According to Google, this gets suggested every year, so this is my contribution this year:
Page numbers on DND Beyond. Often, particularly in online discussions, someone references a rule in the paper rulebooks, even providing a page number where the rule can be found. Even official WoTC answers sometimes carry page numbers.
Only thing is... My physical books are currently sitting 40km away from me, and all I have is DND Beyond. And I'd really like to check out a rules reference by some other means than guesswork.
So maybe, just maybe, we've been good enough THIS year to finally get page numbers on the digital sourcebooks on DNDBeyond for Christmas?
this is never gonna happen though, because beyond do not organise books by their page numbers. each categories have their own things, and what you would seek in a physical book wouldn't be where it is on beyond. basically beyond disassemble the books and reorganise the books to their likings.
this is why we don't have page numbers. this is probably also why we'll never have page numbers.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
DM of two gaming groups. Likes to create stuff. Check out my homebrew --> Monsters --> Magical Items --> Races --> Subclasses If you like --> Upvote, If you wanna comment --> Comment
Play by Post Games --> One Shot Adventure - House of Artwood (DM) (Completed)
Couldn't the staff add the page number and book name to each item/thing in italics/parenthetical and then build a sheet behind the scenes that compiles these so they could be searchable?
I'm certainly not saying this would be a quick or easy task outside of the theory, but suggesting it only as a possible solution.
The main limitation is the fact that D&D doesn't format things into fixed pages like how they are in the books. What would be dozens of pages within a chapter can be a single page on DDB. The locations of the page breaks can appear in the middle of sentences due the fact in the physical books they had to break the text to fit the page, whereas the digital version has no such break.
Additionally, the layout of the site can change based on browser width, window size, even what device you are using. There would be no fixed positioning to apply page references to and some elements such as images and tables can move around based on display. You could have a table on page 123 in the book the might display in the middle of text found on page 124 based on how big you window is.
While it would no doubt be useful, it's not an easy thing to implement in a way that'd be actually useful to the end user.
According to Google, this gets suggested every year, so this is my contribution this year:
Page numbers on DND Beyond. Often, particularly in online discussions, someone references a rule in the paper rulebooks, even providing a page number where the rule can be found. Even official WoTC answers sometimes carry page numbers.
Only thing is... My physical books are currently sitting 40km away from me, and all I have is DND Beyond. And I'd really like to check out a rules reference by some other means than guesswork.
So maybe, just maybe, we've been good enough THIS year to finally get page numbers on the digital sourcebooks on DNDBeyond for Christmas?
this is never gonna happen though, because beyond do not organise books by their page numbers.
each categories have their own things, and what you would seek in a physical book wouldn't be where it is on beyond. basically beyond disassemble the books and reorganise the books to their likings.
this is why we don't have page numbers.
this is probably also why we'll never have page numbers.
DM of two gaming groups.
Likes to create stuff.
Check out my homebrew --> Monsters --> Magical Items --> Races --> Subclasses
If you like --> Upvote, If you wanna comment --> Comment
Play by Post Games
--> One Shot Adventure - House of Artwood (DM) (Completed)
Couldn't the staff add the page number and book name to each item/thing in italics/parenthetical and then build a sheet behind the scenes that compiles these so they could be searchable?
I'm certainly not saying this would be a quick or easy task outside of the theory, but suggesting it only as a possible solution.
The main limitation is the fact that D&D doesn't format things into fixed pages like how they are in the books. What would be dozens of pages within a chapter can be a single page on DDB. The locations of the page breaks can appear in the middle of sentences due the fact in the physical books they had to break the text to fit the page, whereas the digital version has no such break.
Additionally, the layout of the site can change based on browser width, window size, even what device you are using. There would be no fixed positioning to apply page references to and some elements such as images and tables can move around based on display. You could have a table on page 123 in the book the might display in the middle of text found on page 124 based on how big you window is.
While it would no doubt be useful, it's not an easy thing to implement in a way that'd be actually useful to the end user.
Find my D&D Beyond articles here
Good information to consider, thanks!