I'm starting a new campaign here on DNDBeyond. Excited about it. We've created accounts and rolled our characters and successfully linked them up to accounts.

I purchased an adventure that I will use to start the players out... but I noticed that it "shared" the adventure book with my players. This seems counterintuitive. Why would I want to share the adventure book with my players? Wouldn't they be able to see the DM-only information for the campaign they are about to play, or does DNDB restrict the information in the book to only what is relevant?

Thanks in advance.

DDB does not restrict access to the shared book in any way.  Tell your players to please kindly keep their noses out of the adventure they're playing.  And if they spoil themselves anyway, it's not your fault and you have no reason to feel bad about it save for the tarnishing of your own efforts. 

In the campaign's Content Sharing settings, you can disallow access to the adventure book. This will prevent players from reading the book (unless they own it themselves/have access from another campaign) but still give access to the character builder options like magic items and backgrounds.

Really?  Hm.  I didn't know they'd added that functionality.  Good to know.  Thanks for the correction, Naru.

Honestly, I don't see a problem with it (and that's what I think you're asking about).

As far as I can tell, there are two misconceptions about adventures which would make you care about keeping the adventure a secret. The first is about reducing metagaming, and the other is about making sure you don't spoil it for the players (or worse, for you).

Metagaming isn't all bad. I know the YouTubers and Redditers out there typically prey to the no-metgaming Gods out there, but there's both good and bad metagaming. For a severe example, maybe you have a player who's going to play a Legacy Ranger. Legacy Rangers have a ton of stuff based upon where the adventure is set, so choosing wrong means huge swaths of their character never comes up, and a little bit of metagaming can fix that. For a less extreme example, let's look at LMoP and Gaming Proficiencies. SPOILER WARNING: There's an encounter where you can play cards with some bandits. Not Dragonchess, not Bagpipes, but Cards. A ton of adventures don't make it very long, and they might want to have other ways to interact with the world early on, so selecting proficiency in a specific gaming set lets them do this... and it won't hurt your game AT ALL. Heck earlier if they have proficiency in Animal Handling they can feel like a Disney Princess, and leaving that content up to chance is lame, unless that's how the players want to play. Most adventures don't really have a clearly superior strategy to play. It's too "on the rails" for that... so don't worry about the metagame until players are already breaking the game.

Then we get to Spoilers. The entire concept of Spoiling something good is weird. Spoiling means to ruin or make bad... So a bad game/media can't be spoiled because it's already bad, and one that's actually good won't be spoiled by knowing stuff. Besides that, not all people react negatively to spoilers. Some of us (gee I wonder which camp I'm in) would rather have something to look forward to / get excited about than go on blind and numb. For players like this, banning all spoilers isn't making the game ANY better. In all likelyhood they'll be too lazy to spoil anything important. And what all are you afraid of? They know that you need fire to kill a troll? Don't pack only Ice Spells in Hoard of the Dragon Queen? We have myths about that stuff and we don't even live in a world with it! Surely they will too.

In closing: Don't worry about it. In all likelyhood, the player's can't harm the game, and in that extremely rare circumstance that they do, it's their fault and they'll be the one to suffer, not you nor the other players. Hopefully they learn their lesson.

Quote from naruhoodie >>

In the campaign's Content Sharing settings, you can disallow access to the adventure book. This will prevent players from reading the book (unless they own it themselves/have access from another campaign) but still give access to the character builder options like magic items and backgrounds.

well, i read this when i go to my campaign:

"Blocking a source will hide compendium content to prevent players from reading it unless they own it. No options or content will be removed from other tools such as the character builder, character sheet, or encounter builder."

But, i cant actually disable any of the individual sources.  There's no functions at all when i go to "Content Management" other than a list of sources i own

Quote from Wheezal >>

Quote from naruhoodie >>

In the campaign's Content Sharing settings, you can disallow access to the adventure book. This will prevent players from reading the book (unless they own it themselves/have access from another campaign) but still give access to the character builder options like magic items and backgrounds.

 

well, i read this when i go to my campaign:

"Blocking a source will hide compendium content to prevent players from reading it unless they own it. No options or content will be removed from other tools such as the character builder, character sheet, or encounter builder."

But, i cant actually disable any of the individual sources.  There's no functions at all when i go to "Content Management" other than a list of sources i own

 The list of sources should have the following fields: Name, Type, Status, and a toggle. Are you on a mobile phone? You may need to turn it sideways to get everything to show up.

I believe you can turn content sharing off or toggle the digital books you wouldn’t want to share with them

I used to share all of my source books with my players

Until I realized most of them would take it for granted & wound up not even reading the PHB I shared with them

Which became evident during game play 😣 

So now I just (strongly) suggest they purchase their own PHB (hard copy)

Thank you all for the insightful responses. I appreciate your time.

I think as a DM, I would find it valuable to share *some* information from the adventure with my players. For example, if the adventure has a map, it may be useful to share that map with them... or parts of the map as they travel through the area. But I wouldn't want to share encounter-specific information with them.

Since it's an all-or-nothing share and you have to rely on the honor system, that's fine as an answer, but I would hope they make another level of sharing for adventures where you, as the DM, can slow-roll specific pieces of information. For example, the handouts or maps that you can share when that information becomes relevant. That's probably a feature request.

For now, I've turned off sharing with my players since I can't really rely on them not spoiling the adventures for themselves and others (they are newbies and crave "winning" so I'm hoping our first go-around of D&D will temper them, and then I can trust them to make better decisions later).

Note that many books will offer a "Player Version" of things like maps, which have had all the DM-specific information scrubbed off.  You can fetch links to those specific maps and share them without necessarily sharing the entire book.

can you please show me how to do this ? 

Inside the chapter text of your adventure module - not the appendix maps in the back, within the chapters describing the adventure - you'll see buttons below the maps presented in chapters, like this:


Click that button, and it should bring up a clean map you can show players.  Or at least it did in Saltmarsh, which is the only module book I've ever tried to run.