so the supernatural gifts dont show up on the DND beyond character sheet ATM, it should be available in the choose a race section if you are using that campaign setting
so the supernatural gifts dont show up on the DND beyond character sheet ATM, it should be available in the choose a race section if you are using that campaign setting
I believe you can find information about this here:
Agreed. This should be added since WotC is now using this more. + the longer we're in 5e the more people will gain stuff like this. Besides, if it can be home-brewed, then it can be formal brewed no? :)
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Want to see Virtual Table Top like no other before it built within DnDBeyond.com? Upvote the feature request. It's 2nd highest voted so far:
NOTE: You will need to setup a zendesk account (which is not your DnDBeyond.com account, the team uses this 3rd party software). It's easy to do and your votes are needed!
I agree. But until they finish the system upgrades, the actual functionality for this feature does not exist yet. 🤷♂️ Same with Spells of the Mark from Eberron. That’s what happens when WotC (the games publisher) writes game design that DDB hasn’t programmed yet because they didn’t know they needed to until after the fact.
Agreed. This should be added since WotC is now using this more. + the longer we're in 5e the more people will gain stuff like this. Besides, if it can be home-brewed, then it can be formal brewed no? :)
Since WotC is using what more? I don’t understand. And we can homebrew a workaround with feats. But it’s not the same thing. The company that runs this website (which is completely separate from WotC) is in the middle of a massive systemwide upgrade so that they can do stuff like this properly. It takes time to reprogram a website with hundreds or thousands of active users without crashing the system. DDB has actually done such a good job that people have hardly noticed the updates happening all over the place unless DDB points them out.
This is definitely on the list of things to come - for the last several months the dev team has been hard at work, more or less rebuilding the entire character service in order to get things to you more quickly and to help support things like Supernatural Gifts! While there's no ETA as to when it'll be added, I can assure you that the team is working to get them in.
Agreed. This should be added since WotC is now using this more. + the longer we're in 5e the more people will gain stuff like this. Besides, if it can be home-brewed, then it can be formal brewed no? :)
Since WotC is using what more? I don’t understand. And we can homebrew a workaround with feats. But it’s not the same thing. The company that runs this website (which is completely separate from WotC) is in the middle of a massive systemwide upgrade so that they can do stuff like this properly. It takes time to reprogram a website with hundreds or thousands of active users without crashing the system. DDB has actually done such a good job that people have hardly noticed the updates happening all over the place unless DDB points them out.
We keep hearing that the upgrade has been successful and so on, but we have yet to see any actual results. You say they're "in the middle of it", but the fact is, we're paying customers, with certain expectations, and they're pretty reasonable expectations, frankly. The complete lack of any timeframe here is getting into the realms of embarrassing, rather than understandable. It's not good enough, at this point to say "Oh we intend to do this!", when that's been the line for more than six months, and now multiple 5E books and the most major UA of 5E's history have now come out without proper support from Beyond.
It's particularly not a great look when we're seeing things like $15 dice being added, but this stuff still not done - when this is the core purposes of this site, not selling imaginary dice. I'm sure the teams who work on these things are largely separate, but they're certainly not entirely separate, and your constant "Well they're working on it so you're not allowed to complain or be upset!" attitude is quite wearing and seems fan-ish rather than reasonable at this point.
Agreed. This should be added since WotC is now using this more. + the longer we're in 5e the more people will gain stuff like this. Besides, if it can be home-brewed, then it can be formal brewed no? :)
Since WotC is using what more? I don’t understand. And we can homebrew a workaround with feats. But it’s not the same thing. The company that runs this website (which is completely separate from WotC) is in the middle of a massive systemwide upgrade so that they can do stuff like this properly. It takes time to reprogram a website with hundreds or thousands of active users without crashing the system. DDB has actually done such a good job that people have hardly noticed the updates happening all over the place unless DDB points them out.
We keep hearing that the upgrade has been successful and so on, but we have yet to see any actual results. You say they're "in the middle of it", but the fact is, we're paying customers, with certain expectations, and they're pretty reasonable expectations, frankly. The complete lack of any timeframe here is getting into the realms of embarrassing, rather than understandable. It's not good enough, at this point to say "Oh we intend to do this!", when that's been the line for more than six months, and now multiple 5E books and the most major UA of 5E's history have now come out without proper support from Beyond.
It's particularly not a great look when we're seeing things like $15 dice being added, but this stuff still not done - when this is the core purposes of this site, not selling imaginary dice. I'm sure the teams who work on these things are largely separate, but they're certainly not entirely separate, and your constant "Well they're working on it so you're not allowed to complain or be upset!" attitude is quite wearing and seems fan-ish rather than reasonable at this point.
I didn’t say you’re not allowed to complain. Complain all you like, it’s a free country (so far 😒). I was simply attempting to provide information. Be upset. Complain. That’s your right, just as it’s my rite to not complain.
I simply happen to be aware of both the events that led us to this point, and scope of the issues involved with fixing it. And to be frank, I am a fan of DDB. DDB has given me approximately 3 reasons to complain about them, and at least a dozen reasons to support them. And of the 3 complaints, 2 of those reasons were evaporated. One was because of the Mods and staff members like Sedge, Sorce, Firehawk, and MellieDM who have always been more than helpful. The other complaint was addressed by BadEye himself who personally took to the forums to field particular customer complaints.
I complain plenty. I never wanted the stupid dice roller in the first place, and will continue to complain about it until I get an option to use the service sans animation. I don’t play D&D to watch cartoons of dice. In fact, I have been so vocal about it I have probably annoyed the heck out of the aforementioned BadEye as there is no way he missed my comments. Heck, I have probably annoyed everyone I listed above at some point, most likely Sorce. Yet they still treat me with respect and dignity. They still handle my customer issues. They still care, even though I have probably annoyed them personally. I know myself, I’m well aware of how annoying I can be. I seem to have annoyed you as a case in point.
So while I have plenty of complaints about the system, and some of the features, I can honestly say that the people of DDB have never earned any complaint from me. Those human beings do a thankless job and then have to read posts from users about how much they suck. So I will say, they don’t suck. They work their keesters off for us. And I at least appreciate them for it.
So complain. Be Upset. Shout it from the rooftops of every forum thread you find. I wouldn’t stop you even if I could. I’ll simply point out that those are people you’re complaining at, not some faceless system.
PS-You might be interested in this, you might not. But I’ll link it anyway for those who might care:
I certainly agree with not attacking the staff. The messenger should generally never be victimized.
But I do think constantly saying "they're working on it" is unhelpful, because they've been saying this for so long, about so many things. I get that they're not WotC, that they don't make the decisions, but I have to say, I used to be a big fan of and indeed proponent of Beyond, and even an evangelist about it on other forums, encouraging people to use it, clearing up outdated info or misperceptions, but of late I've been pretty disenchanted by three things:
1) Constant "we're working on it" about pretty much everything, including stuff that really should be fairly easy to do, and that they keep suggesting they've made now possible.
2) A serious lack of transparency. Saying "we're working on this!" is only transparent if it's meaningful. And to be meaningful you have to give some kind of intended timeline, even if you might fail to meet this. I work in a development role. I know that things slip. Sometimes by months. I have to communicate constantly and transparently with the people at the multi-billion-dollar business I work at. I can't say "I'm working on it!" and refuse to give any timeline, and I'm not impressed with businesses that do that.
3) The complete lack of effort put into temporary solutions or workarounds performed by the Beyond team.
It's 3 that's really, really bad for me, and that has pushed me from fan/evangelist re: Beyond to mildly negative feeling and considering my subscription and whether I should buy further products here. Theros has the problem worse than any other product.
Supernatural Gifts are the perfect example. I get that they don't have the systems in place to do them properly. I do understand that. I've been in that situation, it sucks. But they have two clear workarounds, and they've intentionally failed to do either. Those being:
A) They could have simply created a number of Feats which mimic the Supernatural Gifts. This would have taken one team member a few hours at most - likely a lot less time than that if they were experienced at implementing content via Feats. Then they could have made those Feats available to Theros purchasers.
If they'd done that, I'd literally have nothing to say on this issue. It's a workaround, but they would have showed good faith by implementing a simple workaround that they had available to them. This is exactly the kind of thing I have to do in my work.
B) Failing that, they could have allowed players to create and share copies of the the Supernatural Gifts as Feats. This would require absolutely no effort from them. Then, once they had Supernatural Gifts working properly, they could have disallowed these Feats from the sharing. Thus there would have been no loss to them.
Instead, they went the opposite way, and showed active bad faith, in my opinion. They outright intentionally blocked Feats which replicate Supernatural Gifts from being shared. Therefore, to use these features in Beyond, a DM has to both know how to work the homebrew system well enough to replicate all the Supernatural Gifts, themselves, but they also have to put in wasted and unnecessary time and effort to do that, themselves. Now, I'm pretty good with the homebrew stuff, I've even created subclasses and so on, which have worked, but I can't figure out how to do all the stuff in Supernatural Gifts, and there's no real documentation of the actual syntax and functionality of the homebrew system anywhere I can find (sometimes it is mentioned in passing in the "guides", but they're pretty superficial and only cover obvious stuff). I'd have to research this by creating loads of homebrew copies of loads of subclasses and races to work out how stuff is done.
And that's really bad. That's what's really killing my opinion of Beyond here. Not only did they decide not to do that (minimal) work themselves, they stopped anyone else doing it for others.
(As an aside, I feel like right now, I'm paying the Beyond team to develop stuff that I don't want or need or benefit from, like the dice, whilst they fail to provide functioning versions of stuff I am literally buying off them - this is not a small amount of money, either - it's hundreds of dollars of books with a subscription that's been running for three years for me now. I feel like the priorities have to absolutely be on making WotC content work, but right now it certainly looks like that's a secondary priority, even if that appearance is deceiving.)
I certainly agree with not attacking the staff. The messenger should generally never be victimized.
But I do think constantly saying "they're working on it" is unhelpful, because they've been saying this for so long, about so many things. I get that they're not WotC, that they don't make the decisions, but I have to say, I used to be a big fan of and indeed proponent of Beyond, and even an evangelist about it on other forums, encouraging people to use it, clearing up outdated info or misperceptions, but of late I've been pretty disenchanted by three things:
1) Constant "we're working on it" about pretty much everything, including stuff that really should be fairly easy to do, and that they keep suggesting they've made now possible.
2) A serious lack of transparency. Saying "we're working on this!" is only transparent if it's meaningful. And to be meaningful you have to give some kind of intended timeline, even if you might fail to meet this. I work in a development role. I know that things slip. Sometimes by months. I have to communicate constantly and transparently with the people at the multi-billion-dollar business I work at. I can't say "I'm working on it!" and refuse to give any timeline, and I'm not impressed with businesses that do that.
3) The complete lack of effort put into temporary solutions or workarounds performed by the Beyond team.
It's 3 that's really, really bad for me, and that has pushed me from fan/evangelist re: Beyond to mildly negative feeling and considering my subscription and whether I should buy further products here. Theros has the problem worse than any other product.
Supernatural Gifts are the perfect example. I get that they don't have the systems in place to do them properly. I do understand that. I've been in that situation, it sucks. But they have two clear workarounds, and they've intentionally failed to do either. Those being:
A) They could have simply created a number of Feats which mimic the Supernatural Gifts. This would have taken one team member a few hours at most - likely a lot less time than that if they were experienced at implementing content via Feats. Then they could have made those Feats available to Theros purchasers.
If they'd done that, I'd literally have nothing to say on this issue. It's a workaround, but they would have showed good faith by implementing a simple workaround that they had available to them. This is exactly the kind of thing I have to do in my work.
B) Failing that, they could have allowed players to create and share copies of the the Supernatural Gifts as Feats. This would require absolutely no effort from them. Then, once they had Supernatural Gifts working properly, they could have disallowed these Feats from the sharing. Thus there would have been no loss to them.
Instead, they went the opposite way, and showed active bad faith, in my opinion. They outright intentionally blocked Feats which replicate Supernatural Gifts from being shared. Therefore, to use these features in Beyond, a DM has to both know how to work the homebrew system well enough to replicate all the Supernatural Gifts, themselves, but they also have to put in wasted and unnecessary time and effort to do that, themselves. Now, I'm pretty good with the homebrew stuff, I've even created subclasses and so on, which have worked, but I can't figure out how to do all the stuff in Supernatural Gifts, and there's no real documentation of the actual syntax and functionality of the homebrew system anywhere I can find (sometimes it is mentioned in passing in the "guides", but they're pretty superficial and only cover obvious stuff). I'd have to research this by creating loads of homebrew copies of loads of subclasses and races to work out how stuff is done.
And that's really bad. That's what's really killing my opinion of Beyond here. Not only did they decide not to do that (minimal) work themselves, they stopped anyone else doing it for others.
(As an aside, I feel like right now, I'm paying the Beyond team to develop stuff that I don't want or need or benefit from, like the dice, whilst they fail to provide functioning versions of stuff I am literally buying off them - this is not a small amount of money, either - it's hundreds of dollars of books with a subscription that's been running for three years for me now. I feel like the priorities have to absolutely be on making WotC content work, but right now it certainly looks like that's a secondary priority, even if that appearance is deceiving.)
And if you follow this link you will have answers as to why those two workarounds you suggested are unfortunately not actually practical. I hope it is informative.
And if you follow this link you will have answers as to why those two workarounds you suggested are unfortunately not actually practical. I hope it is informative.
I read the link. It's a response to my post! It doesn't explain that both are "not practical". In fact, in shows that the Beyond team creating them as Feats would have been perfectly practical, just not ideal. They didn't actually need to identify them as "not Feats". That's not a real requirement - that's an artificial requirement. Deciding not to do something is not the same as it not being practical or possible.
This supports what I'm saying, frankly - the Beyond team have taken certain decisions, which they own, which have resulted in unhappy customers. Their calculation is clearly that the short-term or immediate harm caused by failing to do anything to support certain official WotC features will be balanced out by the long-term gain from getting the material out quickly, and selling books, and from things like selling dice. I accept that they also "want" to do the features "right" in "future", but look at all those quotation marks. It's not even certain that they ever will implement Supernatural Gifts, Piety or the like. They probably will, eventually, but will it be in two weeks, in which case this will all be a funny footnote, or two months, which would be pretty annoying, or a year or more? Which would be downright unacceptable. I would genuinely cancel my sub at that point. I'm considering it now. If it hit three months or so from now with nothing from Character Variants or Theros working, I probably will. There are other exciting RPGs out there, and I know my group would play them.
I certainly agree with not attacking the staff. The messenger should generally never be victimized.
But I do think constantly saying "they're working on it" is unhelpful, because they've been saying this for so long, about so many things. I get that they're not WotC, that they don't make the decisions, but I have to say, I used to be a big fan of and indeed proponent of Beyond, and even an evangelist about it on other forums, encouraging people to use it, clearing up outdated info or misperceptions, but of late I've been pretty disenchanted by three things:
1) Constant "we're working on it" about pretty much everything, including stuff that really should be fairly easy to do, and that they keep suggesting they've made now possible.
2) A serious lack of transparency. Saying "we're working on this!" is only transparent if it's meaningful. And to be meaningful you have to give some kind of intended timeline, even if you might fail to meet this. I work in a development role. I know that things slip. Sometimes by months. I have to communicate constantly and transparently with the people at the multi-billion-dollar business I work at. I can't say "I'm working on it!" and refuse to give any timeline, and I'm not impressed with businesses that do that.
3) The complete lack of effort put into temporary solutions or workarounds performed by the Beyond team.
It's 3 that's really, really bad for me, and that has pushed me from fan/evangelist re: Beyond to mildly negative feeling and considering my subscription and whether I should buy further products here. Theros has the problem worse than any other product.
Supernatural Gifts are the perfect example. I get that they don't have the systems in place to do them properly. I do understand that. I've been in that situation, it sucks. But they have two clear workarounds, and they've intentionally failed to do either. Those being:
A) They could have simply created a number of Feats which mimic the Supernatural Gifts. This would have taken one team member a few hours at most - likely a lot less time than that if they were experienced at implementing content via Feats. Then they could have made those Feats available to Theros purchasers.
If they'd done that, I'd literally have nothing to say on this issue. It's a workaround, but they would have showed good faith by implementing a simple workaround that they had available to them. This is exactly the kind of thing I have to do in my work.
B) Failing that, they could have allowed players to create and share copies of the the Supernatural Gifts as Feats. This would require absolutely no effort from them. Then, once they had Supernatural Gifts working properly, they could have disallowed these Feats from the sharing. Thus there would have been no loss to them.
Instead, they went the opposite way, and showed active bad faith, in my opinion. They outright intentionally blocked Feats which replicate Supernatural Gifts from being shared. Therefore, to use these features in Beyond, a DM has to both know how to work the homebrew system well enough to replicate all the Supernatural Gifts, themselves, but they also have to put in wasted and unnecessary time and effort to do that, themselves. Now, I'm pretty good with the homebrew stuff, I've even created subclasses and so on, which have worked, but I can't figure out how to do all the stuff in Supernatural Gifts, and there's no real documentation of the actual syntax and functionality of the homebrew system anywhere I can find (sometimes it is mentioned in passing in the "guides", but they're pretty superficial and only cover obvious stuff). I'd have to research this by creating loads of homebrew copies of loads of subclasses and races to work out how stuff is done.
And that's really bad. That's what's really killing my opinion of Beyond here. Not only did they decide not to do that (minimal) work themselves, they stopped anyone else doing it for others.
My feelings exactly. If I constantly told my boss I was "working on it" without a timeline, I'd be looking for a new job. It's great that they've got a public road map of the planned features, but without public dates it's worthless. Just as frustrating is finding something that doesn't work right, searching the forum for confirmation, and finding the error was "mentioned to the devs' years ago, and still isn't fixed. I'm a broken record on this issue, but I mean the Bag of Holding still isn't functional. Just... how?
I agree. But until they finish the system upgrades, the actual functionality for this feature does not exist yet. 🤷♂️ Same with Spells of the Mark from Eberron. That’s what happens when WotC (the games publisher) writes game design that DDB hasn’t programmed yet because they didn’t know they needed to until after the fact.
I mean, Supernatural Gifts like blessings and charms as well as epic boons were all part of the DMG. Supernatural gifts should have been added after feats and multiclassing, but before other optional rules like encumbrance.
The only mostly new mechanic in Theros is piety and the spells granted by it. Though that is not too dissimilar from company positions from AI or Guild renown in GGtR. Which are themselves based on renown introduced in the DMG.
So there isn't really anything new that DDB didn't already need to add since the beginning. As far as I can think of, the only new mechanics that would need to be changed since the DMG was spell list changes for backgrounds and races and modifiers for renown ranks.
I agree. But until they finish the system upgrades, the actual functionality for this feature does not exist yet. 🤷♂️ Same with Spells of the Mark from Eberron. That’s what happens when WotC (the games publisher) writes game design that DDB hasn’t programmed yet because they didn’t know they needed to until after the fact.
I mean, Supernatural Gifts like blessings and charms as well as epic boons were all part of the DMG. Supernatural gifts should have been added after feats and multiclassing, but before other optional rules like encumbrance.
The only mostly new mechanic in Theros is piety and the spells granted by it. Though that is not too dissimilar from company positions from AI or Guild renown in GGtR. Which are themselves based on renown introduced in the DMG.
So there isn't really anything new that DDB didn't already need to add since the beginning. As far as I can think of, the only new mechanics that would need to be changed since the DMG was spell list changes for backgrounds and races and modifiers for renown ranks.
Well yeah, but now it’s moved from “optional” to “kinda mandatory” as it were.
so the supernatural gifts dont show up on the DND beyond character sheet ATM, it should be available in the choose a race section if you are using that campaign setting
I believe you can find information about this here:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/bugs-support/69382-mythic-odysseys-of-theros-issues-and-support
I hope this was helpful.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
doesn't feel right to have to write a homebrew content for official material
Agreed. This should be added since WotC is now using this more. + the longer we're in 5e the more people will gain stuff like this. Besides, if it can be home-brewed, then it can be formal brewed no? :)
Want to see Virtual Table Top like no other before it built within DnDBeyond.com? Upvote the feature request. It's 2nd highest voted so far:
https://dndbeyond.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115008597088-Virtual-Tabletop-Gameboard
NOTE: You will need to setup a zendesk account (which is not your DnDBeyond.com account, the team uses this 3rd party software). It's easy to do and your votes are needed!
semajolis,
I agree. But until they finish the system upgrades, the actual functionality for this feature does not exist yet. 🤷♂️ Same with Spells of the Mark from Eberron. That’s what happens when WotC (the games publisher) writes game design that DDB hasn’t programmed yet because they didn’t know they needed to until after the fact.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
Since WotC is using what more? I don’t understand. And we can homebrew a workaround with feats. But it’s not the same thing. The company that runs this website (which is completely separate from WotC) is in the middle of a massive systemwide upgrade so that they can do stuff like this properly. It takes time to reprogram a website with hundreds or thousands of active users without crashing the system. DDB has actually done such a good job that people have hardly noticed the updates happening all over the place unless DDB points them out.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
-
View User Profile
-
View Posts
-
Send Message
D&D Beyond StaffHey there!
This is definitely on the list of things to come - for the last several months the dev team has been hard at work, more or less rebuilding the entire character service in order to get things to you more quickly and to help support things like Supernatural Gifts! While there's no ETA as to when it'll be added, I can assure you that the team is working to get them in.
We keep hearing that the upgrade has been successful and so on, but we have yet to see any actual results. You say they're "in the middle of it", but the fact is, we're paying customers, with certain expectations, and they're pretty reasonable expectations, frankly. The complete lack of any timeframe here is getting into the realms of embarrassing, rather than understandable. It's not good enough, at this point to say "Oh we intend to do this!", when that's been the line for more than six months, and now multiple 5E books and the most major UA of 5E's history have now come out without proper support from Beyond.
It's particularly not a great look when we're seeing things like $15 dice being added, but this stuff still not done - when this is the core purposes of this site, not selling imaginary dice. I'm sure the teams who work on these things are largely separate, but they're certainly not entirely separate, and your constant "Well they're working on it so you're not allowed to complain or be upset!" attitude is quite wearing and seems fan-ish rather than reasonable at this point.
I didn’t say you’re not allowed to complain. Complain all you like, it’s a free country (so far 😒). I was simply attempting to provide information. Be upset. Complain. That’s your right, just as it’s my rite to not complain.
I simply happen to be aware of both the events that led us to this point, and scope of the issues involved with fixing it. And to be frank, I am a fan of DDB. DDB has given me approximately 3 reasons to complain about them, and at least a dozen reasons to support them. And of the 3 complaints, 2 of those reasons were evaporated. One was because of the Mods and staff members like Sedge, Sorce, Firehawk, and MellieDM who have always been more than helpful. The other complaint was addressed by BadEye himself who personally took to the forums to field particular customer complaints.
I complain plenty. I never wanted the stupid dice roller in the first place, and will continue to complain about it until I get an option to use the service sans animation. I don’t play D&D to watch cartoons of dice. In fact, I have been so vocal about it I have probably annoyed the heck out of the aforementioned BadEye as there is no way he missed my comments. Heck, I have probably annoyed everyone I listed above at some point, most likely Sorce. Yet they still treat me with respect and dignity. They still handle my customer issues. They still care, even though I have probably annoyed them personally. I know myself, I’m well aware of how annoying I can be. I seem to have annoyed you as a case in point.
So while I have plenty of complaints about the system, and some of the features, I can honestly say that the people of DDB have never earned any complaint from me. Those human beings do a thankless job and then have to read posts from users about how much they suck. So I will say, they don’t suck. They work their keesters off for us. And I at least appreciate them for it.
So complain. Be Upset. Shout it from the rooftops of every forum thread you find. I wouldn’t stop you even if I could. I’ll simply point out that those are people you’re complaining at, not some faceless system.
PS-You might be interested in this, you might not. But I’ll link it anyway for those who might care:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/bugs-support/69382-mythic-odysseys-of-theros-issues-and-support?comment=37
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
I certainly agree with not attacking the staff. The messenger should generally never be victimized.
But I do think constantly saying "they're working on it" is unhelpful, because they've been saying this for so long, about so many things. I get that they're not WotC, that they don't make the decisions, but I have to say, I used to be a big fan of and indeed proponent of Beyond, and even an evangelist about it on other forums, encouraging people to use it, clearing up outdated info or misperceptions, but of late I've been pretty disenchanted by three things:
1) Constant "we're working on it" about pretty much everything, including stuff that really should be fairly easy to do, and that they keep suggesting they've made now possible.
2) A serious lack of transparency. Saying "we're working on this!" is only transparent if it's meaningful. And to be meaningful you have to give some kind of intended timeline, even if you might fail to meet this. I work in a development role. I know that things slip. Sometimes by months. I have to communicate constantly and transparently with the people at the multi-billion-dollar business I work at. I can't say "I'm working on it!" and refuse to give any timeline, and I'm not impressed with businesses that do that.
3) The complete lack of effort put into temporary solutions or workarounds performed by the Beyond team.
It's 3 that's really, really bad for me, and that has pushed me from fan/evangelist re: Beyond to mildly negative feeling and considering my subscription and whether I should buy further products here. Theros has the problem worse than any other product.
Supernatural Gifts are the perfect example. I get that they don't have the systems in place to do them properly. I do understand that. I've been in that situation, it sucks. But they have two clear workarounds, and they've intentionally failed to do either. Those being:
A) They could have simply created a number of Feats which mimic the Supernatural Gifts. This would have taken one team member a few hours at most - likely a lot less time than that if they were experienced at implementing content via Feats. Then they could have made those Feats available to Theros purchasers.
If they'd done that, I'd literally have nothing to say on this issue. It's a workaround, but they would have showed good faith by implementing a simple workaround that they had available to them. This is exactly the kind of thing I have to do in my work.
B) Failing that, they could have allowed players to create and share copies of the the Supernatural Gifts as Feats. This would require absolutely no effort from them. Then, once they had Supernatural Gifts working properly, they could have disallowed these Feats from the sharing. Thus there would have been no loss to them.
Instead, they went the opposite way, and showed active bad faith, in my opinion. They outright intentionally blocked Feats which replicate Supernatural Gifts from being shared. Therefore, to use these features in Beyond, a DM has to both know how to work the homebrew system well enough to replicate all the Supernatural Gifts, themselves, but they also have to put in wasted and unnecessary time and effort to do that, themselves. Now, I'm pretty good with the homebrew stuff, I've even created subclasses and so on, which have worked, but I can't figure out how to do all the stuff in Supernatural Gifts, and there's no real documentation of the actual syntax and functionality of the homebrew system anywhere I can find (sometimes it is mentioned in passing in the "guides", but they're pretty superficial and only cover obvious stuff). I'd have to research this by creating loads of homebrew copies of loads of subclasses and races to work out how stuff is done.
And that's really bad. That's what's really killing my opinion of Beyond here. Not only did they decide not to do that (minimal) work themselves, they stopped anyone else doing it for others.
(As an aside, I feel like right now, I'm paying the Beyond team to develop stuff that I don't want or need or benefit from, like the dice, whilst they fail to provide functioning versions of stuff I am literally buying off them - this is not a small amount of money, either - it's hundreds of dollars of books with a subscription that's been running for three years for me now. I feel like the priorities have to absolutely be on making WotC content work, but right now it certainly looks like that's a secondary priority, even if that appearance is deceiving.)
And if you follow this link you will have answers as to why those two workarounds you suggested are unfortunately not actually practical. I hope it is informative.
https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/bugs-support/69382-mythic-odysseys-of-theros-issues-and-support?comment=37
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
I read the link. It's a response to my post! It doesn't explain that both are "not practical". In fact, in shows that the Beyond team creating them as Feats would have been perfectly practical, just not ideal. They didn't actually need to identify them as "not Feats". That's not a real requirement - that's an artificial requirement. Deciding not to do something is not the same as it not being practical or possible.
This supports what I'm saying, frankly - the Beyond team have taken certain decisions, which they own, which have resulted in unhappy customers. Their calculation is clearly that the short-term or immediate harm caused by failing to do anything to support certain official WotC features will be balanced out by the long-term gain from getting the material out quickly, and selling books, and from things like selling dice. I accept that they also "want" to do the features "right" in "future", but look at all those quotation marks. It's not even certain that they ever will implement Supernatural Gifts, Piety or the like. They probably will, eventually, but will it be in two weeks, in which case this will all be a funny footnote, or two months, which would be pretty annoying, or a year or more? Which would be downright unacceptable. I would genuinely cancel my sub at that point. I'm considering it now. If it hit three months or so from now with nothing from Character Variants or Theros working, I probably will. There are other exciting RPGs out there, and I know my group would play them.
My feelings exactly. If I constantly told my boss I was "working on it" without a timeline, I'd be looking for a new job. It's great that they've got a public road map of the planned features, but without public dates it's worthless. Just as frustrating is finding something that doesn't work right, searching the forum for confirmation, and finding the error was "mentioned to the devs' years ago, and still isn't fixed. I'm a broken record on this issue, but I mean the Bag of Holding still isn't functional. Just... how?
I mean, Supernatural Gifts like blessings and charms as well as epic boons were all part of the DMG. Supernatural gifts should have been added after feats and multiclassing, but before other optional rules like encumbrance.
The only mostly new mechanic in Theros is piety and the spells granted by it. Though that is not too dissimilar from company positions from AI or Guild renown in GGtR. Which are themselves based on renown introduced in the DMG.
So there isn't really anything new that DDB didn't already need to add since the beginning. As far as I can think of, the only new mechanics that would need to be changed since the DMG was spell list changes for backgrounds and races and modifiers for renown ranks.
Well yeah, but now it’s moved from “optional” to “kinda mandatory” as it were.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting