Today our campaign migrated from paper sheets to using D&D Beyond! It was mostly a great experience, with many hiccoughs totally solvable. Thanks to the Discord for helping answer some key questions.
It would be great if the character builder made it clear when something was not available because of pre-requisites. We lost a lot of time today trying to figure out why someone wasn't able to take the Inspiring Leader feat because their Cha wasn't high enough. Someone on this Discord had to tell us.
I'd like the ability to turn off certain rules in a campaign. In particular, my campaign doesn't play with the Prepared Spells rule - we feel that it's more fun to allow all spells of that level or below to allow for more improvised action. Unfortunately, D&D Beyond's character sheet only lists the spells you have prepared.
My players and I would love being able to hide character sheets from the other players. Some folks have races or abilities that haven't yet been revealed for dramatic effect, and we've had to sub in incorrect classes to avoid giving away the surprise. This creates problems for stats and other mechanics that drive off these hidden characteristics.
If a moderator feels it would be more useful to have these as separate threads for discussion purposes, happy to break it out. Just let me know.
You can check 1 by looking up the feat or by going to manage feats on the character sheet will tell you (the builder just shows available options).
You might be able to use homebrew subclasses to work around 2 (all spells known set to yes), but otherwise DDB wants to stick to the rules because they are a tool for the game that has these rules.
You can make your characters private then only obvious traits like race, gender, level, and class are shown on campaign page, but character sheet can only be viewed by owner and DM. If you want to hide something, homebrew a copy and change the name.
Yep, I could look it up - eventually we did that, but it cost us a lot of time and wasn't obvious. It's a pretty small line of text on the Feat's page as well, but for the most part we just thought it was a bug. This is a usability recommendation to make the experience smoother and more intuitive.
Would I have to manually recreate each spellcasting class?
I thought private just meant private to the world, but still visible within the campaign to all players? All of the forum threads I read on the subject seemed to say that's how it worked. Did it change?
2. Would I have to manually recreate each spellcasting class?
You can't homebrew a class, you can only homebrew subclasses, and you could do it by simply copying the relevant subclass in the homebrew section, and toggling the switch. You would indeed need to do so for every subclass your players use though.
Yep, I could look it up - eventually we did that, but it cost us a lot of time and wasn't obvious. It's a pretty small line of text on the Feat's page as well, but for the most part we just thought it was a bug. This is a usability recommendation to make the experience smoother and more intuitive.
Would I have to manually recreate each spellcasting class?
I thought private just meant private to the world, but still visible within the campaign to all players? All of the forum threads I read on the subject seemed to say that's how it worked. Did it change?
The builder would get pretty cluttered if it showed options you couldn't take for one reason or another (including being the wrong race).
You can make a copy of the used subclass to start with and just change a few options.
The character sheet can't be viewed by anyone except the owner and DM. But the campaign page will still give a general description of PCs in the campaign. The description includes name, level, race, class, and subclass. But you can make homebrew copies of race and subclass and just change the names to hide that from other players.
The builder would get pretty cluttered if it showed options you couldn't take for one reason or another (including being the wrong race).
The way some game systems handle that, like Hero Lab for Pathfinder, is simply having a box with "show unavailable options", this way, if you're looking for something you can't find, you can still tick it, see the thing, and try to figure out why you can't access it.
And actually, this is how DDB handles it too, just not in the build page. On your sheet, if you go to "features & traits" -> "feats" -> "manage feats", it will show you all available feats, and at the bottom, you have access to "unavailable feats", and each of them tells you why they're unavailable. So the general framework seems to already be in place, it just needs a way to incorporate into the builder, and not only on the character sheet.
The builder would get pretty cluttered if it showed options you couldn't take for one reason or another (including being the wrong race).
The way some game systems handle that, like Hero Lab for Pathfinder, is simply having a box with "show unavailable options", this way, if you're looking for something you can't find, you can still tick it, see the thing, and try to figure out why you can't access it.
And actually, this is how DDB handles it too, just not in the build page. On your sheet, if you go to "features & traits" -> "feats" -> "manage feats", it will show you all available feats, and at the bottom, you have access to "unavailable feats", and each of them tells you why they're unavailable. So the general framework seems to already be in place, it just needs a way to incorporate into the builder, and not only on the character sheet.
DDB is actually planning to get rid of the builder eventually amd just have you be able to build and edit the character in the sheet, so that sounds like more of a step back.
1. Sure, more explanations would be nice but the info is available.
2. They really cannot cover every rule change people would make. They cover the published rules.
3. Each player should have their own account so they can set their character sheet to "private". Then tell the busybodies to keep their eyes on their own characters!
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Today our campaign migrated from paper sheets to using D&D Beyond! It was mostly a great experience, with many hiccoughs totally solvable. Thanks to the Discord for helping answer some key questions.
If a moderator feels it would be more useful to have these as separate threads for discussion purposes, happy to break it out. Just let me know.
You can check 1 by looking up the feat or by going to manage feats on the character sheet will tell you (the builder just shows available options).
You might be able to use homebrew subclasses to work around 2 (all spells known set to yes), but otherwise DDB wants to stick to the rules because they are a tool for the game that has these rules.
You can make your characters private then only obvious traits like race, gender, level, and class are shown on campaign page, but character sheet can only be viewed by owner and DM. If you want to hide something, homebrew a copy and change the name.
You can't homebrew a class, you can only homebrew subclasses, and you could do it by simply copying the relevant subclass in the homebrew section, and toggling the switch. You would indeed need to do so for every subclass your players use though.
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The builder would get pretty cluttered if it showed options you couldn't take for one reason or another (including being the wrong race).
You can make a copy of the used subclass to start with and just change a few options.
The character sheet can't be viewed by anyone except the owner and DM. But the campaign page will still give a general description of PCs in the campaign. The description includes name, level, race, class, and subclass. But you can make homebrew copies of race and subclass and just change the names to hide that from other players.
The way some game systems handle that, like Hero Lab for Pathfinder, is simply having a box with "show unavailable options", this way, if you're looking for something you can't find, you can still tick it, see the thing, and try to figure out why you can't access it.
And actually, this is how DDB handles it too, just not in the build page. On your sheet, if you go to "features & traits" -> "feats" -> "manage feats", it will show you all available feats, and at the bottom, you have access to "unavailable feats", and each of them tells you why they're unavailable. So the general framework seems to already be in place, it just needs a way to incorporate into the builder, and not only on the character sheet.
Click to learn to put cool-looking tooltips in your messages!
DDB is actually planning to get rid of the builder eventually amd just have you be able to build and edit the character in the sheet, so that sounds like more of a step back.
1. Sure, more explanations would be nice but the info is available.
2. They really cannot cover every rule change people would make. They cover the published rules.
3. Each player should have their own account so they can set their character sheet to "private". Then tell the busybodies to keep their eyes on their own characters!