Hi all, I'm new to the community and thought I might share some of my first impressions using D&D Beyond and the Maps VTT. I know that many folks have been here from the start, so there seems to be a ton of tribal knowledge in the community in terms of workarounds and fixes for common issues. I wanted to actually explore some of these issues and share the experience of someone who's new to the site. My goal is to highlight some issues that long-term users might have simply gotten used to and just accepted as normal and fine. I'd also like to pitch a few requests at the end. My goal here is to discuss how the platform and services can be improved.
Entitlements not syncing automatically was probably the most jarring thing that I experienced. Having to find some buried menu somewhere (and stumbling upon multiple broken links from help threads) is unacceptable, IMO. It took hours to troubleshoot why content I shared with other players at my table wasn't showing up for them. There are multiple troubleshooting megathreads, but much of the information is outdated, especially the first few search results. In this day and age, we expect changes to be reflected without user intervention. When I purchase a subscription somewhere, I don't need to go into some menu and click a button to refresh my subscriptions. This should be hotfixed and it's unacceptable that it's been a known issue for so long. In the entitlements page there's actually a message saying to try syncing before contacting support, so it's a well-known, documented problem costing enough money in terms of customer support hours that a message had to be added. Please fix!
That aside, another criticism includes how the VTT is marketed. "Everything You Need in a D&D VTT," "The Official VTT of D&D," etc. But it's still in beta and feels very unpolished. The confidence to performance ratio is misaligned. Also, the feature roadmap has the dev team adding a bunch of stuff that's maybe nice to have in certain situations. They should instead be focusing on fixing or improving current features before adding new stuff which will introduce more bugs. My guess is that this push to add new features that can be advertised is likely from the marketing team. I'm curious how much of the feature list was pushed by the devs. Either way, my expectations were very high when I went through the checkout process, then I was disappointed upon experiencing the product. Maybe some of the marketing resources should be redirected into development? (Just kidding, that would never happen)
Not being able to add NPCs was also a huge let down. Stickers and 3D dice are in the 2025 feature roadmap, but still no sign of NPCs? Yes, you can technically create a homebrew monster as a workaround. But just because there's a workaround in place doesn't mean that it's okay to let it go indefinitely. In my experience, there's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution. Also, when selecting tokens it should automatically filter out content that you don't own instead of listing thousands of different junk tokens.
When building a character, certain content can't be filtered out no matter what I do. For example, I can't seem to figure out how to filter out Antimater Rifle from Weapon Mastery when building a Barbarian. I have new players at my table, so who knows what kinds of out of bounds junk they'll see? So then I have to take extra time to comb through their character sheets each level up to make sure they didn't pick something non-canon.
There's also a rule in the forums against the use of any AI generated content, but the feature roadmap has a "Rules Assistant," which I assume will just be *yet another* generative AI chatbot, like the ones popping up all over the place that no one asked for. This is a minor gripe on my end, but it's an inconsistency nonetheless and I'd also rather see bug being fixed insted of a chatbot. A searchable PDF document of the PHB would be preferable to a chatbot IMO. For context, here's a quote of the site rules: "There are ongoing discussions over the ethics of how AI is trained and how the materials used in that training are sourced. Any content created, in whole or in part, through the use of artificial intelligence is not permitted. This primarily includes text, images, and/or audio produced or edited by AI, and it applies whether the AI was prompted by human input or not." I'm sure we won't be provided a list of training sources for the Rules Assistant, bringing up the question of ethics cited in the rules. Will we be allowed to discuss how to interpret output from the Rules Assistant in the forums due to ethical concerns? Only time will tell... https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/news-announcements/208663-site-rules-guidelines#3-7-ai-content
Feature-specific feedback and some bugs I've found: * I know that stickers were just introduced recently, but being able to upload .png files as custom stickers would open up near infinite possibilities. I'm sure it's been mentioned elsewhere, so +1 to that. It would be 1000% better than 3D dice or an AI Chatbot. I homebrew basically everything, please help me (: * I'd love fog of war to have an auto reveal feature. At this point it's not much more useful than just the regular drawing tool. "Fog of War" could even be its own color in the drawing tool. * The drawing tool (when you press the spacebar to temporarily switch to the pan tool) will erase the last area you marked, in the exact shape and size of the cursor you're using. It's difficult to explain, but I might make a bug post about it and include a screen cap if no one else has experienced it. * There's no global setting for all maps on the VTT in terms of limiting what players can do. For example, move or delete stickers, draw on the map, etc. If there is, I can't find it so I have to manually apply settings to all maps when I create them. * When switching maps, it doesn't move tokens over automatically. It's a small complaint, but it makes it difficult or impossible to switch between multiple maps with an evolving situation. For example, you have five maps of a building each with a different stage of flames engulfing the area. Having to switch to the map and then add tokens back in to wherever's the closest area you remember everyone being kinda sucks. If you want to sneakily switch the map on your players to throw them for a loop (vines or shadows slowly creeping up on them) then you're simply out of luck. Again, not a big deal but that's a trick I was looking forward to using on my players before trying Maps VTT. (I'm new to VTTs in general, preferring to play in-person with a wet erase map.)
Requests: * By the gods, please fix the entitlement sync thing. The rest of this post you can light on fire, please fix entitlement sync if nothing else. I'm literally begging. * NPC token support * Custom stickers * Layers where you can add stickers, drawings, fog of war, etc. This would be a great alternative to implementing a fog of war auto-reveal feature, because you can just make a layer for each room the players enter and every time they pass through a door remove that layer. This would allow the DM to frontload all that stuff and focus on running the game instead of micromanaging fog of war. * A keyboard shortcut to swap between sizes and draw/erase for the fog of war and drawing tools. Maybe Shift + Mouse Wheel to move up or down a size. Or maybe holding Shift temporarily switches to the opposite function (erase/draw) while being held, sort of like Space for the pan tool. Low priority power user quality of life request.
I want to end by saying that the VTT has a ton of potential and I'm glad to see new features being added. Building a VTT is a massive undertaking and I'm really grateful for the work the devs have put into it so far and the work they're continuing to do. My handful of gripes aside, it balances simplicity with usability very well. If it receives some of that Hasbro money, it could be legendary.
I agree with what you said. I cannot believe that must have features, like adding a grid, import your own assets or stickers, layers or even dynamic lighting are not even scheduled... I have bought A LOT of stuff here in beyond and sometimes I wonder why I didn't get it in Roll 20 instead.
As will no doubt be repeated by the Mods, any feedback for Maps should (and basically must) go through the "Feedback" tab in the Maps VTT, as developers of that tool do not read the forums.
If you can't see the tab, it may be because you only accepted 'Strictly Necessary' cookies.
As will no doubt be repeated by the Mods, any feedback for Maps should (and basically must) go through the "Feedback" tab in the Maps VTT, as developers of that tool do not read the forums.
If you can't see the tab, it may be because you only accepted 'Strictly Necessary' cookies.
Thank you for the reminder. I recently wrote a post telling I cannot reach MAPS feedback and nobody replied. Anyway I think this is the right place to say what we think.
As will no doubt be repeated by the Mods, any feedback for Maps should (and basically must) go through the "Feedback" tab in the Maps VTT, as developers of that tool do not read the forums.
If you can't see the tab, it may be because you only accepted 'Strictly Necessary' cookies.
That's great info for feedback for the Maps VTT. My feedback was based more as a new user for the whole D&D Beyond experience, as Maps doesn't exist in a vacuum. As a new user here, it's difficult to distinguish them as different entities, as they're marketed as part of the same ecosystem.
As will no doubt be repeated by the Mods, any feedback for Maps should (and basically must) go through the "Feedback" tab in the Maps VTT, as developers of that tool do not read the forums.
If you can't see the tab, it may be because you only accepted 'Strictly Necessary' cookies.
Thank you for the reminder. I recently wrote a post telling I cannot reach MAPS feedback and nobody replied. Anyway I think this is the right place to say what we think.
Yep, the feedback button for some reason doesn't exist for some of us, even if we have all cookies enabled, fresh chrome or firefox install etc.
Only way i got my maps feedback forwarded was to post it on reddit where a DND employee sent the feedback to the dev-team.
They devs also wanted my username so they could investigate why people can't see the feedback button, so they're onto it.
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Hi all, I'm new to the community and thought I might share some of my first impressions using D&D Beyond and the Maps VTT. I know that many folks have been here from the start, so there seems to be a ton of tribal knowledge in the community in terms of workarounds and fixes for common issues. I wanted to actually explore some of these issues and share the experience of someone who's new to the site. My goal is to highlight some issues that long-term users might have simply gotten used to and just accepted as normal and fine. I'd also like to pitch a few requests at the end. My goal here is to discuss how the platform and services can be improved.
Entitlements not syncing automatically was probably the most jarring thing that I experienced. Having to find some buried menu somewhere (and stumbling upon multiple broken links from help threads) is unacceptable, IMO. It took hours to troubleshoot why content I shared with other players at my table wasn't showing up for them. There are multiple troubleshooting megathreads, but much of the information is outdated, especially the first few search results. In this day and age, we expect changes to be reflected without user intervention. When I purchase a subscription somewhere, I don't need to go into some menu and click a button to refresh my subscriptions. This should be hotfixed and it's unacceptable that it's been a known issue for so long. In the entitlements page there's actually a message saying to try syncing before contacting support, so it's a well-known, documented problem costing enough money in terms of customer support hours that a message had to be added. Please fix!
That aside, another criticism includes how the VTT is marketed. "Everything You Need in a D&D VTT," "The Official VTT of D&D," etc. But it's still in beta and feels very unpolished. The confidence to performance ratio is misaligned. Also, the feature roadmap has the dev team adding a bunch of stuff that's maybe nice to have in certain situations. They should instead be focusing on fixing or improving current features before adding new stuff which will introduce more bugs. My guess is that this push to add new features that can be advertised is likely from the marketing team. I'm curious how much of the feature list was pushed by the devs. Either way, my expectations were very high when I went through the checkout process, then I was disappointed upon experiencing the product. Maybe some of the marketing resources should be redirected into development? (Just kidding, that would never happen)
Not being able to add NPCs was also a huge let down. Stickers and 3D dice are in the 2025 feature roadmap, but still no sign of NPCs? Yes, you can technically create a homebrew monster as a workaround. But just because there's a workaround in place doesn't mean that it's okay to let it go indefinitely. In my experience, there's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution. Also, when selecting tokens it should automatically filter out content that you don't own instead of listing thousands of different junk tokens.
When building a character, certain content can't be filtered out no matter what I do. For example, I can't seem to figure out how to filter out Antimater Rifle from Weapon Mastery when building a Barbarian. I have new players at my table, so who knows what kinds of out of bounds junk they'll see? So then I have to take extra time to comb through their character sheets each level up to make sure they didn't pick something non-canon.
There's also a rule in the forums against the use of any AI generated content, but the feature roadmap has a "Rules Assistant," which I assume will just be *yet another* generative AI chatbot, like the ones popping up all over the place that no one asked for. This is a minor gripe on my end, but it's an inconsistency nonetheless and I'd also rather see bug being fixed insted of a chatbot. A searchable PDF document of the PHB would be preferable to a chatbot IMO. For context, here's a quote of the site rules: "There are ongoing discussions over the ethics of how AI is trained and how the materials used in that training are sourced. Any content created, in whole or in part, through the use of artificial intelligence is not permitted. This primarily includes text, images, and/or audio produced or edited by AI, and it applies whether the AI was prompted by human input or not." I'm sure we won't be provided a list of training sources for the Rules Assistant, bringing up the question of ethics cited in the rules. Will we be allowed to discuss how to interpret output from the Rules Assistant in the forums due to ethical concerns? Only time will tell... https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/news-announcements/208663-site-rules-guidelines#3-7-ai-content
Feature-specific feedback and some bugs I've found:
* I know that stickers were just introduced recently, but being able to upload .png files as custom stickers would open up near infinite possibilities. I'm sure it's been mentioned elsewhere, so +1 to that. It would be 1000% better than 3D dice or an AI Chatbot. I homebrew basically everything, please help me (:
* I'd love fog of war to have an auto reveal feature. At this point it's not much more useful than just the regular drawing tool. "Fog of War" could even be its own color in the drawing tool.
* The drawing tool (when you press the spacebar to temporarily switch to the pan tool) will erase the last area you marked, in the exact shape and size of the cursor you're using. It's difficult to explain, but I might make a bug post about it and include a screen cap if no one else has experienced it.
* There's no global setting for all maps on the VTT in terms of limiting what players can do. For example, move or delete stickers, draw on the map, etc. If there is, I can't find it so I have to manually apply settings to all maps when I create them.
* When switching maps, it doesn't move tokens over automatically. It's a small complaint, but it makes it difficult or impossible to switch between multiple maps with an evolving situation. For example, you have five maps of a building each with a different stage of flames engulfing the area. Having to switch to the map and then add tokens back in to wherever's the closest area you remember everyone being kinda sucks. If you want to sneakily switch the map on your players to throw them for a loop (vines or shadows slowly creeping up on them) then you're simply out of luck. Again, not a big deal but that's a trick I was looking forward to using on my players before trying Maps VTT. (I'm new to VTTs in general, preferring to play in-person with a wet erase map.)
Requests:
* By the gods, please fix the entitlement sync thing. The rest of this post you can light on fire, please fix entitlement sync if nothing else. I'm literally begging.
* NPC token support
* Custom stickers
* Layers where you can add stickers, drawings, fog of war, etc. This would be a great alternative to implementing a fog of war auto-reveal feature, because you can just make a layer for each room the players enter and every time they pass through a door remove that layer. This would allow the DM to frontload all that stuff and focus on running the game instead of micromanaging fog of war.
* A keyboard shortcut to swap between sizes and draw/erase for the fog of war and drawing tools. Maybe Shift + Mouse Wheel to move up or down a size. Or maybe holding Shift temporarily switches to the opposite function (erase/draw) while being held, sort of like Space for the pan tool. Low priority power user quality of life request.
I want to end by saying that the VTT has a ton of potential and I'm glad to see new features being added. Building a VTT is a massive undertaking and I'm really grateful for the work the devs have put into it so far and the work they're continuing to do. My handful of gripes aside, it balances simplicity with usability very well. If it receives some of that Hasbro money, it could be legendary.
Thanks for taking the time to read my post :)
I have Darkvision, by the way.
I agree with what you said. I cannot believe that must have features, like adding a grid, import your own assets or stickers, layers or even dynamic lighting are not even scheduled...
I have bought A LOT of stuff here in beyond and sometimes I wonder why I didn't get it in Roll 20 instead.
As will no doubt be repeated by the Mods, any feedback for Maps should (and basically must) go through the "Feedback" tab in the Maps VTT, as developers of that tool do not read the forums.
If you can't see the tab, it may be because you only accepted 'Strictly Necessary' cookies.
Thank you for the reminder. I recently wrote a post telling I cannot reach MAPS feedback and nobody replied. Anyway I think this is the right place to say what we think.
That's great info for feedback for the Maps VTT. My feedback was based more as a new user for the whole D&D Beyond experience, as Maps doesn't exist in a vacuum. As a new user here, it's difficult to distinguish them as different entities, as they're marketed as part of the same ecosystem.
I have Darkvision, by the way.
Yep, the feedback button for some reason doesn't exist for some of us, even if we have all cookies enabled, fresh chrome or firefox install etc.
Only way i got my maps feedback forwarded was to post it on reddit where a DND employee sent the feedback to the dev-team.
They devs also wanted my username so they could investigate why people can't see the feedback button, so they're onto it.