So I've been running multi-year campaigns on DDB for about 6 years. In that time, I've never encountered text field character (letter/word) cap limits in campaign page text boxes before.

Now however, I'm seeing "Description cannot exceed 2048 characters" below all text fields, e.g. description/private notes/public notes.

What is going on? Has there been a change? 

For context, I'm a Master Tier DM sub with purchased legendary bundle access.

Thanks for any clarity on this matter.

My current campaign is 4+ years. Taking into account PCS/NPCS/world/story arc, etc, the notes are extensive and ever growing, to say the least. To suddenly limit space to 2048 characters is quite frankly ridiculous. Suggesting DMs who've spent large amounts of money purchasing materials and subscribing to just use something else" is beyond a slap in the face. 

Has there been an official announcement on this change? I've literally only noticed it now because I'm updating my campaign notes from our last session.

I'm paying for my DDB sub, and have for years, which previously included no text field caps. Now all of a sudden it does, and ridiculously small ones at that, i.e. less than 1,000 words p/box. This seems a drastic and unannounced service reduction from DDB and stating that free 3rd party alternatives exist doesn't in any way change or mitigate that. 

You seem to be saying that DM campaign pages aren't intended as resources for DMs to store campaign information. Can you please post an early source from DDB stating this? Otherwise it merely seems to be your opinion. On the flipside, the mere fact that campaign pages have previously been capable of including tens of thousands of words of notes/stat blocks/images, etc. seems a pretty clear indication that they were in fact intended to allow DMs to collate their campaign info (campaign description, private DM notes and publicly available player notes) all on the one page. But maybe you can post a message from DDB stating that its campaign pages were always intended to be used in conjunction with third party apps/pages?

Or just post the official announcement from DDB to its users stating this change and the reasons for it. You know, the sort of basic provider-to-customer communication one would expect in such situations.

I've never seen any official posts indicating the intent you speak of. Could you please post a link?

Question - do you consider it egregious for a DM running a multi-year campaign to exceed 3,000 words? That's not exactly a novel, barely a short story in fact.

Most of my ire steams from the following:

1. It constitutes an unannounced reduction in service, and
2. It retroactively impacts functionality, i.e. forces long running campaigns like mine to change our info storage/sharing and communication methods.

Functionally, my group were using our campaign page as the heart of our campaign. Considering the fact that I can no longer add any new info to any of the fields, that clearly will no longer be the case.

 Out of curiosity, what is the avg. length of one of your many DDB articles, Davyd?

This limit is very frustrating and makes those notes sections basically worthless. The notes I made the run one of my last sessions was about 6 short paragraphs describing the plot beats, links to monsters for 3 encounters, and a section of a few items that could be found. It is over 4000 characters. So what are we supposed to use these for?

While doing this suddenly without an announcement and with a rather low character count is certainly frustrating, let me say that trying to store any significant quantity of notes in a monolithic text box with no internal organization (there's no way to add, say, a table of contents) is an atrocious idea, so you should probably be switching to something else anyway. Any serious campaign organizer will have abilities such as a table of contents, multiple files, and folders -- for DM notes, just setting up a folder in your Documents directory and using a file editor is better than using D&D Beyond for that.

So these historical statements that you keep referencing exist, but you just can't link to them for some inexplicable reason? Gotcha.

No misrepresentation there. Merely a question, since I'm curious what you consider an egregious quantity of notes, considering that the platform previously had no quantity cap. Noted that you chose not to answer though. 

Granted, that last one was a little tongue-in-cheek, but for someone who writes professionally as you do (I assume you're paid by DDB for those numerous and lengthy articles) to defend this decision (one made without notification or explanation) seems less than impartial.

Exactly, and you have my sympathies, mate. The new, reduced cap is barely enough for a detailed one-shot. My group is almost at the 4 year point (lvl12-13) of a campaign that I've spent years writing and organising, all stored and accessed by my players and I via the campaign page. With a single unannounced stroke DDB have made that impossible to continue. Incredibly disappointing and frustrating to say the least. 

Yeah, I get that there are other, likely preferable third party options out there for DMs to use, but to pay DDB more than $600 buying the legendary bundle years ago (not to mention ongoing master tier sub costs) only to be pushed towards those third party options now and in this fashion feels more than a little gross and unfair.

Part of the frustration is that despite the DDB campaign page's lack of internal organisational facility, DM's like me have spent years structuring and restructuring their notes in order to continue using the platform. Not ''optimal" by any stretch, I know, but there it is.

Here and here are threads from September 2024 discussing issues with lag in the notes system.  While it is not explicitly stated that large notes are contributing to the issue, many users do report they extensively use the notes and there does seem to be a storage issue with saving the notes at fault.

It is generally assumed that D&D Beyond is built atop a pile of spaghetti code, resultant from multiple different owners over its lifetime. We also know that the notes segments of the site are prone to issues, seeing as we had issues last year on that front.   It also is a very well documented fact that D&D has grown substantially since D&D Beyond first launched, far beyond what was anticipated when this site first launched.

If I were a betting man, I would guess the decision came down to an unstable feature becoming more of a liability than a benefit.  After all, memory issues can be expected to grow worse as more users join.  D&D already exploded far more than expected when this site was made and continues to be popular with the best selling core books in history. An ever-increasing player base means more and more notes, built atop an already large archive of existing notes (many of which are probably in campaigns long abandoned, since nothing ever gets deleted).  That is both extremely expensive to maintain, and likely a house of cards waiting to collapse as it already did this past September.

All for what benefit?  A terrible notes app vastly eclipsed by Word, Google Drive, Discord, and any number of other programs.  I also expect that, while used by a significant enough number to cause issues, as a percentage of site users, the number of users of notes is pretty low, as most folks are likely using any number of superior programs.

Limiting something with a demonstrated history of instability that also has limited utility and plenty of alternatives so players are not really losing out on anything?  This seems like a pretty easy choice to make for the stability and health of the site as a whole.  I would much rather they put resources into things that can only exist on Beyond than try to maintain a system that can be done better elsewhere.

Quote from coleislazy >>

This limit is very frustrating and makes those notes sections basically worthless. The notes I made the run one of my last sessions was about 6 short paragraphs describing the plot beats, links to monsters for 3 encounters, and a section of a few items that could be found. It is over 4000 characters. So what are we supposed to use these for?

"Worthless?" If it takes 2k+ words to say, how much of that is actually important notes and how much is filler? Essays are for convincing and stories are for entertaining. Notes are for conveying information in much more condensed form.

I strongly advise improving your efficiency by keeping those direct notes to point form reminders. You'll thank yourself later. And again, you can have much more detailed notes in notepad, or excel, or some similar platform.  

And as others have said, Google Docs are there for those deep backstories. Or Notepad. 

Yeah, I've encountered glitches with stored notes in the past (even made a thread of my own), so I get why DDB might make this decision. Obviously extreme storage quantities (especially all the links) can impact functionality, so I don't doubt that capping text fields as they have is both expedient and cost efficient from a business perspective. But they should have notified customers AND they should have rolled it out so that it only impacts new accounts. To do it without notice and in such a way that it makes current ongoing campaigns no longer functional on the DDB platform is unacceptable. 

Again, my issues are the lack of notice and the reduction in functionality for our game. I think I'll request a refund on my Legendary Bundle purchase and close my account, since the platform is no longer fit for the purpose I was sold on when I came on board, i.e. running my campaigns on. I'll just go back to physical materials and 3rd party platforms for communication and group note sharing.

Quote from Caerwyn_Glyndwr >>

Limiting something with a demonstrated history of instability that also has limited utility and plenty of alternatives so players are not really losing out on anything?  This seems like a pretty easy choice to make for the stability and health of the site as a whole.  I would much rather they put resources into things that can only exist on Beyond than try to maintain a system that can be done better elsewhere.

Well, they could pretty much use off the shelf code other than some special linking functions for the things that actually require special coding -- setting information, notes, and the like don't require any capabilities that don't exist in a standard wiki.

Again, my issues are the lack of notice and the reduction in functionality for our game. I think I'll request a refund on my Legendary Bundle purchase and close my account, since the platform is no longer fit for the purpose I was sold on when I came on board, i.e. running my campaigns on. I'll just go back to physical materials and 3rd party platforms for communication and group note sharing.

 

 Where in the description of buying the legendary bundle did it specify anything about running campaigns via dndbeyond? Requesting a refund for that bundle based on this change is just ridiculous in my opinion. As one hasn't got anything to do with the other. You don't pay for the campaign part of dndbeyond; anyone wheter you pay or not can use it; so nothing in there is a benefit from what you paid for; and thus nothing changed with respect to the functionalities and content you paid for.

Quote from Kotath >>

Quote from coleislazy >>

This limit is very frustrating and makes those notes sections basically worthless. The notes I made the run one of my last sessions was about 6 short paragraphs describing the plot beats, links to monsters for 3 encounters, and a section of a few items that could be found. It is over 4000 characters. So what are we supposed to use these for?

 

"Worthless?" If it takes 2k+ words to say, how much of that is actually important notes and how much is filler? Essays are for convincing and stories are for entertaining. Notes are for conveying information in much more condensed form.

I strongly advise improving your efficiency by keeping those direct notes to point form reminders. You'll thank yourself later. And again, you can have much more detailed notes in notepad, or excel, or some similar platform.  

And as others have said, Google Docs are there for those deep backstories. Or Notepad. 

2048 characters, not words. your post is over 1/4 of that.

My first response was to dismiss the OP, for many of the reasons stated above.  

HOWEVER, after looking at our current campaign notes which consists of 11 lines stating our starting location, our race and option choices and a general directive to try to form a cohesive adventuring party our character count was close to 900.  Other campaigns we have used the space for copious notes that I'm sure went into the 10,000+ range.

So while I get what they are doing and why, I understand the OP's frustration with what is really not a restriction but is more of the elimination of a feature (unintended perhaps) that many used/misused.  

2048 characters is the equivalent to "Please answer YES or NO" instead of an essay.

Please cut the OP some slack, many of us remember changing computer types or software and having to migrate all that information to a new platform.  It's not fun.

The OP is entirely correct that this should have been communicated and given advance notice so that we could make other arrangements for notes and such.

Quote from coleislazy >>

Quote from Kotath >>

Quote from coleislazy >>

This limit is very frustrating and makes those notes sections basically worthless. The notes I made the run one of my last sessions was about 6 short paragraphs describing the plot beats, links to monsters for 3 encounters, and a section of a few items that could be found. It is over 4000 characters. So what are we supposed to use these for?

 

"Worthless?" If it takes 2k+ words to say, how much of that is actually important notes and how much is filler? Essays are for convincing and stories are for entertaining. Notes are for conveying information in much more condensed form.

I strongly advise improving your efficiency by keeping those direct notes to point form reminders. You'll thank yourself later. And again, you can have much more detailed notes in notepad, or excel, or some similar platform.  

And as others have said, Google Docs are there for those deep backstories. Or Notepad. 

 

2048 characters, not words. your post is over 1/4 of that.

My post is not in note form. And I use notepad to compose campaign related handouts, partly because I run on discord and it does not handle fancy formatting so well.