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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I'm going to speak plainly here. Players at my tables may only ever have access to the options that every player has access to. That means if one player has a source book but won't lend it to other players, or if the sources cannot be shared through D&D Beyond it is disallowed at my tables.
This is not an uncommon sentiment. No-one player gets to buy their way to cool content that other players don't have access to.
As a result D&D Beyond Drops with their inability to be shared via content management and the Master Tier subscription are banned without discussion at my tables. I know many other DMs who are intending the same.
Either allow these drops to be purchasable separately, or allow them to be shared via a Master Tier subscription. Failing to do either of these makes the drops entirely pointless. I will not recommend every player goes out and subscribes just to get access to these options. That's simply not fair on some of my players. I get that this is a decision by the higher ups to try and 'more effectively monetise' D&D, but it's a step too far. Personally, if this is the forward plan for D&D it'll result in leaving D&D Beyond and encouraging all the players I have (over 50) to do the same. I know in the GM group that I'm a member of the sentiment last night was universal - this is a bad move by D&D Beyond.
Please reconsider!
DM session planning template - My version of maps for 'Lost Mine of Phandelver' - Send your party to The Circus - Other DM Resources - Maps, Tokens, Quests - 'Better' Player Character Injury Tables?
Actor, Writer, Director & Teacher by day - GM/DM in my off hours.
https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/general-discussion/240257-is-d-d-beyond-requiring-subscriptions?page=2
Page 2, post 43.
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.
Oh, I'm aware of this and frankly Parry's words carry zero weight. Any reasonably competent person would have known before this rolled out it would be unpopular. Like so very much else in our modern world it's an example of poor project management to push out an unfinished thought and call it a feature.
DM session planning template - My version of maps for 'Lost Mine of Phandelver' - Send your party to The Circus - Other DM Resources - Maps, Tokens, Quests - 'Better' Player Character Injury Tables?
Actor, Writer, Director & Teacher by day - GM/DM in my off hours.
I believe in transparency, which is not the same as no secrets. Other players should have some sort of access (at least in the beginning) of the campaign to each other's sheets.
I am in your corner basically. If a person has X, it has to be shared with the DM. If it is shared with the DM and not other players, the question is why? Depending on that answer (which is probably not an acceptable reason) I can see banning it.
It's appropriate to forbid content that not everyone has access to. As long as drops are not eligible for content sharing (which it sounds like they might change), and the game doesn't otherwise require having a D&D Beyond account, sure, forbidding Drops is appropriate. Honestly, you might want to ban them even if they are shareable, given the apparent dev process they're likely to be about as well balanced as random classes from Dragon magazine back in the day (which is to say, hilariously unbalanced).
I agree that they should be shareable, and that all players at a table should have access to the same options. However, since it's fairly trivial for a DM to create homebrew copies of these things that all players in their campaign can automatically access, it strikes me as a non-issue in practice, and not worth issuing blanket bans on whole sections of content.
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I think it is reasonable, but I personally disagree. Even if only one player has access to Drops, the entire group would if the DM would be willing to put in 5 minutes of work to make it. It just seems like this is more about making a statement than addressing player fairness. Making statements are all well and good, but I am not going to punish anyone at my table to make them.
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The head of DND Beyond's words carrying zero weight.
The MAN IN CHARGE' OF BEYOND'S words carrying ZERO weight.
Who do you need to hear it from for it to be weighty enough?
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.
It's weird that you're choosing to arbitrarily punish your players when you have the ability to just copy the content as homebrew and share it with them.
By all means encourage WotC to make the Drops content available for purchase. Personally, I'd love to get physical copies. But punishing your players seems misguided.
So instead of saying "I can give my table access to anything they're interested in", you decided "I'm going to gatekeep their access". That is ... arbitrary.
They've already said you can manually share items that people want, through Homebrew, while they discuss how to handle player options.
Can you please stop whining about this? I think this is the third thread you've started on this topic, and it always ends the same way.
People complained that they weren't getting enough for their subscription, so they gave them exclusive items.
It's also meant as an incentive for more people to subscribe to the Master Tier.
Yes, it would be nice if drops were shareable with everyone.
But what's also repeatedly made clear here is that you're unwilling to do even the bare minimum for your players to make it possible for everyone to use.
You cannot share the options through the Master Tier. Were this to allow sharing of the options then yes I'd agree it'd be perfectly reasonable. I have a master tier for the purposes of ensuring that my entire group has access to the options everyone else has access to. The problem is that Master Tier doesn't allow sharing of these new drops. Oh and let me be clear, this post was to provide feedback - i.e. it was bad to not allow them to be sharable by Master Tier Subscriptions. The post over in DMs Only was to gather other DM opinions. Was it just me, was I the odd person out? Frankly DM opinions on the game carry more weight than blind fan opinions which you often get here in the feedback section.
As to those suggesting that I could just create homebrew versions - yes I could, but would I also be expected then to create a homebrew solution for some random 3rd party content a player discovers on DriveThruRPG? A GM's workload is already a high one in D&D - higher than a lot of other TTRPGs. Yes, there's a solution out there but it's an unreasonable one when all WotC needed to do was ensure that this stuff was sharable by a particular subscription level, or allow it to be purchased separately.
And let's add something else here folks. What about the player who comes to the game in a years' time. They're new and shiny, and they find out that because they only started player a year later, another player at the table has got a cool spell that they didn't even know existed.
There's being a fan of the game, then there's supporting anti-consumer practices by companies interested in only money. This is blatantly anti-consumer and isn't okay.
DM session planning template - My version of maps for 'Lost Mine of Phandelver' - Send your party to The Circus - Other DM Resources - Maps, Tokens, Quests - 'Better' Player Character Injury Tables?
Actor, Writer, Director & Teacher by day - GM/DM in my off hours.
DM here, martin. You're not speaking for all of us. I have zero problem with my players using the Drops features. I'm not going to punish them arbitrarily just because they want to use a cool bonus thing that came with their D&D Beyond subscription.
If you don't want to put in the work as a DM just tell your players that, but don't try to make them out to be the bad guys for having D&D Beyond subscriptions.
This 100%
Oh yes, it's much more realistic that WotC will drop one of the main reasons for Drops than that a DM would figure out how to simply circumvent the restriction. Would you have preferred it if they had introduced a third tier that allowed sharing Drops?
Nobody expects a DM to create a homebrew version for everything on D&D Beyond that they don't own, but it's different to forbid players who own something from accessing it just because another player wouldn't normally have access.
Do you know every spell there is? I'm guessing not. Whether you've been playing D&D for 30, 15, 5 (like me), or 1 year, there's always something new to discover. Someone who discovered D&D a year ago won't know many spells, especially from older books, and the only thing preventing that player from learning Drop spells is a DM who forbids them altogether.
Why not? If someone playing in my game brought me a spell they found in a 3rd party pdf and wanted to use, I would spend the literally 2 minutes it would take to add it via homebrew. I'd probably then add the rest of the spells in that pdf in case anyone else wanted to use any of them too.
Yeah it's an odd take, my players bring me 3rd party or homebrew ideas all the time that I as the DM need to code onto this website. Kinda the job of the DM.
As to the whole "No secrets" comment I saw - My current game every PC has 1 secret they are keeping from the party, 1 secret their character doesn't know, and 1 thing that is a lie the world says about them. This has made for some interesting RP moments when either they use the thing that was secret, or the world brushes up against the secret. So I have no issue with PCs keeping secrets from each other, and as for me, the DM, it is my job to engage with my PCs to make sure they are not accidentally keeping a "secret" from me.
Yes, you would be expected. And that's how you should treat these. They are NOT purchased items with months of playtesting. They are not well balanced and integrated features. They're nice bonuses that designers have come up with, or small elements of useful items, or even adding maps from previous editions, at no extra cost to the subscription.
If you wouldn't have a subscription before, these shouldn't (and aren't intended) to be a reason to get a DM Tier subscription now. If you already had one, you're getting some extra bonus stuff at no extra cost.
Players complained that old bonuses from the subscription were only cosmetic and no useful game elements. They added them to give just that little bit for people to enjoy, and the community decided that they were moustache twirling villains.
I'd say this is a false comparison. To homebrew "some random 3rd party content", you'd need to fully dive into the homebrew tools.
For making a homebrew copy of a drop option, you just need to do a few clicks. In fact, let's count those clicks (I'll try and maximize them). From the homescreen:
19 clicks and/or keypresses. I'm not trying to be factious here, just completely transparent as some people bristle at the more hyperbolic "it's just two or three clicks" type summary. That's what it takes to make a homebrew copy. Doing the above and typing out the number of clicks took me less than 2 minutes. Even if we multiply that by all the drop content, that's like 30 minutes tops. And you only have to do it once.
Additionally, this isn't even the only way—the DM can add these options to a players character sheet for them and that takes even less time.
The point I'm making is there's no rational reason to ban this content because it's not being shared by a Master Tier sub. If your argument was "I shouldn't have to just through these steps an arbitrary list of options", you'd have a rational reason. But "You're forcing me to ban my players from using content they have access to because other players don't and I won't help them share it" is not a reasonable position.
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