OK, so I've searched all over the internet for this issue, and I'm reading a lot of cases of this happening dating back two or three years, with no fix. Character stats that are supposed to be available through updated character sheets are not updating when viewed in the campaign/encounter editor/or PDF export. These may be related, or they may not, but it seems to revolve around hitpoints and level stats, and the best response I have found so far puts the blame on a server refresh bug.

My personal experience with this bug is through the campaign and encounter builder. I have players who have joined the campaign I am preparing to run, and I have been trying to set up a collection of encounters ahead of time in order to cut down on wasted admin time during the game. I have added the characters from the campaign, but if I test the system by updating their character sheets with new levels or hitpoint overrides, the encounters will not update with the characters' new levels no matter what I do. I have removed the characters from the campaign and asked the players to rejoin, I have removed the campaign from the encounter, then saved and reattached the campaign, the campaign itself seems to suffer from the same problem, I have hard refreshed my browser (chrome on MacOS and iOS btw), I have logged out, refreshed, and logged back in again. Nothing, though frankly, even if it did work, I'm sure as hell not going to go to all that trouble in the middle of a game between encounters. The character level-up settings are set to "milestone". The only thing that seems to work is waiting more than 20 minutes for the server to refresh, which is almost as bad.

Similarly, associating a campaign with an encounter should also automatically update it by default with the characters in the campaign. Instead, it only adds whatever characters are already joined with the campaign, and the campaign association has to be reset before It updates the PC list.

This really appears to be just a server default that DNDB doesn't want to change. While I understand that running servers is expensive, and that real-time server functions can result in lag if not balanced with more resources, this is a live game server that DNDB has set up as its primary function as a service. The core purpose of DNDB is to facilitate digital gameplay through live access to a database of dynamic statistics. Having them lag to the point of breaking the experience is not really serving the purpose of the system very well, which is a crying shame, because the concept and toolset are frankly awesome. I really can't emphasise how much I like the features this team have created, I just hate that this one, easily resolved thing gets in the way.  It is particularly irksome when you consider the fact that the whole company has been bought by WotC for $146 million, which certainly is enough money to pay for the resources to fix this. 

Just reduce the refresh time to 1 minute, please. And if it's something else, then please, devs, look into this. It's been years since this issue was first reported.

For the PDFs it’s due to the server refresh. For the encounters it’s an intended behavior. The encounter tracker/builder retains the levels for the characters when the encounter was built and doesn’t update automatically because some DMs (like myself) like to keep old encounters saved for our records, and party composition is part of that record. If you simply deselect the campaign for that encounter in the encounter builder and reselect it, it will pull the updated party info for you.

OK, that does make some sense, but why not just add that information to the game log instead? Or turn live refresh on with a toggle? I mean, there must be some fix to allow for both situations. For me, it's kinda killing the experience having to go back through all of the encounters I've set up prior to running the campaign and manually edit them all again just to add one player or update the character's levels.

EDIT: actually, the more I think about it, the more I feel like that isn't a great use of the system. The encounters themselves are not meant to be records, they are meant to be live encounters. I get that you want to keep the record, but freezing the PCs at their level just for historic purposes *after the encounter's been run*, breaking the functionality of the encounter building in the process is kind of madness. If it's a record keeping thing, it definitely should be in the game log.

How is the game log going to record an encounter as one designed it? It barely functions to record what happens in game. Plus, keeping those records all in one place makes them convenient to reference in future when planning new encounters. Besides, it doesn’t “break” anything, updating the party is just a simple 2 click process.

Im not going to dispute that the game log as it’s currently designed is woefully inadequate for that use, I’m simply saying that that is where the information should be kept, and that is needs to be updated to allow that functionality. It is after all simply a set of data points that could easily be export/import managed to use again for future. As for the 2 click process, that’s fine, but I have 65 prebuilt encounters for one campaign. I now need to go through and update them all, which is 130 clicks, plus the back and forth of going between the list and the editor for each one. It makes preparing encounters ahead of time utterly pointless if the only information that is worth entering is the state the players are in just prior to the encounter. I might as well just build the encounter from scratch just before it begins, in which case, why bother at all (other than to record the encounter, which not everyone will care to do). That is a broken functionality for me.