I would just like to say, first of, is thank you to Adam (BadEye) and the rest of the DDB team. I have been here since beta and this project is just getting better and better.
As for the OP, it seem like this is a thing of "your not moving fast enough on what I want". If Wizards stops coming out with new content that has new rules, I'm sure this wouldn't be an issue. But for, what it seems, every other book having big rule changes, one can't simply go in and add it with out thought as to how that will effect future new rules.Or effect new features.
I also agree that I don't want DDB to be Roll20. I want them to do a VTT because I know they can do it, at least for 5e, much better than Roll20 is doing it. Where as FG might be worried about this, Roll20 should be down right scared.
I might be an odd ball, but I would rather see them finish the combat/encounter tracker, the dice roller, etc. than revamp the home-brew system. The home-brew system won't help me run my game. The aforementioned stuff will. More so now than before.
I only mentioned the homebrew systems because in my mind, 'The Homebrew Overhaul' and the necessary repairs to their character sheet builder for official content are basically the same thing. If they do one, the other is basically also already done by default. 'The Homebrew Overhaul' isn't really much more than putting a slicker U.I. and some permissions restrictions on the same tools DDB uses to implement official content.
Nevertheless, it's excellent to see that these foundational requirements are indeed being addressed.
Thank you, BadEye. I'm honestly surprised to get such a weighty and informative response from someone so highly placed in this organization. I very much appreciate the information you shared with us and will be sharing it in turn with everyone I play with.
I retract my statements concerning VTTs and the like. I personally place very little value on such things, it's true, and in this case I allowed my frustration to speak for me as I am unfortunately prone to do. I understand that no single voice can be permitted to unduly dictate the course of future development, I'm simply very glad mine was heard amidst the constant din. I can say that you've reassured my concerns on this front and I look forward to the results of your team's efforts.
:)
Yeah, VTT functionality is a major request - because it's essentially a core aspect of the game, at least for games that use battle-maps and aren't theater-of-the-mind. Even outside those, you need at least a way to share all dice rolls within a campaign, for instance. Right now, it's hard (if not impossible) to play a campaign just using DDB and nothing else - I suppose some text-only games on the forums manage to do it using the embedded dice roller in the forums, but for anyone who uses battle maps, or otherwise doesn't want to play text-based games on the forums, there's no way to play without using Avrae in Discord, or Roll20, or another VTT. Many people have actually complained that DDB doesn't have a VTT already despite all the years of development (as you point out, they didn't necessarily plan for this when they first started out).
People want to be able to play with their content on the same platform they own it on (instead of annoying copy-pasting or resorting to third-party extensions like Beyond20), which is why VTT functionality is so highly requested (I actually had a call with DDB's product manager a while back to provide feedback, where I basically emphasized that as one of the top things they should focus on in the long term - this was before the release of GGTR, I think?). The encounter builder, combat tracker, etc. as well as the dice-rolling functionality are all things that are necessary to eventually reach that goal, not to mention useful tools in their own right. I am hopeful and confident that DDB will address the issues brought up in this thread, and also continue to aim for that goal in the future.
I wanted to add one more thing. As proven by Badeye, I know that DNDB does take feedback seriously and I have been in other feedback threads where things were addressed quickly as well. I also wanted to say that I've been a top tier paid member for closing on 2 years now and had a stretch of about 7 months when I wasn't playing but still paid the fees because I wanted to support the site. (I think I may have missed a month when I changed banks but anyways) I only did that because I do believe the team here listens and they are always working on something to improve the site. Now, whether or not it's what I'd like to see improved upon at the time isn't always the case (although it has been at other times) Overall though I wouldn't have kept supporting DNDB if I didn't believe in what they're trying to do.
The system we've ended up falling into in our own games is a simple non-Avrae Discord dice bot (RPBot works well if all you need is something to generate numbers for you, without all the janky gets-in-the-way weirdness of Avrae) and a channel for rolling those dice in. Used to do Google Docs with a shared PDF for battle maps; I use Roll20 for climactic fights now, but oh my God their map tool is an unmitigated migraine if you don't pay for their special curated stuff. For the most part though we've switched to theater of the mind combat for anything that isn't a Big Deal Battle. I forget at times that this approach is Heckin' Weird in a day and age where livestreams with elaborate prop work and everyone being Powered By DwarvenForge is the norm.
But like BadEye said himself, VTT functionality is the thing a dozen other companies/tools already have covered. DDB is the thing I buy the books and such on because DDB is where I can actually use the books, look stuff up and easily find the information I need. Their character editor actually works (if not without kinks mentioned in my first post), and they handle everything I can't readily do with basic Discord bots or an MS Paint hack job in R20. If they can introduce a VTT that isn't an absolute godawful nightmare to try and navigate, I'll check it out, but boy that's a crowded market.
Fortunately they've got our backs on the character sheet rebuild too, so we've all got plenty of time to see how their VTT falls out.
Thank you very much for the direct and comprehensive information. Since we have your attention, I have to ask: Since the rollout of the combat tracker, more and more I read requests in the forums that NPCs generated using the PC generator be includable as “enemies,” and that “monsters” like companions and familiars and steel defenders de includable as “friendlies.” Are there any plans for this?
I'll give my two cents here. But I want to recognize that it's just that-- we all tend to feel our experiences are more general than maybe they are and that's why DDB needs to rely on broader datasets to manage their priorities. Feedback on forums is great, but there's no way it's an unbiased subset of their user base. I'm the only one of the 10 to 12 people I game with regularly who ever visits the forums on DDB. But every last one of my players uses the site.
So-- here's my experience: DDB very quickly won over my gaming group, especially after the release of the new character sheets. The conversion was nearly instant-- in one session a group of friends who have VERY different technical competency were using it exclusively and exclaiming how great it was. I even had a player immediately offer to contribute to my subscription and book costs (and, trust me, this is not something that has EVER happened before).
Here's why: Having immediate access to rules and calculations straight from the character sheet was a revelation for many of my players. Some of these folks never read the rules carefully. They enjoy playing and not rules mastery. So having it all laid out for them was game changing. I was no longer having to know everything about everyone's characters. No one was stopping mid game to look things up. Everyone was just playing. And for myself (and the other occasional DMs in the group) the rules lookup was a lifesaver.
So, basically what happened next was pretty much all of us were accessing our D&D through DDB. And do you know what one of the first questions I got asked was?
"Hey, how come I can't roll my dice right off this sheet? That would be awesome."
The second question was (a few sessions later in my online game)-- "Do we keep having to go to Roll20? I'd rather use the DDB sheet and we mostly don't use the maps there anyway. Just a battlemap on DDB would be great . . ."
Listen, I get the frustration with the sheets not handling all the rules perfectly. But I'll be honest, while I want them to work, the issues are an incredibly minor annoyance. I don't think anyone other than me has even ever noticed the relatively edge cases where it's not all working perfectly. If you asked my players whether they want a dice roller or certain features to work more seamlessly on the character sheet, I guarantee you the answer is a dice roller. That's even more so for homebrew versus dice roller. I'm the only one that homebrews. And the same goes for having a virtual space. The character sheet and rules interface are already working just fine for better than 99% of our usage.
In this light, I also think some of you might be missing something about how 'crowded' the virtual tabletop space is. I have used both Fantasy Grounds and Roll20. I like them both. But for any of the rules interface features (like Roll20 character sheets) they are way beyond what anyone in my group will bother to learn. I used to keep everyone's character sheets up to date in Roll20 because they simply wouldn't spend the time to figure it out. Many of us here are very tech savvy, so it's easy to forget that minor barriers for us are major barriers for others.
When DDB offers a virtual play space, they are going to have the excellent usability of their existing tools to go with it. What my group wants is to have all of their digital D&D world in one place. DDB has cleverly (the sly bastards) hooked my whole group. They are happy with DDB as is. Now they want to be able to handle the rest of the game right on that site. They'll move over in a second. And you know something else-- I suspect there are plenty of DDB users that don't use Roll20 or FG or the others, but once functionality appears on DDB they'll start using it.
Overall, I think the DDB strategy of building out solid underlying tools that are very easy to use has been solid. It brings people onto their platform. And they are there waiting for additional functionality as it appears. I mean, I didn't think I needed an encounter builder. Until I had one. Now I use it all the time. Once the combat tracker is built out more, I can see it will be the same for that. Once I have some sort of easy 'dashboard' (probably through the tracker or some such ) to look at the players in my campaign from one screen, I'll use that. And once there are digital maps . . . You get the idea.
They don't need to compete with other VT's. They just need to provide useful functionality for their existing (and large) user base. The rest will happen naturally.
And now I will go back to doing taxes before my wife notices I'm writing long messages on rpg messageboards instead . . .
Thank you very much for the direct and comprehensive information. Since we have your attention, I have to ask: Since the rollout of the combat tracker, more and more I read requests in the forums that NPCs generated using the PC generator be includable as “enemies,” and that “monsters” like companions and familiars and steel defenders de includable as “friendlies.” Are there any plans for this?
Hello! It's tough for me to keep up with every response (our team of moderators do an outstanding job of keeping me in the loop on important threads, and let's be honest, an outstanding job in general), but you did catch me while you had my attention. :)
Including other non-monster types of "opposition" in the combat tracker is definitely planned, even for things like traps that might need to have an initiative order. No ETA yet, but confirming it is on our list.
So does that mean that people with the alpha sheet will have background and mark spells working correctly?
Not sure what you mean by this. The player app (that includes character sheet functionality) that's entering alpha testing is basically just recreating the character sheet functionality on the site in a way that works online. Once DDB has implemented those things in the site, they'll presumably come to the app too. Adam's simply saying that working on the app isn't delaying other projects, because they're being worked on by different teams.
I'll give my two cents here. But I want to recognize that it's just that-- we all tend to feel our experiences are more general than maybe they are and that's why DDB needs to rely on broader datasets to manage their priorities. Feedback on forums is great, but there's no way it's an unbiased subset of their user base. I'm the only one of the 10 to 12 people I game with regularly who ever visits the forums on DDB. But every last one of my players uses the site.
So-- here's my experience: DDB very quickly won over my gaming group, especially after the release of the new character sheets. The conversion was nearly instant-- in one session a group of friends who have VERY different technical competency were using it exclusively and exclaiming how great it was. I even had a player immediately offer to contribute to my subscription and book costs (and, trust me, this is not something that has EVER happened before).
Here's why: Having immediate access to rules and calculations straight from the character sheet was a revelation for many of my players. Some of these folks never read the rules carefully. They enjoy playing and not rules mastery. So having it all laid out for them was game changing. I was no longer having to know everything about everyone's characters. No one was stopping mid game to look things up. Everyone was just playing. And for myself (and the other occasional DMs in the group) the rules lookup was a lifesaver.
So, basically what happened next was pretty much all of us were accessing our D&D through DDB. And do you know what one of the first questions I got asked was?
"Hey, how come I can't roll my dice right off this sheet? That would be awesome."
The second question was (a few sessions later in my online game)-- "Do we keep having to go to Roll20? I'd rather use the DDB sheet and we mostly don't use the maps there anyway. Just a battlemap on DDB would be great . . ."
Listen, I get the frustration with the sheets not handling all the rules perfectly. But I'll be honest, while I want them to work, the issues are an incredibly minor annoyance. I don't think anyone other than me has even ever noticed the relatively edge cases where it's not all working perfectly. If you asked my players whether they want a dice roller or certain features to work more seamlessly on the character sheet, I guarantee you the answer is a dice roller. That's even more so for homebrew versus dice roller. I'm the only one that homebrews. And the same goes for having a virtual space. The character sheet and rules interface are already working just fine for better than 99% of our usage.
In this light, I also think some of you might be missing something about how 'crowded' the virtual tabletop space is. I have used both Fantasy Grounds and Roll20. I like them both. But for any of the rules interface features (like Roll20 character sheets) they are way beyond what anyone in my group will bother to learn. I used to keep everyone's character sheets up to date in Roll20 because they simply wouldn't spend the time to figure it out. Many of us here are very tech savvy, so it's easy to forget that minor barriers for us are major barriers for others.
When DDB offers a virtual play space, they are going to have the excellent usability of their existing tools to go with it. What my group wants is to have all of their digital D&D world in one place. DDB has cleverly (the sly bastards) hooked my whole group. They are happy with DDB as is. Now they want to be able to handle the rest of the game right on that site. They'll move over in a second. And you know something else-- I suspect there are plenty of DDB users that don't use Roll20 or FG or the others, but once functionality appears on DDB they'll start using it.
Overall, I think the DDB strategy of building out solid underlying tools that are very easy to use has been solid. It brings people onto their platform. And they are there waiting for additional functionality as it appears. I mean, I didn't think I needed an encounter builder. Until I had one. Now I use it all the time. Once the combat tracker is built out more, I can see it will be the same for that. Once I have some sort of easy 'dashboard' (probably through the tracker or some such ) to look at the players in my campaign from one screen, I'll use that. And once there are digital maps . . . You get the idea.
They don't need to compete with other VT's. They just need to provide useful functionality for their existing (and large) user base. The rest will happen naturally.
And now I will go back to doing taxes before my wife notices I'm writing long messages on rpg messageboards instead . . .
AD
Playing very intently with that phrase "death and taxes". ;)
When we started with DDB, Wizards of the Coast actually had many concerns about homebrew content on the platform, thinking that having customization options like that could confuse the (literally) millions of new players coming into the game with content that wasn't sensible, balanced, or appropriate.
I'm looking at you, D&D Wiki! Bad D&D Wiki! Bad!
In many ways, we thought the game was stabilizing, that we weren't going to be seeing too many new types of rules from WotC.
I thought y'all were big D&D fans? What, over the course of all of TSR's and WotC's history, would have led you to believe that they wouldn't have done exactly as they have done, since the beginnings of D&D, across every edition? Seriously, that's a really weird take to think that they weren't going to release new types of rules. If anything, the time when you're saying DDB thought they wouldn't be releasing new rules was exactly the time when it was expected of them, given over four decades of precedence...
In fact, the primary reason that we haven't been able to release as much as quickly over the last year is because of this work. I haven't talked about it much, because most fans out there don't find the "backend" behind the scenes work exciting. I see here in this thread we could have talked about it more openly to likely prevent some misconceptions and frustration for part of the community, and that's noted.
As long as it's not just telling us it's 'In progress' every week on the dev update. It's like, we know it's in progress but telling us it's in progress tells us nothing about the progress it's in.
But, the "huge undertaking" you mention has been in progress for some time...
I hate all currently available VTT's. They're all abominable. And I say that as someone who ran 4e games on Maptools with my own macros for everything. They all require a huge financial investment on top of a huge learning curve and are all clunky af. Unintuitive messes made by coders with zero UI people involved in the decision and design process. Command Lines might be cool for *nix geeks but the rest of humanity just wants you all to quit it and get with pretty buttons to push (that actually work and aren't convoluted, ten step hierarchies with no intuitive methodology). And they're all slow. I might not have a super duper computer, but it's recent and powerful enough that I shouldn't be suffering interminable sluggishness. And buggy, my god are they buggy.
I had no desire for DDB to do a VTT of any stripe or colour however the general speediness, cleanliness of design, and push buttonny prettiness that makes it all easy to use is, for me, a huge draw and the single reason that I'm actually somewhat intrigued as to what this 'VTT' of DDB's will look like.
I hate all currently available VTT's. They're all abominable. And I say that as someone who ran 4e games on Maptools with my own macros for everything. They all require a huge financial investment on top of a huge learning curve and are all clunky af. Unintuitive messes made by coders with zero UI people involved in the decision and design process.
I think there are 3 problems with VTTs.
Problem 1, as you say -- most of them do not have competent UI designers working there (or are preventing the UI designers from making good UIs). Everything I have tried, including Astral (which is the one I am using right now as it is free for this month, so it's a good trial) has multiple non-intuitive, or worse, counter-intuitive features.
Problem 2, and this is also related to your comment about the necessary monetary investment -- to maximize their monetization, they try to be "game system agnostic." This means more people can use them, not just, say, someone playing Pathfinder 2e or DnD 5e. But, it also means the can't build rule-specific systems, which is why so much of the UI is left open-ended and undefined. The one, and only, advantage DDB has is that it is a single system, so they can hardcode D&D into it without worrying about that. But everyone else is trying to be more open-ended and this is why the UI is messy, and why you have to do so much work on your end with these systems (or pay through the nose to use the hard work other people already did for you).
Problem 3, is that I think some of the coders and probably the UI designers don't actually use their own systems to play real game sessions. They try them out for a little bit, hey it works in test, no bugs, push it live. Great example -- someone on the Astral discord showed how to use 3 layers to make a 3 level tower so you could have PCs on the 3 layers. Now, I have used dynamic lighting and layers in Astral and, as far as I knew, there is no way to get dynamic lighting (i.e., line of sight) to change per layer. You can only set it once for the map. So opening up different layers of a tower with different room configs per layer, is going to eff up the dynamic lighting. The solution? Make whole different maps. All you have to do is actually play a few sessions with this, or with them not having an actual "secret door" function (or a 'hide' function on their existing doors) to see what the shortcomings are. But they have nothing on their roadmap about this. Why? Because the designers aren't using it to actually play games.
This combination of factors -- bad UI, trying to be all things to all players, and designers who don't seem to actually use their systems in live play (because no one who did would design the features to be this way) -- makes all the VTTs choices between the lesser of several evils. All of them have multiple flaws and imperfections.
DDB will also have flaws and imperfections, but we can hope that maybe, possibly, if they are only doing ONE system, they can provide us what everyone needs for D&D, because they are not providing us what people also might need for Rolemaster, Star Frontiers, Pathfinder, Cthulu, Champions, Villains and Vigilantes, etc, etc, etc.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
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I must say, I love the open and honest feedback you're providing BadEye. Thank you for that.
I would just like to say, first of, is thank you to Adam (BadEye) and the rest of the DDB team. I have been here since beta and this project is just getting better and better.
As for the OP, it seem like this is a thing of "your not moving fast enough on what I want". If Wizards stops coming out with new content that has new rules, I'm sure this wouldn't be an issue. But for, what it seems, every other book having big rule changes, one can't simply go in and add it with out thought as to how that will effect future new rules.Or effect new features.
I also agree that I don't want DDB to be Roll20. I want them to do a VTT because I know they can do it, at least for 5e, much better than Roll20 is doing it. Where as FG might be worried about this, Roll20 should be down right scared.
I might be an odd ball, but I would rather see them finish the combat/encounter tracker, the dice roller, etc. than revamp the home-brew system. The home-brew system won't help me run my game. The aforementioned stuff will. More so now than before.
I only mentioned the homebrew systems because in my mind, 'The Homebrew Overhaul' and the necessary repairs to their character sheet builder for official content are basically the same thing. If they do one, the other is basically also already done by default. 'The Homebrew Overhaul' isn't really much more than putting a slicker U.I. and some permissions restrictions on the same tools DDB uses to implement official content.
Nevertheless, it's excellent to see that these foundational requirements are indeed being addressed.
Please do not contact or message me.
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Yeah, VTT functionality is a major request - because it's essentially a core aspect of the game, at least for games that use battle-maps and aren't theater-of-the-mind. Even outside those, you need at least a way to share all dice rolls within a campaign, for instance. Right now, it's hard (if not impossible) to play a campaign just using DDB and nothing else - I suppose some text-only games on the forums manage to do it using the embedded dice roller in the forums, but for anyone who uses battle maps, or otherwise doesn't want to play text-based games on the forums, there's no way to play without using Avrae in Discord, or Roll20, or another VTT. Many people have actually complained that DDB doesn't have a VTT already despite all the years of development (as you point out, they didn't necessarily plan for this when they first started out).
People want to be able to play with their content on the same platform they own it on (instead of annoying copy-pasting or resorting to third-party extensions like Beyond20), which is why VTT functionality is so highly requested (I actually had a call with DDB's product manager a while back to provide feedback, where I basically emphasized that as one of the top things they should focus on in the long term - this was before the release of GGTR, I think?). The encounter builder, combat tracker, etc. as well as the dice-rolling functionality are all things that are necessary to eventually reach that goal, not to mention useful tools in their own right. I am hopeful and confident that DDB will address the issues brought up in this thread, and also continue to aim for that goal in the future.
I wanted to add one more thing. As proven by Badeye, I know that DNDB does take feedback seriously and I have been in other feedback threads where things were addressed quickly as well. I also wanted to say that I've been a top tier paid member for closing on 2 years now and had a stretch of about 7 months when I wasn't playing but still paid the fees because I wanted to support the site. (I think I may have missed a month when I changed banks but anyways) I only did that because I do believe the team here listens and they are always working on something to improve the site. Now, whether or not it's what I'd like to see improved upon at the time isn't always the case (although it has been at other times) Overall though I wouldn't have kept supporting DNDB if I didn't believe in what they're trying to do.
That's what happens when you wear a helmet your whole life!
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The system we've ended up falling into in our own games is a simple non-Avrae Discord dice bot (RPBot works well if all you need is something to generate numbers for you, without all the janky gets-in-the-way weirdness of Avrae) and a channel for rolling those dice in. Used to do Google Docs with a shared PDF for battle maps; I use Roll20 for climactic fights now, but oh my God their map tool is an unmitigated migraine if you don't pay for their special curated stuff. For the most part though we've switched to theater of the mind combat for anything that isn't a Big Deal Battle. I forget at times that this approach is Heckin' Weird in a day and age where livestreams with elaborate prop work and everyone being Powered By DwarvenForge is the norm.
But like BadEye said himself, VTT functionality is the thing a dozen other companies/tools already have covered. DDB is the thing I buy the books and such on because DDB is where I can actually use the books, look stuff up and easily find the information I need. Their character editor actually works (if not without kinks mentioned in my first post), and they handle everything I can't readily do with basic Discord bots or an MS Paint hack job in R20. If they can introduce a VTT that isn't an absolute godawful nightmare to try and navigate, I'll check it out, but boy that's a crowded market.
Fortunately they've got our backs on the character sheet rebuild too, so we've all got plenty of time to see how their VTT falls out.
Please do not contact or message me.
BadEye,
Thank you very much for the direct and comprehensive information. Since we have your attention, I have to ask: Since the rollout of the combat tracker, more and more I read requests in the forums that NPCs generated using the PC generator be includable as “enemies,” and that “monsters” like companions and familiars and steel defenders de includable as “friendlies.” Are there any plans for this?
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
I'll give my two cents here. But I want to recognize that it's just that-- we all tend to feel our experiences are more general than maybe they are and that's why DDB needs to rely on broader datasets to manage their priorities. Feedback on forums is great, but there's no way it's an unbiased subset of their user base. I'm the only one of the 10 to 12 people I game with regularly who ever visits the forums on DDB. But every last one of my players uses the site.
So-- here's my experience: DDB very quickly won over my gaming group, especially after the release of the new character sheets. The conversion was nearly instant-- in one session a group of friends who have VERY different technical competency were using it exclusively and exclaiming how great it was. I even had a player immediately offer to contribute to my subscription and book costs (and, trust me, this is not something that has EVER happened before).
Here's why: Having immediate access to rules and calculations straight from the character sheet was a revelation for many of my players. Some of these folks never read the rules carefully. They enjoy playing and not rules mastery. So having it all laid out for them was game changing. I was no longer having to know everything about everyone's characters. No one was stopping mid game to look things up. Everyone was just playing. And for myself (and the other occasional DMs in the group) the rules lookup was a lifesaver.
So, basically what happened next was pretty much all of us were accessing our D&D through DDB. And do you know what one of the first questions I got asked was?
"Hey, how come I can't roll my dice right off this sheet? That would be awesome."
The second question was (a few sessions later in my online game)-- "Do we keep having to go to Roll20? I'd rather use the DDB sheet and we mostly don't use the maps there anyway. Just a battlemap on DDB would be great . . ."
Listen, I get the frustration with the sheets not handling all the rules perfectly. But I'll be honest, while I want them to work, the issues are an incredibly minor annoyance. I don't think anyone other than me has even ever noticed the relatively edge cases where it's not all working perfectly. If you asked my players whether they want a dice roller or certain features to work more seamlessly on the character sheet, I guarantee you the answer is a dice roller. That's even more so for homebrew versus dice roller. I'm the only one that homebrews. And the same goes for having a virtual space. The character sheet and rules interface are already working just fine for better than 99% of our usage.
In this light, I also think some of you might be missing something about how 'crowded' the virtual tabletop space is. I have used both Fantasy Grounds and Roll20. I like them both. But for any of the rules interface features (like Roll20 character sheets) they are way beyond what anyone in my group will bother to learn. I used to keep everyone's character sheets up to date in Roll20 because they simply wouldn't spend the time to figure it out. Many of us here are very tech savvy, so it's easy to forget that minor barriers for us are major barriers for others.
When DDB offers a virtual play space, they are going to have the excellent usability of their existing tools to go with it. What my group wants is to have all of their digital D&D world in one place. DDB has cleverly (the sly bastards) hooked my whole group. They are happy with DDB as is. Now they want to be able to handle the rest of the game right on that site. They'll move over in a second. And you know something else-- I suspect there are plenty of DDB users that don't use Roll20 or FG or the others, but once functionality appears on DDB they'll start using it.
Overall, I think the DDB strategy of building out solid underlying tools that are very easy to use has been solid. It brings people onto their platform. And they are there waiting for additional functionality as it appears. I mean, I didn't think I needed an encounter builder. Until I had one. Now I use it all the time. Once the combat tracker is built out more, I can see it will be the same for that. Once I have some sort of easy 'dashboard' (probably through the tracker or some such ) to look at the players in my campaign from one screen, I'll use that. And once there are digital maps . . . You get the idea.
They don't need to compete with other VT's. They just need to provide useful functionality for their existing (and large) user base. The rest will happen naturally.
And now I will go back to doing taxes before my wife notices I'm writing long messages on rpg messageboards instead . . .
AD
Awesome update, thanks for the insight. I love the dev update summaries that get posted now too, as I usually don't have time to watch a video.
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D&D Beyond FoundersHello! It's tough for me to keep up with every response (our team of moderators do an outstanding job of keeping me in the loop on important threads, and let's be honest, an outstanding job in general), but you did catch me while you had my attention. :)
Including other non-monster types of "opposition" in the combat tracker is definitely planned, even for things like traps that might need to have an initiative order. No ETA yet, but confirming it is on our list.
Thanks!
Thank you. My bevy of NPCs await this implementation!
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
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So does that mean that people with the alpha sheet will have background and mark spells working correctly?
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ModeratorNot sure what you mean by this. The player app (that includes character sheet functionality) that's entering alpha testing is basically just recreating the character sheet functionality on the site in a way that works online. Once DDB has implemented those things in the site, they'll presumably come to the app too. Adam's simply saying that working on the app isn't delaying other projects, because they're being worked on by different teams.
Playing very intently with that phrase "death and taxes". ;)
They are pushing an alpha version of the character sheet out to some people.
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ModeratorAh, okay. Interesting.
The mentioned that in the last Dev Update.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
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ModeratorThanks. I haven't watched the latest dev update yet... Guess I should :P
I'm looking at you, D&D Wiki! Bad D&D Wiki! Bad!
I thought y'all were big D&D fans? What, over the course of all of TSR's and WotC's history, would have led you to believe that they wouldn't have done exactly as they have done, since the beginnings of D&D, across every edition? Seriously, that's a really weird take to think that they weren't going to release new types of rules. If anything, the time when you're saying DDB thought they wouldn't be releasing new rules was exactly the time when it was expected of them, given over four decades of precedence...
As long as it's not just telling us it's 'In progress' every week on the dev update. It's like, we know it's in progress but telling us it's in progress tells us nothing about the progress it's in.
WE KNOW!
I hate all currently available VTT's. They're all abominable. And I say that as someone who ran 4e games on Maptools with my own macros for everything. They all require a huge financial investment on top of a huge learning curve and are all clunky af. Unintuitive messes made by coders with zero UI people involved in the decision and design process. Command Lines might be cool for *nix geeks but the rest of humanity just wants you all to quit it and get with pretty buttons to push (that actually work and aren't convoluted, ten step hierarchies with no intuitive methodology). And they're all slow. I might not have a super duper computer, but it's recent and powerful enough that I shouldn't be suffering interminable sluggishness. And buggy, my god are they buggy.
I had no desire for DDB to do a VTT of any stripe or colour however the general speediness, cleanliness of design, and push buttonny prettiness that makes it all easy to use is, for me, a huge draw and the single reason that I'm actually somewhat intrigued as to what this 'VTT' of DDB's will look like.
Aww, wish I were speshul :(
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
― Oscar Wilde.
I think there are 3 problems with VTTs.
Problem 1, as you say -- most of them do not have competent UI designers working there (or are preventing the UI designers from making good UIs). Everything I have tried, including Astral (which is the one I am using right now as it is free for this month, so it's a good trial) has multiple non-intuitive, or worse, counter-intuitive features.
Problem 2, and this is also related to your comment about the necessary monetary investment -- to maximize their monetization, they try to be "game system agnostic." This means more people can use them, not just, say, someone playing Pathfinder 2e or DnD 5e. But, it also means the can't build rule-specific systems, which is why so much of the UI is left open-ended and undefined. The one, and only, advantage DDB has is that it is a single system, so they can hardcode D&D into it without worrying about that. But everyone else is trying to be more open-ended and this is why the UI is messy, and why you have to do so much work on your end with these systems (or pay through the nose to use the hard work other people already did for you).
Problem 3, is that I think some of the coders and probably the UI designers don't actually use their own systems to play real game sessions. They try them out for a little bit, hey it works in test, no bugs, push it live. Great example -- someone on the Astral discord showed how to use 3 layers to make a 3 level tower so you could have PCs on the 3 layers. Now, I have used dynamic lighting and layers in Astral and, as far as I knew, there is no way to get dynamic lighting (i.e., line of sight) to change per layer. You can only set it once for the map. So opening up different layers of a tower with different room configs per layer, is going to eff up the dynamic lighting. The solution? Make whole different maps. All you have to do is actually play a few sessions with this, or with them not having an actual "secret door" function (or a 'hide' function on their existing doors) to see what the shortcomings are. But they have nothing on their roadmap about this. Why? Because the designers aren't using it to actually play games.
This combination of factors -- bad UI, trying to be all things to all players, and designers who don't seem to actually use their systems in live play (because no one who did would design the features to be this way) -- makes all the VTTs choices between the lesser of several evils. All of them have multiple flaws and imperfections.
DDB will also have flaws and imperfections, but we can hope that maybe, possibly, if they are only doing ONE system, they can provide us what everyone needs for D&D, because they are not providing us what people also might need for Rolemaster, Star Frontiers, Pathfinder, Cthulu, Champions, Villains and Vigilantes, etc, etc, etc.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.