Reddit: AMA with Brian Perry & DDB Team Members on August 19th

Questions and Answers from the AMA yesterday.

Note: This is not all responses copied.  Just the ones that hold interesting information without repeats.

Are there any plans to add Map rotation? Would be useful for people who play on a large tv at a table.

WOTC_Zac: It's on our quality of life features backlog! Definitely can see plenty of uses for this.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1vrub9i/comment/p4nlxc6/

hi all! thank you so much for your time. i've been very happy with the direction of D&D Beyond.

this may have been answered elsewhere, but with the backend rebuild, can we expect some of the functionalities mentioned for the app to be brought to desktop character sheets as well? condition and Concentration tracking are the two that leap to mind.

i think it was mentioned before that, like most of the new stuff, the results of the backend rebuild will be rolled out in stages. can we get an idea of what those stages might be, or is it still too early days to say?

WOTC_BrianPerry: Yes, let's talk about those stages and when we're hitting web.

The good news is the new game platform is finally working with real data. We're playing with it and testing it out. The GIF from our article in the game platform section is what's happening behind the scenes of how every rule component is set in a hierarchy for a single level 1 character.

It's going to take us a while to get every single rule across 5E/5.5E working in the new game platform. We can build way faster than before and we can now support any game mechanic. But its still a large chunk of work that will take us longer than we all want it to be.

So rather than wait another year+ to ship this new platform when every rule is working in it, we want to give players something to play around with and run experiences faster. The first release of the play experience will be a more limited set of character options to play with. And then from there we'll continue to add more content, learn from players, and iterate.

We wanted to start with mobile for the first release because it needs the most love and we think can help people playing in-person. Web players won't have to wait long though! We want to get to web probably after just a few early milestone releases.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1vrub9i/comment/p4nl61l/

• Can you describe the stages of rollout and general readiness of the character rebuild work in-progress?
• What will be the user experience of the DM scene prep capability? How does the DM interact with it? Can the text be imported/exported? Will it be automatically set up for existing campaign modules?

WOTC_BrianPerry: Yes, I can!

The new game platform and rules engine is now in early testing up with very limited real data (a Level 1 Halfling Charlatan Rogue). The challenge ahead of us is this is a new game platform built from the ground up. Now, every rule from across 5E/5.5E will need to be actualized in the platform. This is a lengthy process. What we decided to do is instead of toiling away in our corner for the next year+ fully actualizing every rule in the new game platform, we want to deliver experiences more quickly.

Where we are going to start is with a play experience that has a more limited character feature set. These will be well-suited for anyone new to old who is looking for fun low-level play experiences. We then learn and continue to improve the experience with your feedback. At the same time, the rate at which we bring in more character options will continue. So, over time we get from a new play experience with a limited set of player options to supporting full levels 1-20 of play.

I'll also add that we are starting with the mobile experience, both because that needs the most love and can best help in-person play. And very quickly we will get to bringing this new play experience to web as well.

On scene prep, DMs will now be able to drop pins on a Map, set those up as scenes, and write whatever notes you want to reference during play. We have content structured in a format to prompt how you might write your notes. This is a editable text box that you can use however you want to play. We are launching scene prep really soon, so you'll be able to test it out yourself in a matter of weeks!

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1vrub9i/comment/p4nowdy/

Can we get the ability to add a grid/hex overlay on uploaded gridless maps, rescale the token boundaries on already uploaded maps, and rename/sort already uploaded maps in the drop-down menu?

Can we get the ability to layer stickers how we want them to appear instead of having things get buried under other stickers?

Also, can we get a typeable text box blank for VTT?

WOTC_BrianPerry: All good suggestions for u/WOTC_Zac and the Maps team. We want to make sure everything we ship on Maps feels intuitive and easy. We're building a Honda Acord, not an F16. Some of these features we have thought about, if we can deliver things in a more intuitive way.

Follow-up question on the typable text box: have you played around with our new Journals feature where you can type and edit notes during play? If you're talking about typable text blocks right within Maps, Scene Prep (coming soon) will be your friend!

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1vrub9i/comment/p4nn1f5/

Are we going to continue seeing content creators who aren't willing to exclusively release their content for 2024 shunned from your platform? Or any third-party content creators outside of a tiny circle that dominates the platform with the same kind of repetitive content?

Many people playing the game disagree that the "5.5e" revision is an improvement to the game, and they're skeptical of WotC continuing to support the game they've paid to play on DDB, especially with the walked-back attempt to remove 5e support from the site. Couple that with third-party works that were created for 5e being released exclusively for 5.5e on your site, and people are rightfully feeling alienated by a refusal to let them have access to content they'd happily pay you money for.

A lot of people are even more skeptical about where WotC is taking the game after the GenCon convention, and if WotC plans to give less support to 5e owners and diverse creators while giving official support to what are effectively Mike Mearls's house rules for yet another edgy grimdark setting, I don't think there's a bright light at this "new dawn of D&D" your convention of white men are heralding.

WOTC_BrianPerry: I'm going to try and answer your questions in three parts. Let me know if I missed any points.

1. Do we plan to continue to support 5E play and not just 5.5E play? YES. While the majority of D&D Beyond players are now playing in 5.5E campaigns, there's still a sizeable chunk sticking with 5E. We continue to support 5E releases from bug squashing to thinking about it in all the tools we are planning out. For instance, the new Quick Builder fully supported 5E build options from day 1. We want to support all the ways you want to play.

2. Why is a lot of 3P content different on D&D Beyond? Right now, the D&D Beyond backend limitations (what we are rebuilding) means there is a lot of third-party content we can't support on our site and we've learned players don't want more hacky approaches. That has caused us to work with partners on releasing the kinds of content that can be supported and fully integrated into character builder and character sheets. Thats the honest reason for the differences.

3. Why is a lot of 3P content built for 5.5E play? Ultimately we make these decisions in partnership with creators. Because the majority of players are now playing in 5.5E games, more creators want to serve them. Not all, however. Heliana's Guide part 2 which released earlier this year was built for 5E play. Its a partner-by-partner decision.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1vrub9i/comment/p4nvtzu/

So happy with the changes made this year! Any plans on bringing map quickplay and/or Scene Prep to older adventures such as Curse of Strahd or partnered content like Crooked Moon?

WOTC_Zac: We go back and add to old releases from time to time. For instance, we just released the maps for Tales from the Yawning Portal onto the VTT earlier this week! (There was a technical issue with them that took a while to solve.)

We'd love to bring Scene Prep to some of our back catalogue! Realistically, it won't be the entire 5e back catalogue—that's a lot of adventures, many of which don't get a ton of play anymore. We want to spend our time bringing enhanced support to what people are playing now.

That looks like the Drops Weekly Encounters, new books and adventures, and the most popular ones from the back catalogue.

If there's anything specific you'd like to see, let us know!

WOTC_BrianPerry: Definitely in the future! What we first want to do is try out the scene prep format we are using for D&D Beyond Drops Storied Encounters when they roll out really soon.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1vrub9i/comment/p4nrzit/

I know that DDB Maps is all about simplicity and keeping the entry difficulty level low, but is there a plan or rumblings of potentially adding an "advanced" setting that allows more options like line of sight and lighting?

WOTC_Zac: Dynamic lighting is a very hot-button topic! Lots of people ask for it, but it adds a lot of fiddliness and complexity. I've heard from just as many people who are happy we don't have it.

If we ever do build a dynamic lighting feature, it's going to be our own take on it that aligns with our product philosophy (Honda Accord, not F-16. Anyone should be able to sit down and immediately understand how to start playing. Something that facilitates you playing and gets out of the way, and doesn't become another job the DM has to manage), not something that requires 1000 clicks to place every wall, window, curtain and doorway.

We've experimented with a few approaches internally, but haven't quite found anything that cracked it yet.

And ultimately, it's lower on the priority list than the SO MANY things we want to do to help DMs with prep and play. If we find a way to do it that is simple and intuitive, we may be more interested in the future.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1vrub9i/comment/p4nopf7/

Will you implement the Player Journal in the Mobile App?

WOTC_Zac: Definitely something we want to do!

Different teams own the Mobile app and the Character Sheet, and each team has their own roadmaps. So we'll work with them to find opportunities to bring Journals to those other platforms.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1vrub9i/comment/p4nqdmb/

A few questions for the encounter builder - doubling as a wishlist, I guess:

1: Will we have an option for only searching for 'owned/shared content'?

2: Will we be able to rename monsters for the combat?

3: Will we be able to fully remove/add monsters to the combat while it's going on (or make slain monsters clutter the initiative less)?

4: Will we be able to adjust monster statblock stats/abilities/actions before or during combat?

5: Will we be able to search/filter for 'imposes (e.g.) WIS saves', 'imposes (e.g.) prone/stunned condition'.

6: Will the site remember our preference for how our list of encounters are sorted (or standardize filtering by date made, descending, which I assume most people would want)?

WOTC_BrianPerry: We're figuring some of this out right now. I'll say our starting point is the current encounter manager within Maps, which provides simpplicity and flexibility for on-the-fly changes. I'm pretty sure the answer will be YES to at least questions 1-4.

I'm not sure what your question #5 is referring to with searching for saving throws and conditions. Maybe if you could give an example?

I don't think we have an answer to #6 yet, but I appreciate the request!

Currently, we can filter monsters by what they are immune to, and what saves they are proficient in, but not what they might test the players in :)

WOTC_BrianPerry: Ohhh, gotcha you are looking for search that allows you to filter monsters by what kind of saving throws or conditions they can effect. That's interesting. I don't think that's in our search plans right now, but will take that back to the team.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1vrub9i/comment/p4nsc6p/

I see you've got the node-based programming environment you're building in. It makes me wonder if you're going to have a schema or improved programming documentation for the 3rd party publisher side of things to be able to open up the homebrew marketplace for actual paid content? 

WOTC_BrianPerry: The future of homebrew is farther away than we'd like it to be, but when we get there we want it to be a very bright future for many creators! I will say Homebrew and publishing are different and we're not committing to a different publishing plan right now.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1vrub9i/comment/p4npg7n/

My question(s) is about the backend overhaul/upgrade and am curious if there are any updates on revamping homebrew. I currently use it to make custom monsters, feats, items, etc. for my players, but it is super clunky, and very time consuming to use. There are also things I just can't do with it. A second part to this is if we will see more 3P classes from publishers like Loot Tavern with the implementation of the Entity System

WOTC_BrianPerry: You're asking the important question on the one thing I wish we could move so much faster on than we can. We want to reimagine Homebrew, giving the community the power of the new game platform to build everything you can think of for your homebrew campaigns. To get there, we need to get pretty far through the game platform rebuild work.

To your second question, we will be able to do a lot more types of third-party content after the game platform rebuild. I, for instance, have really had fun with the Class and Celestial equipment design Archetype Entertainment did for the Exodus Traveler's Handbook. And that is stuff that we just can't support on today's platform.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1vrub9i/comment/p4nq6qe/

Q: What are the plans for the existing D&D Beyond app? The new player app that is coming in 2027 sounds really cool, but I love the existing one and my players love it, too. It's not only a player app, but a whole library. What will happen with it?

WOTC_BrianPerry: The current play experience is going to be people's primary play experience for a while. And we also know frankly most people don't like change :D

The new play experience is going to start at first with more limited play options, meaning it will have more limited applications. We'll support each in tandem for a long time as we add support for all of 5E/5.5E to the new play experience.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1vrub9i/comment/p4nt4vg/

I have a small set of questions, all of which pertain to homebrew tools.

WOTC_BrianPerry: Homebrew tools will get a lot of love once we have fully stood up the new game platform. That's still going to take a while. When we reimagine Homebrew tools, we're likely starting with the things people hombrew the most: monsters & magic items.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1vrub9i/comment/p4ntkri/

What are the chances of a more player facing custom background support for the 2024 rules?

WOTC_BrianPerry: Definitely something that u/GrandPyromania in particular wants to support when we get to that with the new game platform.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1vrub9i/comment/p4nqbb3/

What does the improved encounter builder assume? Party of 5 no magic items? The challenge we sometimes run into is the "encounter math" says hard or deadly, bit the party breezes through. Part of that is magic items, some is spell choice.

Is there talk of a means to advise the encounter builder that the party has +1 magic weapons. Uses spells like slow or silence, etc to help better calculate appropriate difficulties?

WOTC_Zac: We're still extremely early on in the design process for the new encounter builder. What is important to us is that we understand why people love the existing experience so much and we lean into that more, and then also what ways the existing experience is lacking and address as much as we can.

So with that in mind... tell us what's important to you and we'll factor that in as we design and build!

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1vrub9i/comment/p4nqz35/

A quick small list my players and I made. I know the goal of maps is to be simple and easy for all users. but overall i think this helps everyone and isnt too niche or complicated that drives the main goal away

1. when in combat the current turn creature/player token should be highlighted. because when tokon have names that are too long or custom. it's sometimes hard to tell who is who in combat. as you can't see the "A, B, C" in initiative order or they dont show up since its a custom name.
2. The ability to use a ruler to measure while moving a token. It makes it so much easier and so much faster for combat. sorta like what project sigil did.
3. The dnd beyond app has a list of sorts that shows players senses and passives. Maybe having something like that when the dm clicks there tokon would be nice.
4. These next two are very small and might be niche. One of my players would love to see dynamic lighting implemented. And another ones wants their gifs to play on the tokon. As itll play if i show the art of the creature or play in initiative but not on the tokon itself.

Thanks for answering any of these! My players and i love using MAPS and we appreciate how much effort you put in it. And how it easily allow us to play together even tho we are miles apart from each other.

WOTC_BrianPerry: 

1. Good suggestion! I'm bringing it back to the team.
2. I know exactly what you were talking about and also though the mini movement in Silgil was slick. No plans to change the ruler right now for Maps. But another good suggestion!
3. A quick reference on player key stats for DMs is definitely something we are thinking about with how we can help DMs during play!
4. We're not keen to focus on advanced features like dynamic lighting right now while there is so much still to do to help DMs prep and play. The team has continued to consider if there are more intuitive apporaches to this.
5. GIFs on tokens... not at the moment, but it's an interesting idea!

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1vrub9i/comment/p4nqk58/

How soon will the update to dndbeyonds backend arrive? I'm hoping we can see more content from Mage Hand Press with that. I really want to see their Investigator class on dndbeyond.

WOTC_BrianPerry: As soon as humanly possible and also not as soon as we want it to be. We have to get through actualizing and integrating all of 5E/5.5E rules into the new game platform, which is going to take some time. The first release of the new play experience we showed off at GenCon is planned for early 2027, which is an early release of the game platform. Standing up all the rules is something we'll start jumping into later this year and through 2027. There will be points along the way where we can start to support more and we're working closely with our partners now to plan out what the 2027 third party release schedule could look like.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1vrub9i/comment/p4nu1uw/

I was reading your dev log. You guys mentioned using standard game development methodologies. I'm wondering, how many people are on your team and how many of them have actual game dev backgrounds?

WOTC_LauraT: We are not game devs in the sense you're using, we're distributed systems engineers borrowing architectural patterns from game development and applying them to web services that behave conceptually like a traditional ECS. Instead of arrays, we're storing components as nosql rows. Archetypes are baked at write-time as eventually-consistent bags of related components. Stand-alone search tools like OpenSearch and ValKey help us find what we need, and systems like the Rules Engine act when any component in their archetype changes based changed-data-capture over Event Bridge (for eventual-consistent reads) or by direct API call. Taken together, this gives us an eventually-consistent distributed system that separates state from code, builds entities through composition rather than deep inheritance trees, and is optimized for low read latency. That said, it's quite different from traditional video game development.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1vrub9i/comment/p4nu1uw/

When will I finally be able to only buy one copy of a source material and be able to use it everywhere and at a reasonable price?

The current state of VTT is exhausting. I mainly play in person, I like the physical books (especially the alternative art ones), I have plenty of physical 3rd-party content(that is starting to appear on DDB), and it is very handy to have those. The problem comes when occasionally I try to play online or use DDB for something simple, like creating a character.

See, I bought the books, I already own the content, yet I cannot use it unless I go through the loophole of creating a personal homebrew copy of the official thing, or buy it again.

While DDB offers a digital+physical bundles(20-25% off), but not in my region, therefore it doesn't exist like an option for me and automatically makes it more expensive to buy physical and digital. I have 50-ish official 5E books (missing few adventures), and 11 5E24 books with the upcoming Arcana and WoW books. You can do the math how much I have to spend to get this on DDB.

I know that it costs money to run and develop the platform, the rules engine is very cool feature, but there is absolutely no way to make me buy the same thing twice. I want to be looking forward for the Character Builder 2.0 and the Mobile Player Tool, but I won't be spending close to $2500 in full.

WOTC_LauraT: This is a big challenge on our minds as well, and one that I've been pondering for more than 25 years. Our mission is truly to make it easier to play D&D, together. Anything that makes it harder to play D&D together, we want to solve. We just don't have a good answer yet for how to solve this in a way that is positive for everyone.

WOTC_BrianPerry: Laura said it best here. Our prime focus is on making it easier to play D&D together. We do want to tackle really big problems with good answers. We don't yet have a good answer to this one, but it's always on our minds.

WOTC_LauraT: The current situation puts us in competition with local stores, and we don't see that as good for players or our FLGS community. We have experimented with this in the past with specific stores, and while none of those experiments were successful enough to roll out broadly, we keep learning from them. If more progress is made on this front, we'll be sure to let everyone know.

WOTC_BrianPerry: I'll add to what u/WOTC_LauraT said with specifics. With the release of Ravenloft: The Horrors Within we tried a test across most UK local game stores. We basically did what you are suggesting. We provided codes to get the digital version on DDB for just $10. UK stores could give these to their customers at point-of-sale. This test is still ongoing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1vrub9i/comment/p4o3094/

Are there still plans to overhaul the Discord server's Find a Game process? It is terribly clunky and overly confusing. New people come into the server every 5 minutes, ask about finding a game, get directed to that channel and get overwhelmed or confused and bounce out. 

LaTiaJacquise: Short answer: yes! We are currently in the process of making adjustments to finding a game in the server and reducing some of those friction points. Once they're done, we'll be looking to everyone for their feedback.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1vrub9i/comment/p4nng3o/

With a strict as LucasFilm/Disney is with Star Wars (not allowing PDF of their TTRPG books), how will this affect D&D Beyond with the Star Wars release next year? Will it be available on DDB? Will it be fully functional (I've heard that the LotR book isn't quite fully functional in the character builder)?

WOTC_BrianPerry: You can expect Star Wars to come to D&D Beyond! We don't have more details to share beyond that quite yet.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1vrub9i/comment/p4nuver/

Are there plans to integrate AI into features within DDB? I've heard rumblings of a Rules Helper and that sounds like something that would integrate an LLM. If so, will there be a clear way to turn off AI for anyone who does not want it?

WOTC_BrianPerry: The Rules Assistant was a concept to help streamline play with fast rule search. As we thought about this problem, we realized the more important problem to solve was full site search, which we are working on revamping right now. I can also confirm that site search is using traditional semantic search methods. Not LLM-driven search.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1vrub9i/comment/p4o3ffr/

Can you expand more on the format for Scene Prep. I was interested to see the “Interactions” and “Consequences” sections on the video. As a DM who’s always trying to find the best way to efficiently prep a scene, I’d love to know what you discovered during your research with writers and DMs.

WOTC_BrianPerry: The best thing we can do is get it in your hands! We have idea for how we are formatting scene prep that we want to get player feedback on in the first iteration. We are just weeks away from release of scene prep.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1vrub9i/comment/p4nydd4/

Will there be a TestFlight beta for the D&D Beyond app?

WOTC_LauraT: The mobile experience will be an optional section of the current app, not a new application. We want feedback from as many fans as possible, and are unlikely to gate this behind a Test Flight-style framework.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1vrub9i/comment/p4nvqjs/

Maybe too niche of a request, but a streamlined way to temporarily share a character with someone would be nice. E.g. if you are running a oneshot and want to give players pregens in a way they can use them with D&D Beyond. This can sort of be accomplished now using the campaign feature, but it's clunky for onetime use.

WOTC_BrianPerry: Love the suggestion!

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1vrub9i/comment/p4nyibx/

u/WOTC_BrianPerry - what're your current favorite animes? Saying Dandadan is cheating!

WOTC_BrianPerry: Sentenced to be a Hero.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1vrub9i/comment/p4o1tfk/

Big one this week, thanks for summarising it.

The new app they showed mock footage for looks very interesting and I’m looking forward to trying it. However I’m still worried that they’re focusing too much on players actually playing at the expense of the DM’s who use it to search stat blocks and rules and the players who use it between games to read stuff shared with them. I really hope we don’t end up losing a lot of valuable functionality or worse still end up having to use two apps side my side 

Sounds like there were internal delays on the full site update.

It was supposed to be this year.

But now it's next year.

Wonder what caused the delay(Drops. It's gotta be the panicked reaction to Drops causing a scramble to adjust things...)

I doubt there’s a lot of cross over between the coders designing the new site and the people writing and creating the Drops, certainly not enough cross over that reception for one would delay the other. I suspect it’s the much simpler fact that it’s taken longer than they projected, these types of projects always face delays 

Love the confirmation that the majority have upgraded to 5.5 😎

The Star Wars PDF question was interesting, and highlights an advantage of the DDB platform - it's a form of digital delivery that aligns with the licenseholder's requirements, so we get the convenience instead of being shackled only to pen and paper.

And speaking of digital, I'm surprised to hear there are regions that can't get the digital+physical bundles for some reason. What gives?

Quote from PsyrenXY >>

Love the confirmation that the majority have upgraded to 5.5 😎

The Star Wars PDF question was interesting, and highlights an advantage of the DDB platform - it's a form of digital delivery that aligns with the licenseholder's requirements, so we get the convenience instead of being shackled only to pen and paper.

And speaking of digital, I'm surprised to hear there are regions that can't get the digital+physical bundles for some reason. What gives?

 They took down the international web store and then didn’t replace it so basically unless you’re in North America you can’t get the bundles. Makes those of us who aren’t USAsians feel very loved 

Also I’m happy to hear that 5.5 is doing well, might quiet down some of the naysayers, but since that will be based only on DDB users id be interested to see if the change resulted in a lot of older users just leaving as they felt the site was working against them if they stayed with 5e

Quote from MaedraDawnkeeper >>

Sounds like there were internal delays on the full site update.

It was supposed to be this year.

But now it's next year.

Wonder what caused the delay(Drops. It's gotta be the panicked reaction to Drops causing a scramble to adjust things...)

 It's a huge, complex software project. The big shock is that they ever said it was shipping this year.

And no, it wasn't drops. The amount of infrastructure work involved in changing the way drops shares will have been on the order of negligible.