Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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This is key.
They acquired it in 2022, and then spent 2 years retrofitting the ability to have 90% of 2024's evolving rules to be applied, and then they could start looking at the existing code and fixing obvious bugs. Rewriting the whole thing now is actually a pretty aggressive update.
Agonizing Blast & other, similar Eldritch Invocations working with non-Eldritch Blast are EXPLICITLY named in the roadmap as top priorities in the site rework.
At this point, this thread should be redirected to the roadmap's page, in particular the relevant section to the above.
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
If the D&D Beyond character creator was a core part of the product, that might have some validity, but it's not. D&D Beyond itself is a secondary product, and it's not clear just how important tools such as the character creator are to D&D Beyond (its primary purpose appears to be digital storefront for E-books).
This is not to say there wasn't incompetence, but it's worth pointing in the correct direction:
I am a 74 year old Fortran and COBOL programmer / analyst. I wrote a program using Fortran back in 1977 and this program, with minor modifications along the way, remained in service for 20 years. I know what "legacy code" is, because I was the hacker who wrote it. I retired from the university back in 2007, as the institution was installing a new comprehensive information system across the entire campus. It is the lot of software professionals to design, and re-design, and re-re-design information systems in accordance with the needs and occasional whims of administrators and end-users. It is frustrating, it is aggravating, it can lead to cardiac problems BUT in the end, when the end-users and the administrators are finally satisfied, that is when I and other hackers lift our tired legs and feet, plop them on our work tables and simply declare "piece of cake".
None of which is relevant to the problem at hand, which is that maintaining legacy code costs money and time, particularly if the people who wrote the software no longer work for you, and Wizards was simply not investing in the D&D Beyond tools because they assumed they had a replacement on the way. The development staff for D&D Beyond appears to be pretty small, which means you prioritize, and fixing a rarely encountered problem in an area of code that is apparently difficult to work with (based on the fact that they have never allowed homebrew invocations) isn't going to get all that high a priority.
I could be wrong here, but i dont think the dndbeyond website is written in fortran, stored on punch cards, and run on a mainframe with less than a megabyte of memory.
More importantly, "legacy code" covers a wide variety of code quality. Some is great, well-documented, chugs along happily for years, and is easy to modify when needed. Others are thrown together quickly, with a lot of hard-coded assumptions, and modifying it leads to a rickety structure of work-arounds on work-arounds, until trying to make changes is like playing drunk jenga during an earthquake.
It is my impression that the original DDB code was much more the latter. One can see it in the limitations.
Yeah, the core problem, I think, is that its original purpose was as a tool for creating a character under the rules of 5e D&D that existed at the time the tool was created in 2017 (or whenever it was) and little or no thought was given to implementing any capacity for new capabilities and new concepts in the rules, even though a lot of those came along pretty quickly. That lack of foresight meant that every time a new concept was added to the rules — things like supernatural gifts, sidekicks, optional class features, bastions — they had to choose between implementing a half-assed janky workaround or just not doing it at all.
It's like we've got a road that keeps developing new potholes, and each one is either ignored or just fixed with a quick patch, so you end up with a mess of patches on patches on patches. The right thing to do is tear up the whole street and repave it from scratch, but that takes more time and money than a quick patch (and a lot more time and money than just ignoring the problem) and has to be approved by the people who control the money, who may still share that original lack of foresight.
pronouns: he/she/they
Correct. Based upon what little I have gleaned over the past year or so, the DnD Beyond website and its supporting software is not written in Fortran; it is probably written in Java or object oriented C (known as C++) or in Microsoft's proprietary object oriented C (known as C sharp or C#), with a relational data base underneath it. I did not intend to set off a jargon heavy cyber geek debate over a discrepancy between what the 2024 PHB states and what the character builder delivers. The object oriented paradigm became the new standard just as I was nearing optimal retirement age and the software tools available to me on the university's Hewlett Packard 3000 were not compatible with the new standard. I wish that this thread was not necessary, I wish that it did not exist, I wish that the underlying problem did not exist BUT it does exist and at the present time, we are stuck with it.
On the subject of supernatural gifts, such as a deity granting a +1 bonus to Armor Class and a +1 bonus to all ability saves, the way to do it is with the Homebrew option. You define the gift as a Wondrous Item that does not require Attunement and then you slowly Add a +1 bonus to Armor Class, a +1 bonus to Charisma saving throws, a +1 bonus to Constitution saving throws, and so on, then you enable the character to have Homebrew items and you equip the character with the item. Yes, it is laborious but it works and it is much easier than doing arithmetic in hexadecimal (base 16).
Oh, I'm well aware of the workarounds that exist for some of these issues. That doesn't change the point, which is that most of these issues only exist at all because of a lack of foresight on the part of the people who originally designed this stuff a decade ago (and who, I'd imagine, probably no longer work there).
pronouns: he/she/they
"The object oriented paradigm became the new standard just as I was nearing optimal retirement age and the software tools available to me on the university's Hewlett Packard 3000 were not compatible with the new standard."
I think we are nearly half a century past OO being a "new paradigm".
"I wish that this thread was not necessary"
Is it necessary?
It was necessary back when it was posted two years ago. It's not really serving much purpose now.
pronouns: he/she/they
Hence my proposal for it & a lot of similar threads to be redirected to the page w/the roadmap.
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
Well .......... back in 2001, I had bought a couple of books that supposedly explained "Object Orientation" but, and this is a huge BUT, none of my existing information systems had been crafted using object orientation so the "new" knowledge was rather useless to me. SURS (State of Illinois University Retirement Service) rules said that if you were at least 55 years of age, with at least 30 years of accrued service, you were eligible to retire with a full pension. In 2007, I satisfied both of those regulations and I retired.
Addendum: I have heard all of the jargon specific buzz words and I try not to repeat them when dealing with non cyber geeky folks because such speech confuses the heck out of them.