Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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D&D Beyond StaffI won't talk for anyone else (because I'm not them), but a lot of it ends up depending on what I've got going on that day, whether I notice stuff that makes sense for me to answer, etc.
First and foremost: I'm primarily a lurker. It's kind of difficult for me to shake that instinct, but I'm trying harder to do so.
Secondly: It's not as much of a "I'm ignoring the forums on purpose" as it is "it's hard for me to catch the places on the forums where it would make sense for me to chime in and respond". That said - I do agree with you in that I can be making a better effort to spend more time on the forums to answer stuff around Drops (or other DDB stuff that I'm able to talk about/answer). I'll make a better effort to talk to y'all here!
I get the anxiety, and just explaining yourself does go a long way.
You don't even have to be the one that talks to us if you don't want, it is just that we kinda want someone to.
It really didn't help that people kept speaking on your behalf as self-appointed guard dogs.
It is one thing to be told "No" by a person themselves, and another to be chided for wanting to hear from someone at all.
Hope you find it warm here. And don't worry about rushing into it all at once.
He/Him. Loooooooooong time Player.
The Dark days of the THAC0 system are behind us.
"Hope is a fire that burns in us all If only an ember, awaiting your call
To rise up in triumph should we all unite
The spark for change is yours to ignite."
Kalandra - The State of the World
Next Week: https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/general-discussion/242172-reddit-posts-and-comments-from-wotc-staff-for-the
Without hard numbers take this with a grain of salt, but IME sites like Reddit and Discord get way more engagement than here (traditional message boards seem to be going the way of BBS). But as long as there's some kind of compilation or link to anything important similar to what perringaiden is helpfully putting together that would be enough for me!
Your own site should ALWAYS be the primary source for information. If you want to share it elsewhere for a larger reach, that's perfectly ok, but your own site should ALWAYS be the primary source. Using a third party source as the primary drives traffic AWAY from your site, not towards it. Why would a company ever want to drive traffic away from their own site, to someone else's site, making them the go to place for info on YOUR product?
I, for one, refuse to use Reddit for just that reason (and many others). If a company won't communicate through their OWN site, then why do they have a site to begin with?
If DnDBeyond is the official D&D Digital Toolset, and D&D's official site for all things D&D - then (please don't take this the wrong way)... act like it.
Here's putting it a different way... if the owners won't use their own site, why would anyone else?
I used caps to draw attention to certain words, and I mean this post as friendly advice from someone who has run online communities and helped businesses do the same.
Playing D&D since 1982
Have played every version of the game since Basic (original Red Box Set), except that abomination sometimes called 4e.
It occurred to me last night that a good way to do this ( Besides Hiring Perringaiden which I am also for ) is return to announcing the Reddit AMAs then porting and summarizing them in the Announcement section, and maybe also temporarily pinning them in general, like the Live play announcement is, with links to each one in a little directory style thread.
That way there are records easily accessible if we want to check later.
That way Pyromania can interact on the platform they are most comfortable with. (Again they don't have to be the one that interfaces with us if they aren't comfortable)
it would be nice for someone to interact with from the community team, but as long as the information gets to us without effort from non-staff users needing going above and beyond to make it happen.
I know there are other places, like the Discord, but as someone who used to be a fixture on the discord, it was a lot of Promises that went unfulfilled, promises to tell us things that we never got told, communications getting drowned out or removed on a whim and some frankly disgusting behavior that that mods allowed and even sometimes indulged in.
Also there was often important information posted in channels or threads that were then purged wholesale, something that seems to happen less frequently on the forums.
the Forums are just better, easier to navigate and reference when collating information.
He/Him. Loooooooooong time Player.
The Dark days of the THAC0 system are behind us.
"Hope is a fire that burns in us all If only an ember, awaiting your call
To rise up in triumph should we all unite
The spark for change is yours to ignite."
Kalandra - The State of the World
Yeah, this is what I was going for. Just some announcement (could be on the home page) that it's coming up, with a link to it when it happens.
Honestly, I started doing this because
https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1t6f0pe/comment/okok297/
but then nothing came of it. Even just a paid employee doing this would help.
I don't really agree with any of this, especially given I've been using DDB since it launched. DDB is a toolset, not the everything D&D site and companies have been using third-party platforms to host news and reach the community since internet year dot. It's how things are done. You promote through X and instagram. You stream on twitch and host videos on youtube. You do AMAs on Reddit (reddit coined the term AMA). You'd be surprised how many people who use DDB do so exclusively for the tools, never touch the forums, and even skip over the homepage. Almost everyone I've ever met bookmarks the characters page or the campaign page and never navigates to the DDB homepage.
It's the same for Foundry and Fantasy Grounds and Roll20. They have blogs and articles, sure, but they seem to get the vast majority of their engagement through off-site platforms like Reddit. It's just how the internet has and does work. You asked a question that seemed at first blush very silly:
To host the DDB toolset? The site doesn't exist to facilitate articles or the forums or news, those are ancillary aspects.
Like, I'm not saying people are "wrong" to want the information centered here, I just don't agree with that notion because I don't think it makes sense from a practical perspective.
Find my D&D Beyond articles here
Just to back up the bit about people using the tools and skipping everything else everyone I play with uses DDB for character sheets and character creation but almost exclusively use the app. I’m not even sure if most of them realise there even is a website behind it. They’ve all heard of Reddit though