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!
...is there a way to turn this off? I am building homebrew items (feats, items, etc.) that I do not want to share with my players, or not with a certain campaign, partly because it would be a spoiler, and partly because they are not finished yet.
That ability will come with the introduction of the source management feature.
Wait, if you remove those not completed items from your collection (leave only on creations) the players will not be able to add/locate on character sheet. And since those shared homebrews do not show on search the only way to reach them would be guess the url. So 99.99999% safe XD. Am I wrong?
The logic checks out. Seems like you're all set.
Hmm, it seems to work, at least to remove it from all campaigns, but this way even I can't access them in the character creation/editor. Oh well, will do as an awkward workaround for now, thanks.
Apparently you also alphabetized my Characters :)
I'm getting this for my own items. I've got three items that are part of a set, with similar features, each slightly different, they all have similarly named properties, etc. I have the option to share one of them, but the other two say they're not eligible for publication. Thought you guys should know! :D Keep up the good work <3