?
I also second the questions about pop-up for skills and characteristic description in the DDB sheet, as well as the possibility of having easier access to temporary modifiers and maybe conditions (mostly from a DM point of view) and news on the Twitch integration (+1ed all these posts, but wanted to reiterate :P).
As a final note: thank you very much for all the hard work you guys are doing, I wish I had the possibility and the skills necessary to join and help you more actively.
Born in Italy, moved a bunch, living in Spain, my heart always belonged to Roleplaying Games
I second this. With the avalanche of requests I see on the forum and being a dev myself for sure I want to help in some way.
And I cast Heroism on the community.
My Question is regarding Dragon+:
Dragon Plus
Has often some kind of free new content, will these be added to Beyond?
For example this issue we have the new general Spider Shark monster, some new adventure specific monsters in the D&D Classic section and stats for DiceCameraAction Diath and Paultin.
Another that comes to mind is Belaphoss the Mad the extra Demonlord from issue 4.
There are more examples in the issues and these are free content made by the D&D team.
scanned above but didn't see it mentioned,
I would like to know an ETA on the Character Builder update? I've only recently seen posts that say "it's coming but no ETA".. Can we get a sense of when that might happen at least? not necessarily an exact date.. 1 month? 2? After Season 8 of Game of Thrones? :P
Doomsphere (aka Todd) has been making and uploading all these awesome videos, which I crave every weekday. And all the recent ones reference parts of the books mostly XGtE. So I was wondering are you going to insert these videos inside the books as extra content. Like all the subclass videos with all the subclasses. What would be even cooler is if there are videos that link to a character that I am creating, there is a button asking if you would like to watch a video about that subclass or whatever.
WIth the new rules/features of tools, would it be possible to add the ability to tool tip tools. The tool tip would include a basic description if XGtE was not purchased but if it was it would include all the elements and ideas for how it can assist skill checks.
On a similar note, what is the timeline for allowing the tool tipping of homebrew stuff, i know it has been mentioned that you might be able to set it up where a user tool tips the unique id of their item, so just wondering how far off this might be.
Mega Threads - Staff Quotes - Useful Resources - Homebrew FAQ - Pricing FAQ
On the character sheet side of development I would like to know when the issues around it will be ironed out and improved? Things like lengthy character background not showing on the export sheet unless you re-open it using Adobe Viewer, and then it only shows when you click in the box. Also the character appearance, again if you open the export sheet in Adobe Viewer it will only let you 'open' PDF's to add to it which doesnt work. Needs to be a .jpg or .png etc. Thanks
Any thought's on Licensing and offering Third party books like Godsfall, Mercers Critical role Stuff, or the Middle Earth Stuff in DDB. and if so where would that fall in the Timeline?
Thank You!