So @Stormknight said you guys want more feedback. We've been using DDB for quite a while - "we" being three DMs, separate accounts and subscriptions, just over half-a-dozen players between us (and growing), and we're often buying the same books. And we've discussed DDB quite a bit.
Now, I want to preface this by saying I don't feel DDB is doing a lot "wrong" exactly, but it's more a question of what more needs to be done. Especially as we've started kind of drifting away from D&D a bit, and DDB is part of why (though perhaps not in the way one might expect).
Positives:
1) If it wasn't for DDB, we wouldn't be playing D&D.
Yeah you can use that quote if you have to do any license negotiations with WotC! To expand a bit, 5E is a medium-crunch RPG, which isn't actually a perfect fit for the kind of stuff any of us three would really like to run. So why do we? Because DDB makes our lives sufficiently easy in a way that other systems just don't have. It's possible Fantasy Grounds might, but the buy-in cost of getting into that, both financially and in terms of learning required is, well, huge. So where one of us might prefer to run, say, 13th Age, the lack of support, the the lack of easy-to-use, easy-to-share materials and so on, means instead we use D&D, because DDB makes it "good enough".
I mean, I can hear the gasps of horror from some people from here, but I've been running TT RPGs since I was 10-11 in 1989, and at this point, ease of use is a significant concern, and some kind of online source/storage/leveling-up and so on is a huge asset for anything medium-crunch or above.
2) You have consistently improved the character sheet and the ways you interact with it.
This is the killer feature. Even pre-pandemic, several of the players preferred digital sheets. You can't lose or forget them, you can "level up" between sessions, you can look at them whenever you want, they can roll stuff for you instead of you having to calculate it and so on. DDB always focused on this and it was the right decision. Keep on improving it, especially how well it works on phones (though during the pandemic it seems more people are using laptops and tablets). We appreciate this, we appreciate the regular improvements.
3) The lack any "malicious" or "greedy" seeming actions. The pricing of DDB did seem greedy and I still hold that your pricing for individual items from books is ludicrous, but too late to go back on. However, once past that, we've seen that you actually provide pretty good value, so long as we stick to buying full books. The sharing is very important and seems sufficiently generous (just barely). You didn't, for example, ruin compatibility with the Beyond 20 browser add-on, and that actually encouraged us to stick with you when using a VTT, instead of moving to Roll20 or FG. You also didn't make all the dice stuff mandatory or anything.
4) Prompt additions of UA content. I mean, the failure to ever implement the biggest UA ever was bad, and did cause our group to consider other options, but it's irrelevant now, and otherwise you've done really well here. This again helps you and helps WotC, as it makes UA a lot more exciting as we know they'll actually be usable soon unless they do something wacky.
5) Ability to add your own content is gradually improving. Being able to do this is a minimum, and I still don't think you're quite there, but we've seen steady improvement. If we couldn't add things like spells/items, we wouldn't have signed up at all. Subclasses/races would have meant cancelling for a competitor during lockdown. But keep going on this, keep adding things. Discoverability could stand to improve, but the general direction is good.
Negatives:
I don't want to dwell here because I don't think there's much solidly negative that DDB has done. But I do think more public ownership of failures to implement things and even more transparency on when things are being added, or if they're not, would be pretty beneficial.
What can DDB do better in the future?
The main reason I'm writing all this is I feel like D&D is losing us a bit and part of that is because, as we've had to play online during the pandemic, and are likely to do so a great deal more even post-pandemic, the investments in getting into Roll20 or FG are looking more reasonable, and like, if we're going to do that, why not also switch systems? We certainly won't want to have to re-buy all the D&D books from them just to use them. DDB is D&D only and I'm not suggesting that should change, however.
What I think you do need to find a way to do is give DMs better support.
The player-side support is great, and yes, was the killer app and had to come first, but now it's been a number of years, and still the DM support from DDB is well, poor. It's poor in a lot of ways that really matter. For example, searching for monsters is still incredibly obnoxious - just as bad as it was years ago. Even a feature as simple as "limit to sources I own or can access" as a checkbox isn't present. If I want to do that, I have to carefully select every single source, and I can't even save it, and it'll forget them immediately if I click away by accident. That's terrible. This is a really basic feature, that's been requested a bunch of times, and yet nothing has ever happened on it? Why? Early on, it seemed like some sort of cheap marketing tactic, to try and force you to buy all the books so everything you saw you could use, but that becomes increasingly ludicrous with time, and now it seems more like it was something that didn't seem important when a handful of books were out, and has now fallen completely by the wayside. This is just an example, note, but an important one. Likewise, it seems like the Encounter Builder, which maybe would replace that search, is in the same state it is now, a year ago or more. Again there's still no sources I own feature, which is bizarre. You could at least do something like start with them checked. And this is a valuable tool to DMs, but hasn't improved at all. Other tools for DMs just don't exist or only exist in very basic forms. And this increasingly makes us thing, why keep doing this? Why keep using D&D and DDB? Other stuff might require an investment to get into, but it has better support for us, especially playing online. I'm not saying to "rush the VTT", but the complete failure to improve DM tools, even stuff as basic as the monster finder, is really discouraging. Sometimes instead of D&D we're beginning to run rules-like PbtA or BitD-based games too, simply because we don't need anything for those. If we had decent DM tools, this would be less something we felt the need to do. A VTT would be amazing but I realize it's a way out. So maybe improve what you have? Adding a proper monster-creation tool would also be a very large boon (something like the original DDI's tool, not the form you have now which requires you to know what you're doing in a pretty serious way).
I know there is a cultural issue at DDB where, if something works, and you have a better thing planned, you generally will not make any updates to the existing thing, but I don't think that can fly indefinitely or even much longer with these tools, or the lack thereof. Give us stuff that saves us time and effort, that doesn't just generate more, or de facto saves very little.
Completely agree with your positives. D&D Beyond has done some great stuff, but it's unfortunate how they're currently coasting on these features.
The D&D market has exploded since the release of DDB, and really important features, e.g. Encounter Builder, haven't seen any significant updates since their initial release. It's thirdparty plugins, like Beyond20, that are carrying this site and allowing it to be used for remote play. Even supposedly supported integrations, like Avrae, lack the ability (last I checked) to use homebrew items.
Certain updates have been very promising, like the game log, but others have been too long in coming. I'm hoping that D&D Beyond has been going through growing pains getting their development teams up to speed, and we'll soon see a period of continuous and meaningful updates as the fields sown in the previous years bear fruit. Please?
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So @Stormknight said you guys want more feedback. We've been using DDB for quite a while - "we" being three DMs, separate accounts and subscriptions, just over half-a-dozen players between us (and growing), and we're often buying the same books. And we've discussed DDB quite a bit.
Now, I want to preface this by saying I don't feel DDB is doing a lot "wrong" exactly, but it's more a question of what more needs to be done. Especially as we've started kind of drifting away from D&D a bit, and DDB is part of why (though perhaps not in the way one might expect).
Positives:
1) If it wasn't for DDB, we wouldn't be playing D&D.
Yeah you can use that quote if you have to do any license negotiations with WotC! To expand a bit, 5E is a medium-crunch RPG, which isn't actually a perfect fit for the kind of stuff any of us three would really like to run. So why do we? Because DDB makes our lives sufficiently easy in a way that other systems just don't have. It's possible Fantasy Grounds might, but the buy-in cost of getting into that, both financially and in terms of learning required is, well, huge. So where one of us might prefer to run, say, 13th Age, the lack of support, the the lack of easy-to-use, easy-to-share materials and so on, means instead we use D&D, because DDB makes it "good enough".
I mean, I can hear the gasps of horror from some people from here, but I've been running TT RPGs since I was 10-11 in 1989, and at this point, ease of use is a significant concern, and some kind of online source/storage/leveling-up and so on is a huge asset for anything medium-crunch or above.
2) You have consistently improved the character sheet and the ways you interact with it.
This is the killer feature. Even pre-pandemic, several of the players preferred digital sheets. You can't lose or forget them, you can "level up" between sessions, you can look at them whenever you want, they can roll stuff for you instead of you having to calculate it and so on. DDB always focused on this and it was the right decision. Keep on improving it, especially how well it works on phones (though during the pandemic it seems more people are using laptops and tablets). We appreciate this, we appreciate the regular improvements.
3) The lack any "malicious" or "greedy" seeming actions. The pricing of DDB did seem greedy and I still hold that your pricing for individual items from books is ludicrous, but too late to go back on. However, once past that, we've seen that you actually provide pretty good value, so long as we stick to buying full books. The sharing is very important and seems sufficiently generous (just barely). You didn't, for example, ruin compatibility with the Beyond 20 browser add-on, and that actually encouraged us to stick with you when using a VTT, instead of moving to Roll20 or FG. You also didn't make all the dice stuff mandatory or anything.
4) Prompt additions of UA content. I mean, the failure to ever implement the biggest UA ever was bad, and did cause our group to consider other options, but it's irrelevant now, and otherwise you've done really well here. This again helps you and helps WotC, as it makes UA a lot more exciting as we know they'll actually be usable soon unless they do something wacky.
5) Ability to add your own content is gradually improving. Being able to do this is a minimum, and I still don't think you're quite there, but we've seen steady improvement. If we couldn't add things like spells/items, we wouldn't have signed up at all. Subclasses/races would have meant cancelling for a competitor during lockdown. But keep going on this, keep adding things. Discoverability could stand to improve, but the general direction is good.
Negatives:
I don't want to dwell here because I don't think there's much solidly negative that DDB has done. But I do think more public ownership of failures to implement things and even more transparency on when things are being added, or if they're not, would be pretty beneficial.
What can DDB do better in the future?
The main reason I'm writing all this is I feel like D&D is losing us a bit and part of that is because, as we've had to play online during the pandemic, and are likely to do so a great deal more even post-pandemic, the investments in getting into Roll20 or FG are looking more reasonable, and like, if we're going to do that, why not also switch systems? We certainly won't want to have to re-buy all the D&D books from them just to use them. DDB is D&D only and I'm not suggesting that should change, however.
What I think you do need to find a way to do is give DMs better support.
The player-side support is great, and yes, was the killer app and had to come first, but now it's been a number of years, and still the DM support from DDB is well, poor. It's poor in a lot of ways that really matter. For example, searching for monsters is still incredibly obnoxious - just as bad as it was years ago. Even a feature as simple as "limit to sources I own or can access" as a checkbox isn't present. If I want to do that, I have to carefully select every single source, and I can't even save it, and it'll forget them immediately if I click away by accident. That's terrible. This is a really basic feature, that's been requested a bunch of times, and yet nothing has ever happened on it? Why? Early on, it seemed like some sort of cheap marketing tactic, to try and force you to buy all the books so everything you saw you could use, but that becomes increasingly ludicrous with time, and now it seems more like it was something that didn't seem important when a handful of books were out, and has now fallen completely by the wayside. This is just an example, note, but an important one. Likewise, it seems like the Encounter Builder, which maybe would replace that search, is in the same state it is now, a year ago or more. Again there's still no sources I own feature, which is bizarre. You could at least do something like start with them checked. And this is a valuable tool to DMs, but hasn't improved at all. Other tools for DMs just don't exist or only exist in very basic forms. And this increasingly makes us thing, why keep doing this? Why keep using D&D and DDB? Other stuff might require an investment to get into, but it has better support for us, especially playing online. I'm not saying to "rush the VTT", but the complete failure to improve DM tools, even stuff as basic as the monster finder, is really discouraging. Sometimes instead of D&D we're beginning to run rules-like PbtA or BitD-based games too, simply because we don't need anything for those. If we had decent DM tools, this would be less something we felt the need to do. A VTT would be amazing but I realize it's a way out. So maybe improve what you have? Adding a proper monster-creation tool would also be a very large boon (something like the original DDI's tool, not the form you have now which requires you to know what you're doing in a pretty serious way).
I know there is a cultural issue at DDB where, if something works, and you have a better thing planned, you generally will not make any updates to the existing thing, but I don't think that can fly indefinitely or even much longer with these tools, or the lack thereof. Give us stuff that saves us time and effort, that doesn't just generate more, or de facto saves very little.
Completely agree with your positives. D&D Beyond has done some great stuff, but it's unfortunate how they're currently coasting on these features.
The D&D market has exploded since the release of DDB, and really important features, e.g. Encounter Builder, haven't seen any significant updates since their initial release. It's thirdparty plugins, like Beyond20, that are carrying this site and allowing it to be used for remote play. Even supposedly supported integrations, like Avrae, lack the ability (last I checked) to use homebrew items.
Certain updates have been very promising, like the game log, but others have been too long in coming. I'm hoping that D&D Beyond has been going through growing pains getting their development teams up to speed, and we'll soon see a period of continuous and meaningful updates as the fields sown in the previous years bear fruit. Please?