So.  

I don't need to tell anyone here that DDB is a great tool and an extremely useful way to store and create characters for D&D.  It's the only reason I get to play at all, stuck with online games as I am.  It's swell, and I don't mind having supported it.  

But...well.

We have the Combat Tracker alpha.  the Encounter Builder...beta?  Sub-beta?  Wherever that is.  The Digital Dice Roller.  The Avrae Discord bot.  All these glitzy wow tools that're supposed to Immerse You Like Never Before in online D&D.  But you know what we don't have?

Functioning rules or character sheets.

Now, I'm the last person who's going to underestimate how difficult the task of creating an online system that can handle the nigh-infinite flexibility of pen-and-paper tabletop is.  I'm well aware that this is a hefty undertaking, which is why sites like Myth-Weavers simply use form-fillable PDFs and tell you to do your own math.  Which is fine.  DDB is trying to do more than just being a digital version of a paper sheet.  They want to be your one-stop shop for all things D&D, which is a laudable goal.

But the Spells of the Mark feature from the Eberron book isn't even slightly functional yet.  Half the shit from Wildemount isn't implemented.  The DDB team has basically given up altogether on properly implementing any new UA that comes out, just says "HERE.  There's words on your screen.  It doesn't work in the character builder but you can fudge it!  Use the honor system."  Avrae is a hot mess that doesn't know what half the functions of D&D are or do and makes it extremely difficult to play anything but basic, vanilla, AL-style RAW 5e, and even then half the shit in the books isn't implemented in Avrae yet.  Because it's not even implemented in DDB yet.

It is increasingly clear that DDB's digital toolset is too limited.  The fundamental code base does not allow for the sorts of things Wizards is doing these days, and trying to get the DDB character sheet to do anything that isn't covered in the basic 5e ruleset is an ever more labyrinthian nightmare..  CoronaCrisis 2020 isn't even slightly helping, but this has been a problem since before then.

I know the 'Homebrew Overhaul' is on the roadmap.  I know it's a huge undertaking.  I know that pulling apart the entire character sheet engine and rebuilding it such that it can actually do the things it's supposed to do is a brutal, unpleasant task that does not have the glitzy glam WOW factor of throwing three hundred d20s across your screen, or saying 'we have a digital tabletop, stop giving money to Roll20 now!'  It's ugly and potentially less profitable than selling glitzy glam WOW stuff.

It also needs to happen.

Please.  Stop putting it off, DDB.  Every single time Wizards releases something you guys cannot or will not implement because your tool doesn't allow for it, it's another crack in the foundation.  People paid for Eberron.  People paid for Wildemount.  Nobody pays for UA, but UA eventually becomes paid content that needs to be implemented properly in the system.  if you want to be more than Myth-Weavers, with a slick cool digital tool that does all the math for you and makes it easier and more intuitive than ever to play D&D?  Then that tool needs to be kept up to date.

I know it's a huge ask.  I know it's not sexy.  I know it's not an attention-grabbing headline.  I know it's not something that'll help you get money that used to be going to Roll20 instead.  But please, guys.  Please.  I never asked you to build me an online tabletop, I do not want an online tabletop.  If I was desperate for that I'd get people to by VTT on Steam, or I'll just wait for TaleSpire to drop.  Roll20 ******* sucks.  Absolutely nobody wants you guys to be Roll20.  Stop chasing them.

I should be able to add +1 to a weapon's attack value without also increasing its damage.  I should be able to add a spell to a character as a quest item/reward without having to create an entire custom feat for it with a million little janky rules and a giant red flag saying "THIS IS NOT PUBLIC CONTENT YOU SHOULDN'T BE USING IT".  I should be able to give a character an item that lets them perform a specific action without needing to make that action into its own separate feat with no connection whatsoever to the item.  There are so many basic, simple things I should be able to do without having to invent seven hundred different janky wacky workarounds to get them to even halfway show up properly in the character sheet.

Please, guys.  Stop de-prioritizing 'The Homebrew Overhaul'.  Because it's not just a homebrew overhaul, it's basic system repair, and it needs to happen sooner rather than later.

Please?

I agree. I care more about a better development of core features over a bunch of gimmicky stuff that only mostly works. To me core features should be the official D&D book content and it should flawlessly integrate with the character sheet. Hell the long rest button doesn't even reset anything like it's supposed to.

I want to buy more source content to keep building in DND Beyond because I love the convenient look ups and not having to lug a bunch of books around that I only but need bits of, but if everything is only half assed that's more frustrating than not and I might as well buy the book and do it by hand to keep track of what I need.

D&D Beyond has different teams working on different things. For example, the Challenges team works on the encounter builder and combat tracker, while the content team works on what WotC delivers and needs to be entered. The discord bot is actually a team that was originally external to DDB and got incorporated into the company, while they have a separate team in Poland working on the character sheet app.

The point I'm making is that it's not linear development; the development of the encounter builder or combat tracker or dice roller isn't slowing down the work being done for spells of the mark or class variants features, because they're different teams handling different parts of the site. It's a little silly to assume that those things aren't being looked at full stop, just because other things are being developed. 

I agree.. the homebrew elements of the site are not robust enough, and it is very clear that they built everything with the assumption that people would slot in the stuff in the rules and supplements, from drop down menus that only give the list of choices WOTC provides... and did not realize that people with custom worlds would need to Homebrew nearly everything from languages to non-magic items to races to deities.  And it's not that we mind homebewing everything (we want to -- that's why we're making a custom world), but it is very kludgey or sometimes even impossible to add that homebrew stuff because the basic design was not intended to be that robust.

I think they need to decide -- are they going to fully support homebrew or not. If yes, then they need to do some serious work as described above. If not, admit it, and take it out, and declare that you only support games played using the official, published books.

In before "They should put everyone working on ______."

Teams that get too large for a specific task get too unmanageable and a lot of 5th wheels are created since two people should never modify the same bit of code at the same time. If there are enough people on a task, putting other people on other tasks in parallel just makes sense.

If you watch the tracker, you can see how fast things move. If something moves fast, it likely not because they threw all their resources at it. Some things are extremely risky to the environment in total even if it seems simple superficially. You never want to rush those. Some things are less difficult to add without long-reaching effects that could wreck everything else. Are they simply not supposed to do them if they have the people to do it?

Lots of possibilities. We can be Armchair CEOs all we want to a company where we know only the public facing side, but in the end, they're really the only ones who can make informed decisions on how to proceed. I would never assume that they're deaf to the needs and demands of the public unless they stated something directly opposed to the audience's needs. I've yet to see any such statements from DDB.

The homebrew generator that we have access to is the same system they use to input official WotC material, only we don’t have admin access. If we find it kludgy, and we do, imagine how kludgy they must find it too. One would think that improving that system would be a major relief for the Devs as well.

I don’t need a flashy new animated dice roller, just a random number generator that allows me to pick the number and type of dice. In fact, if there is no way to turn of the dice animation, I will probably never use the darned thing. I don’t need a VTT, we play in our living rooms. We have ATTs to roll on. 

I have found CR to be practically useless, so the Encounter Builder is also practically useless. The Combat Tracker doesn’t actually track anything I can’t do on a napkin, so that’s not very helpful yet either. Especially since it doesn’t actually pull from the PC sheets, and I can’t put “PCs” in as enemies, or “monsters” in as friendlies.

Basically, the three things DDB does mostly well are Source Search, Character Sheet, and Homebrew. The search function leaves something to be desired, the character sheet gets jankier with every new publication. The LR button doesn’t reset anything, the SR button only resets half of everything. If I Infuse an item under Equipment, then I still have to remember to go back to Features and Traits to check off the box manually. 

And the Homebrew creator... well enough about that. 

If the improvements they have been mentioning on the Dev Updates function as advertised, hopefully that will fix the character sheet issues. Hopefully that will make the Homebrew Overhaul more of a reality too.

Unfortunately I think you are right about the underlying issues, which is going to make things much harder to work out. For instance, they don't need to "fix" the character sheet so much as do a complete page-1 rewrite of the code from the ground up. And I am quite sure they're not going to want to do that -- and even if they did it would be months to years before it was in place. The underlying design is the main issue here, and that is not an easy thing to correct on a live service.

3D dice animations are bread and circuses.

I understand that different teams do different things and not all resources can be focused on one thing to speed its completion.  Nine women can't make a baby in one month.

One cannot make a baby with zero women, either.

Like Sposta said.  All these side projects are just bread-and-circuses distractions from the fact that the core tool everybody is here for in the first place is less and less functional with each pass.  Literally nobody asked for MTX dice sets.  Just...can we maybe put one guy on long-range planning, at the least?  

I think there are multiple issues. My guess is many of these issues are related to the need to bring the site live as early as they could to start generating revenue from the eBooks and so forth. Using the existing Fantasy Grounds/Roll20 model, they hooked the character sheet (which is what everyone needs the most) directly into the data from the books. This (a) makes the character sheet (theoretically) easy to use and helps new players especially, and (b) generates revenue, as the player learns that the subclass or spell he or she wants is not included in the basic rules and must be bought directly from the site. So they went live with that, as quickly as they could, because it's their (initial) money-maker.

The problem with this, as understandable as it is, lies in the fact that going live with a character sheet hooked into compendium data is not the basis for a fully functioning VTT on the order of something like a Fantasy Grounds or Roll20. So what DDB appears, at least to the end user, to have lacked is the vision that a place like Foundry has. Knowing you're going to make a fully-featured VTT that, unlike the others, is D&D specific, one would ideally design the whole thing from the ground up with that in mind. This would mean you'd know you need things like, homebrew capability for literally everything, hooks into all the published material, plus maps, counters, dice, video chat, audio chat, text chat, forums, the list goes on. If you look at what Foundry is doing, or Astral, for example, this is what they are doing (or planning). 

If you start with that level of long-range planning (mentioned in the post above), then some of what DDB has done, you probably wouldn't do. They would have known from Day 1 that they needed better homebrew, needed an encounter builder, a combat tracker, and all the rest.

But, again, although I don't know what went on behind closed doors, it certainly appears from where I sit that they did not really intend to do that, or at least didn't specifically plan for it. Again maybe rushing it just to get positive cash flow, or maybe because they didn't really intend to replace Roll20/FG/Astral/etc., or I don't know what the reason is, but they went live with something that looks pretty, and most importantly looks official (see all the posts on other forums asking why buying hard copy != getting content on DDB), but is not at all robust.

Look at their app, for instance. It started out being the "DDB app" and they were going to "incorporate character sheets into it." This was their stated plan for what, like a year? And then they said "nah, the app is just an e-reader and the character sheet thing will be a different app." That certainly makes it look like they are just making things up as they go along and not fully planning. Furthermore, as just an eReader, their app is horrible... not at all competitive with eReaders like Kobo, Kindle, Nook etc....  If it's were a site-wide app that included everything (combat tracker, etc.), then I could put up with the terrible eReader functions, but as a stand-alone just eReader? They need to basically take it down and restart from a page 1 re-write because it is utterly terrible. (And go study how Kindle or Kobo or Nook works as an eReader and make theirs work like them, rather than doing something sooooo much worse.)

I know this isn't about the app, but I think the app is a great example of why, from the outside looking in, DDB appears to have no higher level planning at all, but to just be throwing stuff on the wall and see what sticks. It looks to me like now, years into it, they are realizing that people need a VTT, and that their revenue will skyrocket if they can be a "Roll20 giantslayer". So now the dollar signs are on the eyeballs like a Tom and Jerry cartoon and they are adding all these other features to a system that was clearly not designed with the VTT aspect in mind, and is ill-equipped to handle it.

That's just at the top level of the overall direction. But further down, it's also clear that the people making the systems here did not build them properly to "scale up," for instance when you add new content like Wildemount or XGE. It appears that there is a metric ton of work the people at DDB have to do behind the scenes to get all of it to work with character sheets let alone the encounter builder and combat tracker. It would not be that much work if they had built it to scale up correctly. They seem to have "hardcoded" each little thing into the system rather than making something robust to adding new variables. So you have all these pieces that were not really designed from the ground up to work together, and then within each subsystem, they were not designed in a way that allows easy scale-up or additions/subtractions/homebrewing... so you have what appears to be a Gordian Knot. And you how Alexander the Great supposedly solved the problem of the knot, right? (Where's my sword...?)

Again, I haven't seen their code... but that's just how it looks to me from the outside as an end user (who has some coding and database management background). To me, it appears that there has been a failure of project design at the higher level, and then a failure of subsystem implementation at the lower level. Maybe I'm wrong and it just looks worse than it really is. I hope so.

I don’t think you are wrong. I think that is exactly what happened.

I agree with pretty much all of this OP. I feel that a change to prioritize flash over function started with the mega menu system with pretty pictures that take up the whole screen and are less efficient. Unfortunately it seems that some of that is continuing. I have no need of virtual dice, but I can see the appeal it may have for some folks. I've tried to use the combat tracker and encounter builder and just don't because they are sorely lacking. There are some things on the roadmap that look like they may become more functional down the road. However at this point using the D&D Chrome extension is easier and more effective. I agree that there are other parts of the site that should be fixed first. Without question! Basic functionality, not even with homebrew, but with regular items is missing in many many places. Such as having a healers kit that has 10 uses, yet no way to track when you use it. Checkboxes in the sidebar when you click on it to indicate a use would be great. Having scrolls actually be able to link to the spell it's a scroll for. Now the scroll has a checkbox for charges, which is interesting since it's destroyed on use yet the healer kit with effectively 10 charges doesn't. The character builder overhaul is on the roadmap so hopefully some of those issues will be addressed. It is slated for after encounter builder, combat tracker, avrea and dice roller though. Inventory management is listed as a long term project which I think should be a much higher priority. 

As OP said. Functional integration of the character sheet should be a TOP priority. Especially since if you can't rely on your character sheet to be fully functional and accurate, you're not going to need any of those other tools.

One of the things that gives me confidence in D&DBeyond's future is the way that Adam and other staff members communicate to the community and seem genuinely interested in the health of the platform. Thanks for the info, Adam.

First, thanks for the detailed responses to the OP. Some of this was fairly easy to suss out just from looking at the website and following development posts, but some was not.

I will return to one comment, however:

While I assure you that we are not "chasing" anyone other than doing the best we can for the community, our community is asking for virtual tabletop functionality.

Here is the problem: it may be what everyone wants, but it's pretty clear it's not what this site was originally designed to be. This is why you are experiencing so many more growing pains than just the "natural" ones you'd have as the size/user base expanded and the sourcebooks multiplied. Not really sure what you can *do* about it at this point, but... I don't envy you trying to make this all work given where you are right now. (And it's why I'm not going to hold my breath on a DDB "VTT" any time soon. Maybe by the time 6th edition is out you guys will have it done....)

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.