DDB has been around just a little more than 1 year. During this time, they have released several homebrew tools (completely free), have been offering direct access to the supplements released by WotC ahead of the physical copy release date (with added bonuses if you preorder), they just released a major overhaul of the Character Sheet, and along the run fixed all kind of issues and unintended weirdness within the site and tools.
For a team of 5 developers, I'd say that's a pretty good list of achievements. As the community and user-base grows, I am sure the dev-team will grow and we will see a definite improvement in the pacing of updates/upgrades.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Born in Italy, moved a bunch, living in Spain, my heart always belonged to Roleplaying Games
I may have missed something, but just last week, when I viewed one of my campaign characters in VIEW mode, I could click the CAMPAIGN button and it would open a window that displayed all of the characters in that campaign. I could then just click that PC and jump to their page.
Now when I click it, it opens the same window, but it only has my campaign description on it. So now I have to go back to the main drop down and select My Content, Campaigns, Select the appropriate campaign (I have 2 right now) and then finally the character I want to view.... VERY not user-friendly.
Sorry if I missed this being discussed earlier in the thread, but I didn't feel like scrolling through 45 pages of commentary. :)
I may have missed something, but just last week, when I viewed one of my campaign characters in VIEW mode, I could click the CAMPAIGN button and it would open a window that displayed all of the characters in that campaign. I could then just click that PC and jump to their page.
Now when I click it, it opens the same window, but it only has my campaign description on it. So now I have to go back to the main drop down and select My Content, Campaigns, Select the appropriate campaign (I have 2 right now) and then finally the character I want to view.... VERY not user-friendly.
Sorry if I missed this being discussed earlier in the thread, but I didn't feel like scrolling through 45 pages of commentary. :)
Sean~
When you're on the character sheet:
Top right hand corner click CAMPAIGN: Poorly Planned Adventuring Party
Sidebar pops out with a List of all players in the campaign (Currently selected one highlighted)
Click on the appropriate character to jump straight to their page
I've been one of the people arguing for campaign manager being for campaigns (with notes, world data, etc.) rather than encounters (initiative tracker, monster stats, etc.). I've changed my mind. D&D Beyond is amazing for all the nuts and bolts of D&D. But I've recently started using World Anvil to track the other stuff and it does a great job at that (and is... not great at the stuff D&DB does). So I say - let each service do what it does best. And D&DB is the best for keeping track of characters and stats.
I wanted both although encounter building is my priority. But I've just rediscovered Devonthink and it's the best tool I've found for campaign management and world building (Mac only and wouldn't necessarily buy it just of this, but had it unused on my Macbook). I certainly wouldn't complain if DDB created some campaign management tools - you don't have to have multiple subscriptions for all these tools - but not nearly as worried about it now.
Whilst I am not allowed to reveal future plans that have been shared with me by staff (because things can change and it's not fair to discuss features that may not happen), the whole area of encounter building is something I find fascinating and the future of it in D&D Beyond is going to be amazing & awesome.
There are already very good tools out there for world building, but as an immediately useful tool I think aiming at adventures would be perfect for D&DB. Encounters are already on the menu so...
Let us manage adventures. That's boxed text, area descriptions, maps, boxed text, NPCs, and encounters.
Tie the monster DB into an encounter builder. Just groups of monsters at first, but it should let us designate an encounter "alias" for individual monsters to handle named NPCs and "counts as" monsters. Let us track them with an encounter name.
Take that and tie it into an automatic initiative tracker that also ties into the character roster (including campaign characters that belong to other players) so that we can add characters to the initiative tracker.
Then let us add flavor text to the encounters we create. Just generic text will be fine at first.
Next, let us define our own adventures. The first pass of this can just be a name, suggested/intended level spread, short description, and then a series of "text sections" with headings. Let us link sections to one another with in-text links like we can link spells and monsters and the like.
Give us the ability to save maps. Not make maps. That's beyond the scope of D&DB, IMO. But give us the ability to link to them, import them, and upload them. Then give us the ability to embed maps into adventure sections, or link to maps from them.
Then let us drop pins onto our maps that are simple clickable links. They can link back to named adventure sections.
Then just spend time cleaning it all up and making it more usable. A PDF export function would be my personal target.
The feature that I want out of this is the ability to basically use D&DB to write my own adventures using licensed and homebrew materials and to, eventually, be able to upload them in PDF format to the DMs' Guild if I so desire.
Then let us drop pins onto our maps that are simple clickable links. They can link back to named adventure sections.
You can actually already gain some of this type of functionality through the Beyond Help Chrome extension.
Then why are you coming to beyond to begin with ? isn't all this campaign management already do able on FG or Roll20 ? Heck even androids have apps to manage campaigns and many of them are quite good at it.
the point we're making is, not for them to know we got apps to do the job... it is for them to realise that we need this on their site, not from 3rd party apps.
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)
Except that Beyond Help isn't another app or site. If you'd looked at it at all, before shooting down a great suggestion, you'd have seen that it's a Chrome extension that offees enhanced features that layer onto this site.not an ideal solution, doesnt help non-Chrome users, but it is a bandaid for some people. Just saying.
Except that Beyond Help isn't another app or site. If you'd looked at it at all, before shooting down a great suggestion, you'd have seen that it's a Chrome extension that offees enhanced features that layer onto this site.not an ideal solution, doesnt help non-Chrome users, but it is a bandaid for some people. Just saying.
Yah, and like how Curse was built from the start, where it made it's name in mods for games, a lot of these mods serve as feature testing that the devs consider implementing if they're popular. Pretty much every UI improvement in World of Warcraft came about due to modders pioneering the way; it's sort-of like an open source development environment.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
Right now I really miss the option to create more Rich Text boxes for both the Public and the Private part of the campaign so dont have to fit everything into the 2 current textboxes.
Right now I really miss the option to create more Rich Text boxes for both the Public and the Private part of the campaign so dont have to fit everything into the 2 current textboxes.
Could really help to structure text.
That cant take much time to code :D
Yes please. I've taken to creating private D&D Beyond conversations with all the players, and just using those as threads for more campaign details. We have one on locations, for example. That's okay, but a bit of a hack, and having addional text boxes as options for the campaign would definitely be an improvement.
Right now I really miss the option to create more Rich Text boxes for both the Public and the Private part of the campaign so dont have to fit everything into the 2 current textboxes.
Could really help to structure text.
That cant take much time to code :D
That would be nice, though I think I probably would take a long time to code. I'm currently using the public part of mine for quite a bit and it's huge -- I've been cutting and pasting into a separate document just in case I run into space limitations. Here's what I currently have in mine:
* Info about when and where the next session will be * Rules for making characters in D&D Beyond for this campaign (i.e. - what model of encumbrance, hit points, XP, homebrow, etc) * A history of what happened in each session. The older ones are collapsed in spoiler tags, the most recent one isn't. * I used to have some other important quest markers in there, but moved it to the campaign description so it'll appear in the new character sheet sidebar. * I messed around a bit with putting maps in there, but it was taking up too much screen real estate.
Ideally we could have an arbitrary number of textboxes, with one for each session highlight. Maybe another for maps and other handouts we give to the players.
Hello, I am a web developer myself. I wanted to suggest a medium effort task that would add huge value in my mind.
Having a collection of campaign notes for private/public. Instead of 2 static rich text editors for a campaign object have the campaign notes be a related object collection. A note could contain:
a title "Session 1" Or "The town of Fey Winter" etc.
rich text editor for the content.
Private Flag (Bool)
Would be nice to have related tags to filter/sort
Flag to highlight a Note may be nice to let players know what they should read
Flag to mark a set of notes as read only so players can't edit it.
Notes could display in an accordion like the Monster section of the site does.
**Adding even more flexibility/complexity would be allowing organizing notes in a folder structure the user can build out. Folders could be marked private or public.
Adding some sort of limit to this would be helpful to prevent years of data building up that you possibly don't want to keep hosting. Giving users the ability to export and import this data in some way would alleviate some backlash of a limit. Such as campaigns that haven't had an update to content in 1 year or decided amount of time is cleansed from the system.
This is a large thread so this may have come up already.
I created a new campaign and wanted to add one of my characters to it as an assisting npc. So I copied the link and went to the page to join. The problem here is I made a copy of my character and made it a level 4 character instead of level 2. It has the same name. I click on the level 4 version of the character and click Join as Character and it adds the level 2 copy instead. So I'm going to assume it's adding characters based on name instead of ID and sorted by creation date (the level 2 was created a month or so ago).
That's my problem, I now have a suggestion.
It would be nice if a dm could migrate or at least copy a player's character into a new campaign. The reason is the previous campaign didn't last and some time has passed and now I'm doing a completely original game with two of those characters from the other campaign. I'd like to just select them and either transfer or copy to the new campaign.
This is a large thread so this may have come up already.
I created a new campaign and wanted to add one of my characters to it as an assisting npc. So I copied the link and went to the page to join. The problem here is I made a copy of my character and made it a level 4 character instead of level 2. It has the same name. I click on the level 4 version of the character and click Join as Character and it adds the level 2 copy instead. So I'm going to assume it's adding characters based on name instead of ID and sorted by creation date (the level 2 was created a month or so ago).
That's my problem, I now have a suggestion.
It would be nice if a dm could migrate or at least copy a player's character into a new campaign. The reason is the previous campaign didn't last and some time has passed and now I'm doing a completely original game with two of those characters from the other campaign. I'd like to just select them and either transfer or copy to the new campaign.
Confirmed my theory, I renamed my level 2 version to have (OG) at the end (original gnome), then tried adding the level 4 character again and it added the correct one.
I've been reading the thread, and I there's so much gold in here.
My personal biggest ask for campaign management is being able to 100% custom campaigns. I want to be able to say, "OK, this is a Sub-Roman Britain real-world campaign, no magic, chain is the most advanced armor, humans only, languages are Latin, Briton, Irish, Pict, and Anglo-Saxon, nobody is literate unless they select a language they know as a proficiency."
Maybe that last bit is too much to ask for house rule integration, but you get my point. I want to run my heavily-house ruled campaign settings while still benefitting from the exceptional toolset offered here. Restrict armors, create languages (and assign them as selectable by races/backgrounds), make certain spells, classes, etc. unavailable.
I haven't scoured over this, I'm sure it's been mentioned somewhere but as a DM it'd be great to have a way to organize the character sheets I make for stuff like NPC's. Maybe a way to even attach those characters to the game I'm running, without the PC's being able to see them and potentially a way to group them together? I know the private notes section would probably be the best way to deal with it, kind of like how you do with pre-generated characters for adventures, but it'd still be nice to have a way to organize it visually.
I've asked about this in another thread, but i'd also like to have the ability to switch to spell points (if there isn't) as well as set other rules, that are already found as options in the DMG. I understand doing house rules can be hard, but stuff like things the DMG openly suggests as variants feels like something that should be in this.
[Sarcasm]
DDB has been around just a little more than 1 year. During this time, they have released several homebrew tools (completely free), have been offering direct access to the supplements released by WotC ahead of the physical copy release date (with added bonuses if you preorder), they just released a major overhaul of the Character Sheet, and along the run fixed all kind of issues and unintended weirdness within the site and tools.
For a team of 5 developers, I'd say that's a pretty good list of achievements. As the community and user-base grows, I am sure the dev-team will grow and we will see a definite improvement in the pacing of updates/upgrades.
Born in Italy, moved a bunch, living in Spain, my heart always belonged to Roleplaying Games
I can't seem to find the downvote button...
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
― Oscar Wilde.
I may have missed something, but just last week, when I viewed one of my campaign characters in VIEW mode, I could click the CAMPAIGN button and it would open a window that displayed all of the characters in that campaign. I could then just click that PC and jump to their page.
Now when I click it, it opens the same window, but it only has my campaign description on it. So now I have to go back to the main drop down and select My Content, Campaigns, Select the appropriate campaign (I have 2 right now) and then finally the character I want to view.... VERY not user-friendly.
Sorry if I missed this being discussed earlier in the thread, but I didn't feel like scrolling through 45 pages of commentary. :)
Sean~
When you're on the character sheet:
It's crazy easy.
I wanted both although encounter building is my priority. But I've just rediscovered Devonthink and it's the best tool I've found for campaign management and world building (Mac only and wouldn't necessarily buy it just of this, but had it unused on my Macbook). I certainly wouldn't complain if DDB created some campaign management tools - you don't have to have multiple subscriptions for all these tools - but not nearly as worried about it now.
There are already very good tools out there for world building, but as an immediately useful tool I think aiming at adventures would be perfect for D&DB. Encounters are already on the menu so...
Let us manage adventures. That's boxed text, area descriptions, maps, boxed text, NPCs, and encounters.
Tie the monster DB into an encounter builder. Just groups of monsters at first, but it should let us designate an encounter "alias" for individual monsters to handle named NPCs and "counts as" monsters. Let us track them with an encounter name.
Take that and tie it into an automatic initiative tracker that also ties into the character roster (including campaign characters that belong to other players) so that we can add characters to the initiative tracker.
Then let us add flavor text to the encounters we create. Just generic text will be fine at first.
Next, let us define our own adventures. The first pass of this can just be a name, suggested/intended level spread, short description, and then a series of "text sections" with headings. Let us link sections to one another with in-text links like we can link spells and monsters and the like.
Give us the ability to save maps. Not make maps. That's beyond the scope of D&DB, IMO. But give us the ability to link to them, import them, and upload them. Then give us the ability to embed maps into adventure sections, or link to maps from them.
Then let us drop pins onto our maps that are simple clickable links. They can link back to named adventure sections.
Then just spend time cleaning it all up and making it more usable. A PDF export function would be my personal target.
The feature that I want out of this is the ability to basically use D&DB to write my own adventures using licensed and homebrew materials and to, eventually, be able to upload them in PDF format to the DMs' Guild if I so desire.
You can actually already gain some of this type of functionality through the Beyond Help Chrome extension.
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
― Oscar Wilde.
Then why are you coming to beyond to begin with ?
isn't all this campaign management already do able on FG or Roll20 ?
Heck even androids have apps to manage campaigns and many of them are quite good at it.
the point we're making is, not for them to know we got apps to do the job... it is for them to realise that we need this on their site, not from 3rd party apps.
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)
So that my intentions can be questioned when I was just trying help. I live for that. It's all I live for.
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
― Oscar Wilde.
Take it to a PM and leave this thread to campaign management discussion.
Thank you.
[ Site Rules & Guidelines ] --- [ Homebrew Rules & Guidelines ]
Send me a message with any questions or concerns
Except that Beyond Help isn't another app or site. If you'd looked at it at all, before shooting down a great suggestion, you'd have seen that it's a Chrome extension that offees enhanced features that layer onto this site.not an ideal solution, doesnt help non-Chrome users, but it is a bandaid for some people. Just saying.
Yah, and like how Curse was built from the start, where it made it's name in mods for games, a lot of these mods serve as feature testing that the devs consider implementing if they're popular. Pretty much every UI improvement in World of Warcraft came about due to modders pioneering the way; it's sort-of like an open source development environment.
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
― Oscar Wilde.
Right now I really miss the option to create more Rich Text boxes for both the Public and the Private part of the campaign so dont have to fit everything into the 2 current textboxes.
Could really help to structure text.
That cant take much time to code :D
Yes please. I've taken to creating private D&D Beyond conversations with all the players, and just using those as threads for more campaign details. We have one on locations, for example. That's okay, but a bit of a hack, and having addional text boxes as options for the campaign would definitely be an improvement.
That would be nice, though I think I probably would take a long time to code. I'm currently using the public part of mine for quite a bit and it's huge -- I've been cutting and pasting into a separate document just in case I run into space limitations. Here's what I currently have in mine:
* Info about when and where the next session will be
* Rules for making characters in D&D Beyond for this campaign (i.e. - what model of encumbrance, hit points, XP, homebrow, etc)
* A history of what happened in each session. The older ones are collapsed in spoiler tags, the most recent one isn't.
* I used to have some other important quest markers in there, but moved it to the campaign description so it'll appear in the new character sheet sidebar.
* I messed around a bit with putting maps in there, but it was taking up too much screen real estate.
Ideally we could have an arbitrary number of textboxes, with one for each session highlight. Maybe another for maps and other handouts we give to the players.
Hello, I am a web developer myself.
I wanted to suggest a medium effort task that would add huge value in my mind.
Having a collection of campaign notes for private/public.
Instead of 2 static rich text editors for a campaign object have the campaign notes be a related object collection.
A note could contain:
Notes could display in an accordion like the Monster section of the site does.
**Adding even more flexibility/complexity would be allowing organizing notes in a folder structure the user can build out. Folders could be marked private or public.
Adding some sort of limit to this would be helpful to prevent years of data building up that you possibly don't want to keep hosting. Giving users the ability to export and import this data in some way would alleviate some backlash of a limit. Such as campaigns that haven't had an update to content in 1 year or decided amount of time is cleansed from the system.
This is a large thread so this may have come up already.
I created a new campaign and wanted to add one of my characters to it as an assisting npc. So I copied the link and went to the page to join. The problem here is I made a copy of my character and made it a level 4 character instead of level 2. It has the same name. I click on the level 4 version of the character and click Join as Character and it adds the level 2 copy instead. So I'm going to assume it's adding characters based on name instead of ID and sorted by creation date (the level 2 was created a month or so ago).
That's my problem, I now have a suggestion.
It would be nice if a dm could migrate or at least copy a player's character into a new campaign. The reason is the previous campaign didn't last and some time has passed and now I'm doing a completely original game with two of those characters from the other campaign. I'd like to just select them and either transfer or copy to the new campaign.
Confirmed my theory, I renamed my level 2 version to have (OG) at the end (original gnome), then tried adding the level 4 character again and it added the correct one.
I've been reading the thread, and I there's so much gold in here.
My personal biggest ask for campaign management is being able to 100% custom campaigns. I want to be able to say, "OK, this is a Sub-Roman Britain real-world campaign, no magic, chain is the most advanced armor, humans only, languages are Latin, Briton, Irish, Pict, and Anglo-Saxon, nobody is literate unless they select a language they know as a proficiency."
Maybe that last bit is too much to ask for house rule integration, but you get my point. I want to run my heavily-house ruled campaign settings while still benefitting from the exceptional toolset offered here. Restrict armors, create languages (and assign them as selectable by races/backgrounds), make certain spells, classes, etc. unavailable.
"The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible."
- Mark Twain
I haven't scoured over this, I'm sure it's been mentioned somewhere but as a DM it'd be great to have a way to organize the character sheets I make for stuff like NPC's. Maybe a way to even attach those characters to the game I'm running, without the PC's being able to see them and potentially a way to group them together? I know the private notes section would probably be the best way to deal with it, kind of like how you do with pre-generated characters for adventures, but it'd still be nice to have a way to organize it visually.
I've asked about this in another thread, but i'd also like to have the ability to switch to spell points (if there isn't) as well as set other rules, that are already found as options in the DMG. I understand doing house rules can be hard, but stuff like things the DMG openly suggests as variants feels like something that should be in this.