GrandPyromania: Hey I'm that guy! I'm also the person in charge of Drops.
So I'll be honest: the Pact feats were definitely inspired by the Eberron feats (in that they're their own "thing" and category of feat) but the intent wasn't to be overtuned; but a few of the feats ended up that way. I think you can probably see that a lot of the options since then almost veered in the opposite way of being a bit conservative in their power-level. It's a tricky balance to be sure.
The beauty of being making this available digitally is that we can respond to feedback in real-time and adjust accordingly (unfortunately, the books have a much longer lead time).
As cheesy (and corporate) as it sounds, frank and honest feedback like what's in this thread (and naturally, all the others threads that praise or condemn Drops) is going a LONG way toward calibrating and understanding what the community want to see out of Drops.
D&D Beyond Drops should be focused on updating old stuff to 5.5E. Unfortunately, they're doing this the other way around.
GrandPyromania: I'll be honest - I have a strong reticence about doing this with Drops. I'm not against it by any means, but I (personally) don't think it feels great if we're just rehashing a lot of what 5e has already done and just updating it to 5.5e. I can see the appeal for sure, but I think there's a lot more in D&D's history (from older editions) that we can bring forward (that the current product roadmap) isn't able to do due to scope or making sense within what the books offer. The para-elementals are a great example of that (imo).
I'm not against paying for new content, but you absolutely should not lose access to it once you've paid for it. If D&D Beyond Drops is supposed to be analogous to Dragon Magazine from back in the days of yore, in that that's where we get additional content, we need to be able to keep our copies of the magazine, not be required to continually pay for it.
GrandPyromania: That's a totally fair take! We saw this feedback a LOT, and it's why we're offering a standalone SKU after a full year of Drops. Frankly, we aren't offering it sooner because it doesn't feel great to be like "hey, here's a month of content" vs. "hey here's an entire year of content". Like Brian (the Executive Producer in charge of DDB as a whole) said in a recent(ish) blogpost:
WOTC_BrianPerry: We will commit to releasing at least yearly D&D Beyond Drops bundles on the D&D Beyond marketplace every year (in May), covering the previous year’s content and purchasable for all players. We will commit to releasing at least yearly D&D Beyond Drops bundles on the D&D Beyond marketplace every year (in May), covering the previous year’s content and purchasable for all players. We have ways to further augment this with player feedback. For now, I wanted to make that baseline commitment clear.
I'm hopeful that with announcements like that blogpost and with the change in our stance with allowing Drops content to be shareable with Master tier subscribers, we're putting in effort to show that we're willing to listen to the community, but I fully accept that trust is earned, not given.
Yeah I've just said no to anything in the drops. It'll be nice to see them in a purchasable format but I doubt it'll be physical so therefore I don't care for it
GrandPyromania: Being totally honest here: printing stuff is expensive. On top of that, we're only on month 3 of Drops! I want to see it happen (as a D&D nerd how cool would it be to see this thing that I'm helping run be in a physical format?!), but there are the unfortunate realities we have to contend with. I am trying though!
That said - I also want to be clear: nothing in Drops is exclusive to it. There's nothing preventing Drops content from appearing in a future physical product - it's just a matter of timing and whether it lines up with the product itself. The para-elementals are a great example - they probably wouldn't have made sense in Ravenloft: The Horrors Within, but if there's a product in the future that could utilize Drops content, the game design team have no qualms about doing so!
I'd rather see a book a couple times a year than this.
GrandPyromania: FWIW (I've said that phrase way too many times in this thread), but Drops isn't intended to replace the books - it's intended to supplement, complement, and explore things in D&D's lore that the books aren't able to (usually due to the scope of the book or just the timing of it).
So if hypothetically (and assuming I'm doing everything legitimately as intended) I've built a character which uses even a single subscriber-only option, then for the life of that character I have to pay the subscription.
GrandPyromania: For what it's worth - this isn't fully accurate. It was imperative to me that if someone unsubscribes that we don't brick their character sheet (because that's dumb). Basically what happens:
Someone unsubscribes with Drops content on their character sheet.
They can continue to use the Drops content in their character sheet without any issues. If they click on a Drops spell, they'll see it as normal (full text and all, and any effects it would have on the character sheet would continue to function like normal).
(Continuing my example, let's pretend they're a Cleric or Druid). They unprepare/remove the spell from their character sheet.
If they try to re-add it (or any other Drops content) to their character sheet they wouldn't be able to add it because they don't have access to that content anymore.
WOTC_Zac: Great feedback. We already have a ticket for updating the Z index- which is fancy speak for "the token toolbar should be on top of everything else." Will be getting to that shortly.
Also love the idea of putting more information in there. We have a couple other ideas we're exploring about how to communicate information like that but as a fallback it could live there.
Finally, which you didn't call it out but others have and they might see this thread so this is for you all. We've also heard a lot of feedback about it being significantly larger than the old menu bar, which introduces some new UX problems even though the functionality around when it opens is exactly the same. We're going to do an exploration shortly about how we could slim it down and make it a little bit more compact.
Part of the reason it is the size it is, is we're building in room for things like condition tracking, which obviously doesn't exist now but we needed to design in room for it. so there are just some extra empty spaces right now that will get filled soon. In general I do think that this could get compacted a little bit and it would make for a better experience so feedback heard! We're looking into it.
The ability to rename a map after it has been added.
WOTC_Zac: Yeah, fair. :) we have a lot of improvements coming to that particular component. Renaming and reordering are definitely on the list.
The ability to edit a campaign note after it has been created.
WOTC_Zac: If you are referring to Journal entries, you're currently using our "MVP", or minimum viable product, of that feature. Click the link at the top of the Campaign Journal to learn more about our release strategy and roadmap for this feature, but I will say you won't have to wait very long for editing. :)
WOTC_Zac: This seems to be a bug in the new directx drivers. Go to chrome://flags and select D3D11 WARP in the ANGLE section. That should resolve it.
We'll look into it soon - it's a tough one because our current best understanding is it only impacts certain hardware, and it's a result of the driver update. In the short term, non-chromium based browsers do not appear impacted (like Firefox). We'll see if there's anything we can do on our side though.
Not sure if this is on your radar, but for the love of God can we pretty pretty please just get a quick toggle for turning Barbarian rage on and off? (edit: On Maps)
WOTC_Zac: This is the sort of thing that will be easy once our new game engine rebuild is done, and it's exactly why we're spending a huge amount of effort on that project.
I'm liking the (Journals) formatting. Can it be available on the initial entry box?
WOTC_Zac:gets on soapbox. Clears throat.
Software can either generally be "opinionated" (like iOS) or "unopinionated" (like Android). There's A Way it wants you to do things, or it lets you do things All Sorts Of Ways.
There are pros and cons to both approaches.
Generally, we want to support people in playing any way they want to play (leaning towards unopinonated). The Quick Jot modal for Journals, however, I very intentionally wanted to be opinionated. That feature is designed to be fast, seamless, let you dip in, type a little, hit enter, then get back to playing your game. This encourages DMs to focus on playing the game and engaging with their players rather than getting sucked into formatting in the middle of their session.
If we add formatting to the Quick Jot menu, it encourages DMs to do exactly that - add a bunch of formatting in the middle of the game. That's stealing their focus, taking them out of the game, and distracting them from engaging with players.
Editing lets you add new entries straight from the Campaign Journal view (that didn't make it into the video but it shipped today too) and add formatting there if you want it.
Some people may want formatting in Quick Jot, and they might be frustrated we aren't going to do it, but I truly the best version of this feature is sticking as closely as possible to that "light, frictionless, fast" experience. Which means no formatting there.
By the gods, a dev who's thought of the design philosophy of the thing they are working on? You're singlehandedly making me excited again about D&d Beyond development.
WOTC_Zac: I think that's doing a disservice to a lot of extremely talented people on the D&D Beyond team. As the PM for Maps, I certainly benefit from Maps being built on an entirely new technology platform.
The Maps team has a lot of flexibility that my peers, who are working on a 10-year old platform that was forked off a different platform that was already 10 years old at the time, do not have.
That's why we're deep underway in our Game Engine rebuild project.
when the backend rebuild is completed, will that have any effect on existing homebrew items? i use a LOT of homebrew myself and it'd be really convenient for it to still be compatible.
1. Your two Qs here are very inter-related. The backend rebuild is progressing along! It's a long behind-the-scenes process. To the point of rolling it out in stages, once its rebuilt, we start adding features to it. So, rebuilding Homebrew tools is definitely on the list in the future!
i love the current character sheet, but i've definitely noticed the shift in aesthetic for the homepage, library, and quickbuilder. will this shift in aesthetic extend to character sheets as well?
2. We are definitely working on the future of character play. No plans currently to change the aesthetic of the current Character Sheet. We understand above all else it needs to serve its play utility well.
WOTC_Randy: Hello there! At the moment, early access is something we offer only for select first-party releases, so this third-party title won't have an early access period ahead of its release. Thanks for the question though. It help us understand what kinds of release experiences the community is looking for.
Got an email from WotC asking me to "join the Wizards of the Coast Dungeon Master (DM) Research Panel". Is it legit?
WOTC_Zac: Yes, it's legit. It's sourced from people who submitted their information to our survey in this post from December.
We've been contacting portions of this list for various pieces of feedback, and we're adding some new feature testing capabilities to our toolchest with this invite.
WOTC_Zac: The changelog is for new features, improvements, and bug fixes that are released to the general public. Our work on the new game engine wouldn't go in there because we haven't shipped anything to the public yet.
That being said there's a huge amount of work going on in the background.
I'll drop any bits to say that I appreciate that you're here, and that you guys are doing everything you can to perform community outreach and to give transparency on your jobs for the community.
I hope this is something you are wanting to do, and not something your managers have dictated you have to do. If it's the latter, I feel like this community has metastasized into a toxic fandom, and the internet & the hobby would be better if it no longer existed.
WOTC_Zac: I'm here because I love this game and want to make the best tools possible to support other people who love this game.
I am glad someone finally asked “when the backend rebuild is completed, will that have any effect on existing homebrew items?” That is something I have long been wondering. I am a bit concerned that other parts of the poster’s question were answered, but there was not a commitment to ensuring compatibility with existing content. While I recognize they have not started work on that part of the system, a “we have not started on the homebrew system, but we do intend backwards compatibility to be a core element of our design process” or such language would go a long way toward alleviating concerns their rebuild might break what is already there.
I imagine the more likely thing is conversion. They're going to have to convert all their stuff anyway so applying the same tool to homebrew should be a straightforward process.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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(Two Weeks of posts as the forums were down all last weekend)
Previous Week: https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/general-discussion/241212-reddit-posts-and-comments-from-wotc-staff-for-the
Sources:
Posts:
Comments:
Drops
https://www.reddit.com/r/onednd/comments/1ulvruo/comment/ov97t6g/
https://www.reddit.com/r/onednd/comments/1ulvruo/comment/ov996ix/
https://www.reddit.com/r/onednd/comments/1ulvruo/comment/ov9ar9k/
https://www.reddit.com/r/onednd/comments/1ulvruo/comment/ov9d9ns/
https://www.reddit.com/r/onednd/comments/1ulvruo/comment/ov9ca79/
Maps Changes
https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1u6ykj9/comment/orwbmq6/
https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1uabuto/comment/osn2gsa/
https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1ubawnc/comment/osvropk/
https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1u6q09i/comment/osxyqtj/
https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1uflek6/comment/ott6co6/
https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1uflek6/comment/otzp35u/
General Comments
https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1uflek6/comment/otyz2uq/
https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1ufg7pq/comment/otstksh/
https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1udnh3m/comment/otdmi7h/
https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1ujw8p3/comment/ourf61p/
https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1u5bo9b/comment/orsdzde/
https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1u6u8g2/comment/orwezxm/
https://www.reddit.com/r/onednd/comments/1ufut0z/comment/ou9bh2a/
I am glad someone finally asked “when the backend rebuild is completed, will that have any effect on existing homebrew items?” That is something I have long been wondering. I am a bit concerned that other parts of the poster’s question were answered, but there was not a commitment to ensuring compatibility with existing content. While I recognize they have not started work on that part of the system, a “we have not started on the homebrew system, but we do intend backwards compatibility to be a core element of our design process” or such language would go a long way toward alleviating concerns their rebuild might break what is already there.
Once again, thanks for posting!
I imagine the more likely thing is conversion. They're going to have to convert all their stuff anyway so applying the same tool to homebrew should be a straightforward process.