Brand new subscriber who just returned to D&D after leaving when 4th edition came out and I am ughing over the forced workarounds for this. Why something simple has not been implemented is beyond me, but it makes me rethink a lot of things. I'm going to have to contemplate which workaround is best for me going into uploading everything I have in Scrivener and Campaign Cartographer.
AS the DM do characters I create as NPCs also have this issue? I guess rule one is nothing about my campaign can be public.
The age of OGL is over. The Time of the ORC has come!
The moment that WotC declares OGL 1.0a "de-authorized", "revoked" or any such nonsense is the moment I release as much content as possible under OGL 1.0a and say, "Sue me WotC". OGL1.0a cannot be revoked. If thousands of us do it, the countersuit will be a class action suit.
Bumping this in order to hopefully bring more attention to it.... I am having this issue severely right now. There is no way to keep players from learning everything about other players in the same campaign if it's in their character sheet.
Please allow us to make player characters private in a campaign.
So the issue here is about what is visible at a glance on the campaign page: Race, class, level. You can make the character sheets themselves private on the first page of the character creation at the very bottom, where it toggles between public and private. Hope that helps.
But if you agree with us that even Race, Class, and level should have an option to keep private, welcome aboard. (Especially relevant if a player wants to pose as a human, but is actually an aasimar or changeling or something, or if a DM makes some NPC character sheets that they want to keep hidden...)
4 years, over 7000 views, and almost 50 responses. I get that this is not an issue for some people, but many do not use forums or have no idea that this function would be helpful for them.
4 years and not a single response from anyone on the team... Why do we even have this forum if no one is looking or reacting?
I have been waiting for this functionality for over a year and I have never spoken up about it because I thought it was 100% obvious it should be at the top of their list to do. THE FACT IT STILL IS NOT DONE IS MIND BOGGLING. DMs NEED THIS SUPER EASY AND BASIC FUNCTIONALITY WITHOUT HOUR LONG WORKAROUNDS. OTHER THAN ALL CAPS HOW ELSE CAN WE MAKE THIS EASIER TO UNDERSTAND?! DO WE ALL NEED TO CANCEL OUR SUBSCRIPTIONS TO MAKE THE POINT?!
To hide the Character information should be a standard :-( no one is interested in the Character screen itself, but you see always the name and the Class , this shows all the secret a character could have.
Please DnD Beyond team, this is a needed enhancement for the Campaigne Creation.
Bumping this again... I'm beginning to think going viral may be the best way to get noticed by the team. We've had a lot of great traffic recently.
Looking at OneDND marketing materials, I was understanding that there's a vision and goal of giving players and DMs one place to go for all your game content today. Why use the DNDBeyond encounter tool if you have to manually build your characters to keep them secret? So we go to other tools and build these workarounds so that when a piece of the story is revealed (like a PC is a changeling or has a warlock patron or a secret royal background) that should result in a memorable table experience for both players and PCs, we can deliver that and we can give our players the agency to participate in how and when this part of the story is told.
At my table, we keep all our rolls tracked in the campaign. To keep an oathbreaker paladin secret until the right point in the story, a placeholder paladin was added to the campaign (another workaround). But this meant that the paladin's roles weren't part of the campaign and couldn't participate in this function of the platform with the rest of the party.
It seems logical to me that we should be able to toggle what is visible from the campaign... player race, class, level, and background. Give DMs and players the agency to tell the story at a pace that plays out organically or we will not be able to use DnDBeyond as a one-stop-shop, we won't be able to rely on these upcoming integrated systems or tools that OneDND is aiming to provide.
I have come to the conclusion that none of the mods watch threads like these. We need to organize and get everyone voting for this issue in the New Features & Requests thread that is 128 pages long. If we ALL vote for the issue there it should surface to the top.
I have come to the conclusion that none of the mods watch threads like these. We need to organize and get everyone voting for this issue in the New Features & Requests thread that is 128 pages long. If we ALL vote for the issue there it should surface to the top.
The Mods do watch, but they're not the ones calling the shots. That's the Staff members. And while the mods have been quite active in these threads, their job is not to implement website functions. Staff does that.
Staff has been quiet though
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Leaving OGL 1.0(a) untouched and making SRD 5.1 CC-BY-4.0 is a great first step. The next is a promise to do the same for future editions. Here's a discussion thread on that.
It's rather frustrating to see all of the hype put out by WOTC for One D&D and how great everything is going to be all lumped together...but when I'm feeling unheard about such a simple fix that really does mean a lot to inter-player privacy within a campaign, I'm not exactly stoked.
Having been a gamer for decades, and starting with D&D red box, I have some thoughts on this topic. I only bring it up as I am new to D&D 5e.
1) It can be fun to hide info from other players, which is the point of this topic.
2) I have only seen it in a few campaigns overall, and most of the time it was just so you can play an evil character. At some point this is likely to cause hard feelings and a party fight. Some players have a nicer intention and are only sandbagging.
3) You might as well just be honest and put what you really know. Tell the other players that their characters do not know, and maybe they know X. It gives everyone a bit more practice for roleplaying, and only acting on CHARACTER knowledge instead of player knowledge.
Can it be implemented as a feature? Sure. But they probably figure on point 3 and don't implement it, and help you to avoid hard feelings from point 2.
Having been a gamer for decades, and starting with D&D red box, I have some thoughts on this topic. I only bring it up as I am new to D&D 5e.
1) It can be fun to hide info from other players, which is the point of this topic.
2) I have only seen it in a few campaigns overall, and most of the time it was just so you can play an evil character. At some point this is likely to cause hard feelings and a party fight. Some players have a nicer intention and are only sandbagging.
3) You might as well just be honest and put what you really know. Tell the other players that their characters do not know, and maybe they know X. It gives everyone a bit more practice for roleplaying, and only acting on CHARACTER knowledge instead of player knowledge.
Can it be implemented as a feature? Sure. But they probably figure on point 3 and don't implement it, and help you to avoid hard feelings from point 2.
I feel like this is strange reasoning when character alignments are one of the few things that are hidden from other players (only the owning player or the DM of the campaign can see the Description and Notes tabs on character sheets).
So it's already possible to hide being evil; I played a character a little while ago who was Neutral Evil and it wasn't revealed to the others until the Paladin used Divine Sense and suddenly realised he was standing next to an "evil" character. It was a lot of fun, because despite being "evil" the character had done nothing to warrant suspicion and wasn't working against the party (in fact their goals were fully aligned with the party, just for different reasons). I was ready for the character to have to defend himself with various clever philosophical arguments but sadly nobody took the bait – I was fully prepared to convince the lawful good paladin that he was more "evil" than my ruthless dragonborn who was also secretly a cursed chromatic dragon. 😂
Wanting to hide the fact that a character is a Changeling, Reborn or whatever pretty much comes with the territory of these races, as it can be a fun thing to reveal and surprise people with later, same as you might reveal secret backstory like having worked for the enemy in the past etc.
Also, keep in mind that D&D was designed to be played on a physical character sheet, where you can literally write anything you want onto it. So if your character looks like an elf you can put "Elf" in the race box for the benefit of prying eyes and change it when it's time for the reveal. What people are asking for here is for something we can already do when we're not using D&D Beyond, but which D&D Beyond doesn't properly support without homebrew or race juggling which is actively making things more difficult.
First off, I did not know that you can make your alignment hidden, so thanks for that.
But what you are asking for about hiding your race is not as simple as you are saying. Races give different abilities. Should those be hidden as well? What happens when someone sees that you are getting the proficiency bonus in a long sword you have equipped when you are a Wizard or have Simple weapons, except for the bonus proficiencies you get for being an Elf? They are fooled by the headband you have on your ears and think you are a Human. And it is even more odd if they can see abilities you have on your character like Dark vision and shapechanger. Race is usually obvious, with very rare exceptions like a Changeling.
The most effective way to make it work is to have a second campaign for your "real" character and have the current fake character show up in the shared campaign. What you are asking for is way beyond the reasonable expectations of what D&D Beyond should be able to do. Sure, you can do whatever you want with a character sheet that you can write on, but that character sheet does not auto-fill and auto-calculate everything for you, and customizing each and every little field for what is essentially "only when viewed by other players" is asking for way too much. And that is why nothing has been done even though this thread has been around for a few years. It is not a question of IF it can be done (it cane), but becomes a question on SHOULD it be done, and the answer is "No, as the only real workaround is the capability for players to separate their personal knowledge from character knowledge". That is a lot of work required for very little point.
But what you are asking for about hiding your race is not as simple as you are saying. Races give different abilities. Should those be hidden as well? What happens when someone sees that you are getting the proficiency bonus in a long sword you have equipped when you are a Wizard or have Simple weapons, except for the bonus proficiencies you get for being an Elf? They are fooled by the headband you have on your ears and think you are a Human. And it is even more odd if they can see abilities you have on your character like Dark vision and shapechanger. Race is usually obvious, with very rare exceptions like a Changeling.
They could do that by letting you hide what the race gives you, i.e- the racial traits section, any spells etc. as only the owning player and DM need to see those; everyone else can wonder how you're proficient with a certain weapon, or are able to speak certain languages, but you don't have to tell them. Same for backgrounds and so-on.
The simplest option though would just be to allow players to hide their characters from everyone except themselves and the DM; while the fact that you are hiding something is still information, nobody knows what you are hiding and why (or even if you're actually hiding something), you can tell people whatever you want, just like the real game.
Still not solved... ugh.
Brand new subscriber who just returned to D&D after leaving when 4th edition came out and I am ughing over the forced workarounds for this. Why something simple has not been implemented is beyond me, but it makes me rethink a lot of things. I'm going to have to contemplate which workaround is best for me going into uploading everything I have in Scrivener and Campaign Cartographer.
AS the DM do characters I create as NPCs also have this issue? I guess rule one is nothing about my campaign can be public.
The age of OGL is over. The Time of the ORC has come!
The moment that WotC declares OGL 1.0a "de-authorized", "revoked" or any such nonsense is the moment I release as much content as possible under OGL 1.0a and say, "Sue me WotC". OGL1.0a cannot be revoked. If thousands of us do it, the countersuit will be a class action suit.
Bumping this in order to hopefully bring more attention to it.... I am having this issue severely right now. There is no way to keep players from learning everything about other players in the same campaign if it's in their character sheet.
Please allow us to make player characters private in a campaign.
So the issue here is about what is visible at a glance on the campaign page: Race, class, level. You can make the character sheets themselves private on the first page of the character creation at the very bottom, where it toggles between public and private. Hope that helps.
But if you agree with us that even Race, Class, and level should have an option to keep private, welcome aboard. (Especially relevant if a player wants to pose as a human, but is actually an aasimar or changeling or something, or if a DM makes some NPC character sheets that they want to keep hidden...)
4 years, over 7000 views, and almost 50 responses. I get that this is not an issue for some people, but many do not use forums or have no idea that this function would be helpful for them.
4 years and not a single response from anyone on the team... Why do we even have this forum if no one is looking or reacting?
I have been waiting for this functionality for over a year and I have never spoken up about it because I thought it was 100% obvious it should be at the top of their list to do. THE FACT IT STILL IS NOT DONE IS MIND BOGGLING. DMs NEED THIS SUPER EASY AND BASIC FUNCTIONALITY WITHOUT HOUR LONG WORKAROUNDS. OTHER THAN ALL CAPS HOW ELSE CAN WE MAKE THIS EASIER TO UNDERSTAND?! DO WE ALL NEED TO CANCEL OUR SUBSCRIPTIONS TO MAKE THE POINT?!
Hi All,
another DM here :-)
To hide the Character information should be a standard :-(
no one is interested in the Character screen itself, but you see always the name and the Class , this shows all the secret a character could have.
Please DnD Beyond team, this is a needed enhancement for the Campaigne Creation.
thanks
Bumping this again... I'm beginning to think going viral may be the best way to get noticed by the team. We've had a lot of great traffic recently.
Looking at OneDND marketing materials, I was understanding that there's a vision and goal of giving players and DMs one place to go for all your game content today. Why use the DNDBeyond encounter tool if you have to manually build your characters to keep them secret? So we go to other tools and build these workarounds so that when a piece of the story is revealed (like a PC is a changeling or has a warlock patron or a secret royal background) that should result in a memorable table experience for both players and PCs, we can deliver that and we can give our players the agency to participate in how and when this part of the story is told.
At my table, we keep all our rolls tracked in the campaign. To keep an oathbreaker paladin secret until the right point in the story, a placeholder paladin was added to the campaign (another workaround). But this meant that the paladin's roles weren't part of the campaign and couldn't participate in this function of the platform with the rest of the party.
It seems logical to me that we should be able to toggle what is visible from the campaign... player race, class, level, and background. Give DMs and players the agency to tell the story at a pace that plays out organically or we will not be able to use DnDBeyond as a one-stop-shop, we won't be able to rely on these upcoming integrated systems or tools that OneDND is aiming to provide.
Very well stated.
Stil nothing 😭😢
Bumping. This seems like it would be an easy fix no? A priceless feature for both Dungeon Masters and players alike!
Pwease?
I have come to the conclusion that none of the mods watch threads like these. We need to organize and get everyone voting for this issue in the New Features & Requests thread that is 128 pages long. If we ALL vote for the issue there it should surface to the top.
The Mods do watch, but they're not the ones calling the shots. That's the Staff members. And while the mods have been quite active in these threads, their job is not to implement website functions. Staff does that.
Staff has been quiet though
Leaving OGL 1.0(a) untouched and making SRD 5.1 CC-BY-4.0 is a great first step. The next is a promise to do the same for future editions. Here's a discussion thread on that.
#OpenDnD
DDB is great, but it could be better. Here are some things I think could improve DDB
Can you link (or relink) the thread for New Features & Requests?
Unrelated: 128 pages is a lot to sift through
It's rather frustrating to see all of the hype put out by WOTC for One D&D and how great everything is going to be all lumped together...but when I'm feeling unheard about such a simple fix that really does mean a lot to inter-player privacy within a campaign, I'm not exactly stoked.
Hi all,
is now not the perfect moment to enhance things? get good news ?
Please make an option to hide the Character details and only to show the Picture and the name ?
thanks
Having been a gamer for decades, and starting with D&D red box, I have some thoughts on this topic. I only bring it up as I am new to D&D 5e.
1) It can be fun to hide info from other players, which is the point of this topic.
2) I have only seen it in a few campaigns overall, and most of the time it was just so you can play an evil character. At some point this is likely to cause hard feelings and a party fight. Some players have a nicer intention and are only sandbagging.
3) You might as well just be honest and put what you really know. Tell the other players that their characters do not know, and maybe they know X. It gives everyone a bit more practice for roleplaying, and only acting on CHARACTER knowledge instead of player knowledge.
Can it be implemented as a feature? Sure. But they probably figure on point 3 and don't implement it, and help you to avoid hard feelings from point 2.
I feel like this is strange reasoning when character alignments are one of the few things that are hidden from other players (only the owning player or the DM of the campaign can see the Description and Notes tabs on character sheets).
So it's already possible to hide being evil; I played a character a little while ago who was Neutral Evil and it wasn't revealed to the others until the Paladin used Divine Sense and suddenly realised he was standing next to an "evil" character. It was a lot of fun, because despite being "evil" the character had done nothing to warrant suspicion and wasn't working against the party (in fact their goals were fully aligned with the party, just for different reasons). I was ready for the character to have to defend himself with various clever philosophical arguments but sadly nobody took the bait – I was fully prepared to convince the lawful good paladin that he was more "evil" than my ruthless dragonborn who was also secretly a cursed chromatic dragon. 😂
Wanting to hide the fact that a character is a Changeling, Reborn or whatever pretty much comes with the territory of these races, as it can be a fun thing to reveal and surprise people with later, same as you might reveal secret backstory like having worked for the enemy in the past etc.
Also, keep in mind that D&D was designed to be played on a physical character sheet, where you can literally write anything you want onto it. So if your character looks like an elf you can put "Elf" in the race box for the benefit of prying eyes and change it when it's time for the reveal. What people are asking for here is for something we can already do when we're not using D&D Beyond, but which D&D Beyond doesn't properly support without homebrew or race juggling which is actively making things more difficult.
Characters: Bullette, Chortle, Dracarys Noir, Edward Merryspell, Habard Ashery, Legion, Peregrine
My Homebrew: Feats | Items | Monsters | Spells | Subclasses | Races
Guides: Creating Sub-Races Using Trait Options
WIP (feedback needed): Blood Mage, Chromatic Sorcerers, Summoner, Trickster Domain, Unlucky, Way of the Daoist (Drunken Master), Weapon Smith
Please don't reply to my posts unless you've read what they actually say.
First off, I did not know that you can make your alignment hidden, so thanks for that.
But what you are asking for about hiding your race is not as simple as you are saying. Races give different abilities. Should those be hidden as well? What happens when someone sees that you are getting the proficiency bonus in a long sword you have equipped when you are a Wizard or have Simple weapons, except for the bonus proficiencies you get for being an Elf? They are fooled by the headband you have on your ears and think you are a Human. And it is even more odd if they can see abilities you have on your character like Dark vision and shapechanger. Race is usually obvious, with very rare exceptions like a Changeling.
The most effective way to make it work is to have a second campaign for your "real" character and have the current fake character show up in the shared campaign. What you are asking for is way beyond the reasonable expectations of what D&D Beyond should be able to do. Sure, you can do whatever you want with a character sheet that you can write on, but that character sheet does not auto-fill and auto-calculate everything for you, and customizing each and every little field for what is essentially "only when viewed by other players" is asking for way too much. And that is why nothing has been done even though this thread has been around for a few years. It is not a question of IF it can be done (it cane), but becomes a question on SHOULD it be done, and the answer is "No, as the only real workaround is the capability for players to separate their personal knowledge from character knowledge". That is a lot of work required for very little point.
They could do that by letting you hide what the race gives you, i.e- the racial traits section, any spells etc. as only the owning player and DM need to see those; everyone else can wonder how you're proficient with a certain weapon, or are able to speak certain languages, but you don't have to tell them. Same for backgrounds and so-on.
The simplest option though would just be to allow players to hide their characters from everyone except themselves and the DM; while the fact that you are hiding something is still information, nobody knows what you are hiding and why (or even if you're actually hiding something), you can tell people whatever you want, just like the real game.
Characters: Bullette, Chortle, Dracarys Noir, Edward Merryspell, Habard Ashery, Legion, Peregrine
My Homebrew: Feats | Items | Monsters | Spells | Subclasses | Races
Guides: Creating Sub-Races Using Trait Options
WIP (feedback needed): Blood Mage, Chromatic Sorcerers, Summoner, Trickster Domain, Unlucky, Way of the Daoist (Drunken Master), Weapon Smith
Please don't reply to my posts unless you've read what they actually say.