We are excited to announce that D&D Beyond will soon be joining Hasbro as part of the Wizards of the Coast family!
On May 18, 2022 or soon after, your D&D Beyond account will transfer to Wizards of the Coast, at which point (and going forward) the Wizards Terms of Use will apply to your use of D&D Beyond, and the Wizards Privacy Policy will apply to the personal data associated with your account. If you are located in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, Wizards of the Coast LLC will become the “data controller” of your personal data once it transfers.
For more information on this transaction, please click here. If you wish to delete your account prior to the transfer, you will find instructions for doing so here.
Frequently asked questions
When will the D&D Beyond Terms of Service be updated?
The Terms of Service will be updated to Wizards of the Coast Terms of Service on or around May 18, 2022.
Why are they being updated?
As part of Wizards of the Coast acquiring D&D Beyond, we will extend the Wizards Terms of Service to cover this new service.
What is changing in them?
We need your permission to put your user content on D&D Beyond and operate the D&D Beyond service, and we’re working to ensure that the scope of the permission you give us is tailored to that goal. The Wizards Terms of Service will therefore be updated with a section specific to D&D Beyond to allow us to host your content and otherwise operate the D&D Beyond service.
Will Wizards own my homebrew content created on D&D Beyond?
Wizards has no intent of taking ownership over user content you put on D&D Beyond, and the Terms of Service will not grant us such rights. The permissions we will need for user content will relate to allowing us to operate the D&D Beyond service, including displaying that content on our site.
Do these changes affect homebrew content that was created before May 18?
Any content that remains on the D&D Beyond service will be subject to the updated Wizards Terms of Service. The updated Terms of Service should not impact how you've used the site or owned your content prior to May 18.
If I delete my D&D Beyond account, will my homebrew content remain on D&D Beyond? If so, will my username still be credited?
While your homebrew content will remain on D&D Beyond, the credited username will change to “user-[number].”
Will Wizards own any character or account information I upload (e.g. character sheets, profile pictures)?
Wizards has no intent of taking ownership over user content you put on D&D Beyond, and the Terms of Service will not grant us such rights. The permissions we will need for that content will relate to allowing us to operate the D&D Beyond service, including displaying that content on our site.
Will I need a Wizards account to access or sign up for D&D Beyond after May 18?
No. You can continue to use your Twitch or Google account or Apple ID to sign into D&D Beyond. New users will still need a Twitch or Google account or Apple ID to sign up for D&D Beyond after May 18.
Keep in mind ... ALWAYS granting license and them not doing anything with it is ENTIRELY different from what WotC will do with your creations. I'm sorry ... You may not care if your hard work is taken from you, but many of us do. I do not spend countless hours creating something just to give to someone else to make money off of. Unless some additional clarification is made very quickly, I will be removing all of my homebrew content. I'm actually glad I didn't share anything to the public at this point. As I mentioned above, it might be time for my group to find a new place to hang our hats.
You won't find anywhere without similar terms and conditions; not if they want to be profitable and to protect themselves from legal entanglements.
By letting you create homebrew on their site, DDB makes money, whether directly or indirectly, because it's part of the toolset that keeps you using the site; it doesn't matter if the homebrew is only used privately because if anyone in your campaign has a subscription (which at least one of you must do) then they are making money from your homebrew.
In other words, like it or not, you have always been subject to similar legal boilerplate on DDB, and they have been making money from your homebrew whether you knew it or not. This is the legal boilerplate that covers them from that, or from future possible releases that may be in any way similar.
It's not a free license to take anything you create and simply sell it, because if they did that they'd very quickly end up with a PR nightmare.
Again, since I think this needs to be repeated:
If you want Homebrew on this site, you have to agree to a license for Wizards to use it. If Wizards has no such license, they can’t take your homebrew and beam it into computers, tablets, and phones across the world because they would be distributing something that they have no legal right to distribute. That is why any site that hosts user submitted content is going to have similar terms.
Protecting themselves from overly litigious content submitters is a secondary concern - their primary concern is simply having the site function.
Those are the only choices - Wizards has homebrew content and this language in their T&C, or they don’t have either. There is no option (other than perhaps Wizards hiring some incompetent attorneys) where there is homebrew but isn’t this set of terms.
So they can use our homebrew content however they want, including potentially using it in official books, which means they'd make money from our ideas... and not even give us credit for it.
This is some BS. Absolutely garbage thing to do to the players.
I just want to know how much prices are going to go up
Well that is why ny homebrew is not on the website . As it is not just for this system and I have no intention on gving up my intectual property to greedy pple if anyone will intend to monetize my homebrew it will be me :D and solely me. Dont make me wrong we all love what wotc made and play it and i can get wha stat block of ma characters is owned by them but not my world in the slightest or my actual characters character ;)
Anyhow this means that crical roles content and all chatacters are wotc and can be used in any way by them.... :D :( :D :(
I will stay if the prices wont go up. But my homebrew will not end up online as I do not intend to give tgem tbe chance to make money on me. Thouh I am not someone theyd propably would as I am just one of several thousands using these services. Anyway everyone can swap over to pathfinder or whatever system will satisfy their needs.
I agree that 5.2 appears, under a lot of legalese and words, to be a flat out "we get to take your creative work and claim it as our own..."
I also see a deactivation coming
WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS
I just read about the conflict happening at Hasbro and Wizards. This might not be good for DnDBeyond users. There are three different companies involved, at least. DnDBeyond might end up an asset that needs to be monetized or an anchor that needs to go away.
I am curious how this might affect tools like Mr Primate's DDB importer that can import content into Foundry VTT.
So what happens if we have both a Wizards and D&DBeyond account?
You can now link your DDB account to the WotC account for login purposes (same as you can with Google, Twitch etc.).
why this transport?
Bruh
So, what of mine exactly did they make money off of, when I didn't share any of my homebrew publicly as was mentioned previously mentioned? Nothing ... No one else has used this content and won't until I decide it may. However, if a company that does such things gets ahold of it, it would be unwise of them not to take advantage of the millions of user’s ideas and claim them as their own. Basically, a free think tank. Hey, more power to you for using your resources but shame on you for outright stealing other people’s ideas in their entirety. Some of the comments I have heard seem to justify stealing and I'm definitely not ok with that.
Making money off of something I create via luring more paying customers into this platform is considerably different than taking my shared works and making it their own and putting it into a book. Before, with D&D Beyond, there was an acceptable risk to sharing some of my ideas with the community. It would appear not so much now. If WotC wants some great ideas, I'm sure some of this wonderfully creative community would be willing to part with their hard work for the right price.
None of this is relevant. You want to store your homebrew on Wizards’ servers and want them to later beam that homebrew back to you? Wizards is going to want to have a license to distribute your content so it can go back to you.
Protecting Wizards from overly litigious homebrewers is a secondary concern and one that is important, but not the primary concern.
The simple reality is that Wizards distributing content they do not own to you means they need this language. You can choose no homebrewing at all or you can choose homebrewing and giving Wizards the rights they need for this to function. There are no other options.
As I previously mentioned it doesn't matter if you share it publicly or not; if you use it at all in a private campaign then at least one of the players must have a subscription, if any of the players has bought any book content, dice etc. then this is all money made "from" your homebrew because it's part of the experience keeping those players using the site.
If you've genuinely done none of those things, and you have a free account with no unlocked content, you've never subscribed, never bought dice etc. then they've made no money off your content, but that doesn't mean they don't need you to agree to the terms and conditions in case that ever changes, because ultimately they are the ones responsible for all content you've submitted to them, as they're the ones storing it on their servers, maintaining the tools to create it and view it and so-on. And there's not much point creating homebrew if you're never going to use it.
No-one is suggesting that it'd be fine for a company to take your homebrew, print it in a book and make a load of money off of it, and neither are they, actually.
Because there is a big difference between covering their asses against being sued, and actively exploiting their users; if they were to do the latter you could still show that you created it and they printed it exactly (though it'd be easier if you publicly shared it because then you'd have a fixed snapshot and a timestamp of the homebrew as it was when released) and you could then create a PR mess they'd rather avoid.
And again, you were already subject to the same terms and conditions under Fandom, very little has actually changed in the terms themselves (if anything, they're more limited than Fandom's were). The major difference is that it's Wizards of the Coast now.
People threatening to close their accounts or delete all their homebrew (which doesn't actually delete it btw, as you can simply restore it again) are doing so over terms and conditions they were already subjected to.
Now that you're joining Wizards of the Coast will we be able to register our physical books on D&D Beyond? I've seen a few forum posts about it in the past and honesty it would be a great feature for those who own physical copies of the books.