Hey all. I love the structure of DNDBeyond and the character creation and encounter tools. They work wonders! One major suggestion though would be to explain WHY certain options are locked for players. I had a player with a physical player handbook. He rolled a Ranger and when he got access to spells he wished to learn Hail of Thorns. Great! glad he read ahead and figured that out! Then we tried to add it into DNDBeyond and hit a problem that held us up big time.
We proceeded to play but had no idea why he didn't have access to the spell on his digital char sheet. Then we leveled up to 3 and the problems were even more apparent when other classes had only 1 selection for a specialization with no reasoning...
It took a bit of digging and reading through Reddit before I realized what happened. None of us had the digital handbook. So we were locked out of a major swath of the content. Now I don't care that we needed to pay for that content or a subscription to share. That's part of the price for a pretty decent tool for managing our campaign. What we do care about is that there was no indicator of WHY we were denied that content.
A little tip on user experience from someone who has worked on and designed UIs before. Most people will avoid paying for something at all costs. But for those who are willing to pay, it is well worth it to put a logical on-ramp to why they should pay or a sign saying what those who aren't are missing out on. A good way to do this would be to add a header when there are options from the Handbook that are not present in the base rules or when that option is attempted to be selected (maybe a tooltip/modal will suffice). If the account owns a campaign maybe also explain that getting the handbook + the subscription gives all of their players access as well. Don't try to force users into buying everything, but give a way for them to get started while also providing a logical content tutorial for those who want to take a dive into this digital platform.
Thank you and I hope this is fixed for the next DMs that come down this road.
Only the freely available content from WotC is available for free on this website. That free content is what’s available in the free Basic Rues & SRD, and the EEPC:
Anything not in those two documents must be paid for. If you attempt to view content that isn’t free it tells you you need to purchase it and brings up a link to purchase the appropriate book.
The point of this is that it would be helpful if D&D Beyond had details in the character builder about how to get access to certain materials. If all you do is make a basic account and get into the builder, you're just gonna find a bunch of content missing and not know why at first.
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Hey all. I love the structure of DNDBeyond and the character creation and encounter tools. They work wonders! One major suggestion though would be to explain WHY certain options are locked for players. I had a player with a physical player handbook. He rolled a Ranger and when he got access to spells he wished to learn Hail of Thorns. Great! glad he read ahead and figured that out! Then we tried to add it into DNDBeyond and hit a problem that held us up big time.
We proceeded to play but had no idea why he didn't have access to the spell on his digital char sheet. Then we leveled up to 3 and the problems were even more apparent when other classes had only 1 selection for a specialization with no reasoning...
It took a bit of digging and reading through Reddit before I realized what happened. None of us had the digital handbook. So we were locked out of a major swath of the content. Now I don't care that we needed to pay for that content or a subscription to share. That's part of the price for a pretty decent tool for managing our campaign. What we do care about is that there was no indicator of WHY we were denied that content.
A little tip on user experience from someone who has worked on and designed UIs before. Most people will avoid paying for something at all costs. But for those who are willing to pay, it is well worth it to put a logical on-ramp to why they should pay or a sign saying what those who aren't are missing out on. A good way to do this would be to add a header when there are options from the Handbook that are not present in the base rules or when that option is attempted to be selected (maybe a tooltip/modal will suffice). If the account owns a campaign maybe also explain that getting the handbook + the subscription gives all of their players access as well. Don't try to force users into buying everything, but give a way for them to get started while also providing a logical content tutorial for those who want to take a dive into this digital platform.
Thank you and I hope this is fixed for the next DMs that come down this road.
Only the freely available content from WotC is available for free on this website. That free content is what’s available in the free Basic Rues & SRD, and the EEPC:
Anything not in those two documents must be paid for. If you attempt to view content that isn’t free it tells you you need to purchase it and brings up a link to purchase the appropriate book.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
They already figured that out.
The point of this is that it would be helpful if D&D Beyond had details in the character builder about how to get access to certain materials. If all you do is make a basic account and get into the builder, you're just gonna find a bunch of content missing and not know why at first.