Hello as those who call in to radio stations would say "Long time view, first time caller." I have been playing DnD for over 10 years (right after 5th edition came out) and have been using DnD beyond and it's services for a very long time. I have always loved this websites core functionality and character sheets. However early on when DnD beyond was first made, there were a few small issues with the service that could very easily chalked up to "this is a small team on a developing service that will change and get better over time." Then a few years back Wizards of the Coast purchased DnDBeyond and with it came a large influx of money and resources. I would like to give feedback on a continuing issue that I have seen developing over the past several years and try to put this feedback in the most constructive way possible. Examples will be numbered below however in general, my issue is as follows. D&D Beyond development has seemingly completely stopped or ignored development on basic website functionality and user experience over the prioritization of "nice-to-have" features that do not meaningfully improve the actual service that D&D Beyond is selling.
Example 1: The Hotbar/menu
As anyone who has used the website for a while will know, below the information banner and logo of the website is the hot bar with several useful menu items. I have one main issue with the hotbar: The "sources" menu. Plainly put, the UI of this menu is awful. It chronologically lists every single item that D&D beyond has ever sold except it doesn't. It only shows around 30. After that you have to leave the whole page to find anything that isn't listed. While there wasn't any issue in the early days of 5e, now that there are literally dozens of books for the game, the menu that just lists things chronologically doesn't actually HELP anyone. The purpose of a menu like this is to be able to easily navigate the website from the home page. If I want to find the campaign setting for the game I'm running, I would have to click "view all sources" then scroll through an unorganized mess of sourcebooks until I found mine. This makes navigating the website objectively frustrating to navigate. An incredibly easy solution to this problem would be to have a few drop-down sub-menu's. In other words, if you hovered over the "Sources" tab, you would get a menu that has "Core Rules" containing the basic rules and the big-3 books for both 5e 2014 and 5e 2024, Adventures, Campaign Settings, Unofficial/ 5e Content (things likeRick & Morty, MCDM, Kobald Press, and other 3rd party content) and maybe something like "Expansions" to indicate things like the various Bestiary's and Magic expansions like Volo's Guide to Monsters, Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, etc.. This is a basic feature that countless websites and online retailers (like dndbeyond) already use.
Example 2: The Subscriptions
To put it simply, the process of upgrading, downgrading, or canceling a subscription is objectively awful. The idea of having to submit a customer support ticket, explaining the change you want to make through a series of emails, then on a case-by-case basis make changes to your subscription is something straight out of the early 2000's of online retailing. Now credit where credit is due, I have never had any incorrect or unfair terms to any cancelation or modification I have ever made to my subscription and the customer support agents that have helped me have been best-in-class. However customer support should NOT have to deal with people simply trying to upgrade or cancel subscriptions. They should have to deal with actual customer support problems. I can look at quite literally every other subscription to every other service I have and modify/cancel my subscription in a matter of seconds. To put is quite frankly, this is a solved problem in 2024. I think the solution is clear. cut valuable time and costs from the Customer Support team, make their life easier, lower overhead, and make the user experience better by fixing this glaring issue.
Example 3: Navigating monsters/magic items.
This is actually my biggest issue with D&D beyond as a whole. I own several digital copies of books through D&D beyond. The whole point of D&D Beyond is to be a tool for DM's and players to use to make playing the game faster and easier. When D&D beyond and 5th Edition were young, it absolutely did that. But now, I find myself dreading looking up anything on the website. God forbid every time I want to make an encounter for my game I have to click through a million monsters that I don't have access to for almost an hour until I find the monsters I want to use for my encounter. The same thing can be said for magic items. Just while doing session prep for my last sessions I spent 30 minutes looking through monsters just to find 1 NPC stat block. The vast majority of that time was spent clicking on a monster only to realize that I didn't have access to it and to get a link to buy the book in the marketplace. So I did what any reasonable person would to and I went into the advanced filters to see if I could refine my search a bit to make it faster and easier to use. I scoured through the advanced filters looking for some what to narrow down the search to focus on only books that I owned. I found 2 such filters; "source category" and "source." I was elated! finally I had a solution to my problem. Except no I didn't. In order to use these filters, you have to somehow know exactly which books you have and select individual books item by item and hope that you didn't mis-click. I have spent hundreds of dollars on digital content through D&D Beyond over the years and I don't think any reasonable person should be expected to know off of the top of their head exactly which books they have and have not purchased. Here is a perfect solution to this problem which will take one freelance web developer a few minutes to solve. Include a check box in the advanced filters labeled "Include only owned content," or something to that effect. That way, I as well as countless other DM's won't have to slog through dozens of "See Marketplace" boxes while just trying to make an encounter.
Example 4: Poor prioritization
So why does this frustrate me so much? After all, all websites have issues they have to work through and develop over time, right? That would be correct if D&D Beyond was ever even close to fixing these issues. These have remained problems for far longer than a service that is owned by Hasbro through Wizards of the Coast should. The kind of resources that the D&D Beyond team has access to compared to when they were just a small independent operation have gone up by orders of magnitude. Want proof? See below
Digital dice (these cost money)
New dice are added seemingly every month? How much development time goes into each set?
Custom character sheet backgrounds (cost money)
Custom character borders (these cost money)
Encounter builder (still in beta after how many years?)
Official VTT Integration
2 iterations of the mobile app (I still mostly use DDB Reader because that's all I need from the app)
D&D Beyond Maps
Addition of 3rd party content (this is great. i love this, but still)
Those are all things that have take time and money to develop and integrate into the website yet basic/core functionality of the tools that are the only reason for D&D Beyonds existence are being ignored.
Conclusion:
I actually have several more examples, however it is very late and I have to work at 4am tomorrow. To be honest, I would have moved to another site entirely years ago had I not already spent hundreds of dollars in the D&D Beyond marketplace. My experience as a DM using this site has actually gotten harder to do than just looking through my book. I have actually had to resort to opening the digital versions of my books to find magic items and monsters rather than use the tools that D&D beyond provides to supposedly get rid of having to do that. In fact I have been exclusively using hardcover books and buying hardcover books to avoid using the site because it is actually easier for me to use than D&D Beyond. Isn't that the whole point of D&D beyond? To NOT have to flip through book after book; page after page? Instead we have developed a bunch of paid cosmetics like some sort of cheap mobile game instead of working on the core functionality of the service. This website and service has great potential. Unfortunately potential isn't a positive thing when this has been a service for several years.
One of your points interested me, as someone who works in a similar field to how DDB operates.
Example 4: Poor prioritization
So why does this frustrate me so much? After all, all websites have issues they have to work through and develop over time, right? That would be correct if D&D Beyond was ever even close to fixing these issues. These have remained problems for far longer than a service that is owned by Hasbro through Wizards of the Coast should. The kind of resources that the D&D Beyond team has access to compared to when they were just a small independent operation have gone up by orders of magnitude. Want proof? See below
Digital dice (these cost money)
New dice are added seemingly every month? How much development time goes into each set?
Basically none, it's all art-work and modelling as the dice engine is a completed system. So no actual site-relevant development would likely go into this.
Custom character sheet backgrounds (cost money)
Again, that's art-working existing assets so zero development time
Custom character borders (these cost money)
That's even less work as it's likely just picking a hex code, assigning it a name, and adding it to the database
Encounter builder (still in beta after how many years?)
Nothing to do with my experience, but they seem to have paused this in favor of Maps which features encounter building using the 2024 rules. I can't say that with any certainty though.
Official VTT Integration
Are you referring to Sigil? Because that's recently been scaled down from 30 people to something like 2. And is it's own distinct thing.
2 iterations of the mobile app (I still mostly use DDB Reader because that's all I need from the app)
That was consolidating the offline reader app into the DM app into a single app, and that's handled by it's own app development team afaik. Again not related to the general site development.
D&D Beyond Maps
This is the only one of the list that I would assume actually draws resources from from the site development pool. Again assuming it isn't it's own team.
Addition of 3rd party content (this is great. i love this, but still)
Content entry is it's own team, again separate from the site development team.
This is all based on information that may be outdated by now, but from past Dev updates and forum posts from staff, we roughly know DDB is divided into the at least following teams:
Site development
Content entry
App development
Art, sound, and modelling
Business
Editorial
Sigil (?)
Only one of your points above would take any resources (AFAIK) from the site dev team
While they might all still be separate teams, money spent on a person on content entry, art,... is money not spent on maybe getting a second dev team, araditional devs in the existing team(s?)
Hi davyd. I appreciate the informative post from someone that works in the field and the detailed information that you gave. I was especially surprised that this post was seemingly brought back to life after almost a year after posting. So I think I would like to do a couple things. First, I want to respond to your post and second I’d like to give an update to the user experience as of today 8 months after my original post.
first as to your points, I think your brought up a good point that the amount of work that it realistically takes to create many of the cosmetic items for players to use on their character sheets like digital dice, backgrounds, and borders. I think that we may disagree on one thing in that regard, however. I think there is a difference between a specific cosmetic taking very little work vs taking no work. While these things are easy and quick to develop. I believe it would be dishonest to say that they take no work at all or that the time and resources are negligible. This is because there is still a conscious choice being made from above to send resources and spend time on quick-n-easy cosmetic items as compared to sending these resources to the teams that would fix glaring issues that have no reason being in a website owned by Wizards/Hasbro. Frankly I believe that the fact that these are different teams is irrelevant when these issues have been around since the very inception of D&D Beyond. Clearly they are being ignored in favor of a generalized focus on player monetization for increased quarry gains.
in terms of Sigil, please understand the state of Sigil as it was 8 months ago in September 2024. No one knew much about Sigil at that time. I also think that saying that the Sigil team was “downsized” is also a bit dishonest. Sigil was clearly also not given the time or resources to become a feature complete software. Frankly the program was dead on arrival and is 100% abandonware now. The team was laid off because the software flopped.
as for the encounter builder. I haven’t looked at their maps much, but they still advertise their encounter builder on the front page of the website. It’s still in beta 8 months later. The fact that their are two unfinished projects that serve the same purpose doesn’t exactly shine a positive light on their development practices.
now for the update. It has been 8 months since my previous post. there has been no change to the filter options. I quite literally did a test the other day. I opened D&D beyond’s monster listings and clicked on every single monster on the first page, keeping track of how many of them I had access to vs. how many were just linked to the marketplace to purchase the book it’s from. I stopped keeping count after I reached 5 monsters that I had access to and 22 that I did not. With every book that gets released, this problem gets worse and worse. I mean this in the most genuine way possible. It is objectively faster and easier for me to grab my physical books, look in the glossary, and find the monster in my book than to use D&D beyond when session prepping.
I still have to contact D&D beyond support and submit a ticket to cancel or upgrade my subscription.
the hotbar/menu is still just as bad if not worse in terms of finding your purchased books. I’m running the Frozen Sick free starter module for a group of mine. In order to access this module I have to…
1. Click the “sources” tab.
2. Click “view all” under the adventures section.
3. I don’t think that the adventure is actually listed. I’ve looked twice. so then I have to search “frozen sick” in the search bar.
4. Click on the adventure when I comes up after searching.
eventually I just got tired of doing the same song and dance every time I wanted to open my digital content and bookmarked the damn thing.
I can say this confidently. The user experience as a dungeon master on D&D beyond is bad. I don’t like it and I’ve already made the decision to just repurchase all of my content on roll20 digitally and leave D&D Beyond behind entirely after my current campaign is over.
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Hello as those who call in to radio stations would say "Long time view, first time caller." I have been playing DnD for over 10 years (right after 5th edition came out) and have been using DnD beyond and it's services for a very long time. I have always loved this websites core functionality and character sheets. However early on when DnD beyond was first made, there were a few small issues with the service that could very easily chalked up to "this is a small team on a developing service that will change and get better over time." Then a few years back Wizards of the Coast purchased DnDBeyond and with it came a large influx of money and resources. I would like to give feedback on a continuing issue that I have seen developing over the past several years and try to put this feedback in the most constructive way possible. Examples will be numbered below however in general, my issue is as follows. D&D Beyond development has seemingly completely stopped or ignored development on basic website functionality and user experience over the prioritization of "nice-to-have" features that do not meaningfully improve the actual service that D&D Beyond is selling.
Example 1: The Hotbar/menu
As anyone who has used the website for a while will know, below the information banner and logo of the website is the hot bar with several useful menu items. I have one main issue with the hotbar: The "sources" menu. Plainly put, the UI of this menu is awful. It chronologically lists every single item that D&D beyond has ever sold except it doesn't. It only shows around 30. After that you have to leave the whole page to find anything that isn't listed. While there wasn't any issue in the early days of 5e, now that there are literally dozens of books for the game, the menu that just lists things chronologically doesn't actually HELP anyone. The purpose of a menu like this is to be able to easily navigate the website from the home page. If I want to find the campaign setting for the game I'm running, I would have to click "view all sources" then scroll through an unorganized mess of sourcebooks until I found mine. This makes navigating the website objectively frustrating to navigate. An incredibly easy solution to this problem would be to have a few drop-down sub-menu's. In other words, if you hovered over the "Sources" tab, you would get a menu that has "Core Rules" containing the basic rules and the big-3 books for both 5e 2014 and 5e 2024, Adventures, Campaign Settings, Unofficial/ 5e Content (things likeRick & Morty, MCDM, Kobald Press, and other 3rd party content) and maybe something like "Expansions" to indicate things like the various Bestiary's and Magic expansions like Volo's Guide to Monsters, Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, etc.. This is a basic feature that countless websites and online retailers (like dndbeyond) already use.
Example 2: The Subscriptions
To put it simply, the process of upgrading, downgrading, or canceling a subscription is objectively awful. The idea of having to submit a customer support ticket, explaining the change you want to make through a series of emails, then on a case-by-case basis make changes to your subscription is something straight out of the early 2000's of online retailing. Now credit where credit is due, I have never had any incorrect or unfair terms to any cancelation or modification I have ever made to my subscription and the customer support agents that have helped me have been best-in-class. However customer support should NOT have to deal with people simply trying to upgrade or cancel subscriptions. They should have to deal with actual customer support problems. I can look at quite literally every other subscription to every other service I have and modify/cancel my subscription in a matter of seconds. To put is quite frankly, this is a solved problem in 2024. I think the solution is clear. cut valuable time and costs from the Customer Support team, make their life easier, lower overhead, and make the user experience better by fixing this glaring issue.
Example 3: Navigating monsters/magic items.
This is actually my biggest issue with D&D beyond as a whole. I own several digital copies of books through D&D beyond. The whole point of D&D Beyond is to be a tool for DM's and players to use to make playing the game faster and easier. When D&D beyond and 5th Edition were young, it absolutely did that. But now, I find myself dreading looking up anything on the website. God forbid every time I want to make an encounter for my game I have to click through a million monsters that I don't have access to for almost an hour until I find the monsters I want to use for my encounter. The same thing can be said for magic items. Just while doing session prep for my last sessions I spent 30 minutes looking through monsters just to find 1 NPC stat block. The vast majority of that time was spent clicking on a monster only to realize that I didn't have access to it and to get a link to buy the book in the marketplace. So I did what any reasonable person would to and I went into the advanced filters to see if I could refine my search a bit to make it faster and easier to use. I scoured through the advanced filters looking for some what to narrow down the search to focus on only books that I owned. I found 2 such filters; "source category" and "source." I was elated! finally I had a solution to my problem. Except no I didn't. In order to use these filters, you have to somehow know exactly which books you have and select individual books item by item and hope that you didn't mis-click. I have spent hundreds of dollars on digital content through D&D Beyond over the years and I don't think any reasonable person should be expected to know off of the top of their head exactly which books they have and have not purchased. Here is a perfect solution to this problem which will take one freelance web developer a few minutes to solve. Include a check box in the advanced filters labeled "Include only owned content," or something to that effect. That way, I as well as countless other DM's won't have to slog through dozens of "See Marketplace" boxes while just trying to make an encounter.
Example 4: Poor prioritization
So why does this frustrate me so much? After all, all websites have issues they have to work through and develop over time, right? That would be correct if D&D Beyond was ever even close to fixing these issues. These have remained problems for far longer than a service that is owned by Hasbro through Wizards of the Coast should. The kind of resources that the D&D Beyond team has access to compared to when they were just a small independent operation have gone up by orders of magnitude. Want proof? See below
Those are all things that have take time and money to develop and integrate into the website yet basic/core functionality of the tools that are the only reason for D&D Beyonds existence are being ignored.
Conclusion:
I actually have several more examples, however it is very late and I have to work at 4am tomorrow. To be honest, I would have moved to another site entirely years ago had I not already spent hundreds of dollars in the D&D Beyond marketplace. My experience as a DM using this site has actually gotten harder to do than just looking through my book. I have actually had to resort to opening the digital versions of my books to find magic items and monsters rather than use the tools that D&D beyond provides to supposedly get rid of having to do that. In fact I have been exclusively using hardcover books and buying hardcover books to avoid using the site because it is actually easier for me to use than D&D Beyond. Isn't that the whole point of D&D beyond? To NOT have to flip through book after book; page after page? Instead we have developed a bunch of paid cosmetics like some sort of cheap mobile game instead of working on the core functionality of the service. This website and service has great potential. Unfortunately potential isn't a positive thing when this has been a service for several years.
They really need to prioritize Example #1 because it keeps getting worse especially as they've introduced 3rd party products.
One of your points interested me, as someone who works in a similar field to how DDB operates.
Basically none, it's all art-work and modelling as the dice engine is a completed system. So no actual site-relevant development would likely go into this.
Again, that's art-working existing assets so zero development time
That's even less work as it's likely just picking a hex code, assigning it a name, and adding it to the database
Nothing to do with my experience, but they seem to have paused this in favor of Maps which features encounter building using the 2024 rules. I can't say that with any certainty though.
Are you referring to Sigil? Because that's recently been scaled down from 30 people to something like 2. And is it's own distinct thing.
That was consolidating the offline reader app into the DM app into a single app, and that's handled by it's own app development team afaik. Again not related to the general site development.
This is the only one of the list that I would assume actually draws resources from from the site development pool. Again assuming it isn't it's own team.
Content entry is it's own team, again separate from the site development team.
This is all based on information that may be outdated by now, but from past Dev updates and forum posts from staff, we roughly know DDB is divided into the at least following teams:
Only one of your points above would take any resources (AFAIK) from the site dev team
Find my D&D Beyond articles here
While they might all still be separate teams, money spent on a person on content entry, art,... is money not spent on maybe getting a second dev team, araditional devs in the existing team(s?)
Hi davyd. I appreciate the informative post from someone that works in the field and the detailed information that you gave. I was especially surprised that this post was seemingly brought back to life after almost a year after posting. So I think I would like to do a couple things. First, I want to respond to your post and second I’d like to give an update to the user experience as of today 8 months after my original post.
first as to your points, I think your brought up a good point that the amount of work that it realistically takes to create many of the cosmetic items for players to use on their character sheets like digital dice, backgrounds, and borders. I think that we may disagree on one thing in that regard, however. I think there is a difference between a specific cosmetic taking very little work vs taking no work. While these things are easy and quick to develop. I believe it would be dishonest to say that they take no work at all or that the time and resources are negligible. This is because there is still a conscious choice being made from above to send resources and spend time on quick-n-easy cosmetic items as compared to sending these resources to the teams that would fix glaring issues that have no reason being in a website owned by Wizards/Hasbro. Frankly I believe that the fact that these are different teams is irrelevant when these issues have been around since the very inception of D&D Beyond. Clearly they are being ignored in favor of a generalized focus on player monetization for increased quarry gains.
in terms of Sigil, please understand the state of Sigil as it was 8 months ago in September 2024. No one knew much about Sigil at that time. I also think that saying that the Sigil team was “downsized” is also a bit dishonest. Sigil was clearly also not given the time or resources to become a feature complete software. Frankly the program was dead on arrival and is 100% abandonware now. The team was laid off because the software flopped.
as for the encounter builder. I haven’t looked at their maps much, but they still advertise their encounter builder on the front page of the website. It’s still in beta 8 months later. The fact that their are two unfinished projects that serve the same purpose doesn’t exactly shine a positive light on their development practices.
now for the update. It has been 8 months since my previous post.
there has been no change to the filter options. I quite literally did a test the other day. I opened D&D beyond’s monster listings and clicked on every single monster on the first page, keeping track of how many of them I had access to vs. how many were just linked to the marketplace to purchase the book it’s from. I stopped keeping count after I reached 5 monsters that I had access to and 22 that I did not. With every book that gets released, this problem gets worse and worse. I mean this in the most genuine way possible. It is objectively faster and easier for me to grab my physical books, look in the glossary, and find the monster in my book than to use D&D beyond when session prepping.
I still have to contact D&D beyond support and submit a ticket to cancel or upgrade my subscription.
the hotbar/menu is still just as bad if not worse in terms of finding your purchased books. I’m running the Frozen Sick free starter module for a group of mine. In order to access this module I have to…
1. Click the “sources” tab.
2. Click “view all” under the adventures section.
3. I don’t think that the adventure is actually listed. I’ve looked twice. so then I have to search “frozen sick” in the search bar.
4. Click on the adventure when I comes up after searching.
eventually I just got tired of doing the same song and dance every time I wanted to open my digital content and bookmarked the damn thing.
I can say this confidently. The user experience as a dungeon master on D&D beyond is bad. I don’t like it and I’ve already made the decision to just repurchase all of my content on roll20 digitally and leave D&D Beyond behind entirely after my current campaign is over.