so yeah, even if they could redo this, would they really want to ? its a still a bother to them.
Because it's the easiest way to get both feedback on the product regarding mechanics and its implementation in Ddb.
Its wanted by its consumer base, there are monetization options for it (separate beta tier), directly does its purpose (with testing and feedback for the UA with play, and discussion from these boards), gain data and insights from how it's being used from play, and gets them a leg up on releasing when offical, even more so with the new ownership.
This might of been a good call prior. But now it has weaker justification.
you are using the old arguments and the reason why they had it in the first place... now you should go forward and push that reasoning... why did they remove it ? their reason for removing it was simple... they didn't have any time whatsoever to develop their own stuff and add the stuff... only to have it removed later on because of new stuff or archived stuff. when it comes to homebrew, you can actually do it yourself and itisn't that long to do. so one has to wonder... why would they lose precious time developping something you can already do with their own tools ?
basically what you are asking them, is to do stuff for you cause you are too lazy to do it yourself. again it isn't because they dont want to, they already were working it before... but the reason they stopped ! its a lot of time and effort spent on something that's not gonna stick... its something you will remove about 3 to 4 months later and will have to redesign entirely because of new books coming up. as far as a developpers go, this is hours betterly spend on real books or real features people want.
again its not like its something you cannot do, you can do it with homebrew alone. so why would they spend time and precious hours of work on something you the user, can do yourself ?
also, you are describing beta tests... but UA aren't beta tests. while they pass as such, they are not...they are still design in progress, meaning they can literally be anything else when a book comes out, or literally nothing when they get archived and removed for good.
This is not like games you've been seeing in the last 5 years... those games aren't gonbna go anywhere and as such they can open their betas... here, the game is always changing, they cannot make beta like those video games. because the mechanics might change entirely.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
DM of two gaming groups. Likes to create stuff. Check out my homebrew --> Monsters --> Magical Items --> Races --> Subclasses If you like --> Upvote, If you wanna comment --> Comment
Play by Post Games --> One Shot Adventure - House of Artwood (DM) (Completed)
again its not like its something you cannot do, you can do it with homebrew alone. so why would they spend time and precious hours of work on something you the user, can do yourself ?
You could say this about nearly everything on this site. If nothing was integrated I wouldn't purchase here. UA was one of the main reasons at the time I moved to dndbeyond. Asking millions to do the work of one person and not allowing that work to be shared is crappy. Even if they don't have time it still sucks. I don't believe they are working 24/7 so they probably have time it's just stuff that requires a dev to develop something new they don't have (paid) time for. If your saying it can be done in the homebrew system they should be doing it - even if in their free time and their not getting paid. Their love of the game and community they preach so much should allow them to spend some time on DND outside work. I would do it in a heart beat (I do spend significant time developing things for the dndbeyond community outside work for free). Again this is just for stuff that can already be made in the homebrew tools. New development stuff I understand. Even if I think the stuff they can't get mechanically working they should fill in the text as if it was a paper sheet character but that's less of an issue as copy paste is pretty quick for the masses anyway.
The bare minimum would take 1 person a few minutes, a fully fledged out UA might take a few hours (if already supported by the homebrew system). Now multiply that by potential millions by asking their customers to do it. There's a reason they can sell the integration as a feature of their digital version and why people say it has value to repurchase the content. I and my group personally lost a lot of value on dndbeyond (that was unique to dndbeyond) when they made this decision. Again asking them to allow sharing of UA at a bare minimum should be a possibility now that they are part of WotC.
Yes I want work done for me that's why I use this site to begin with. I wouldn't be using it if I had to buy the phyiscal copies and manually put everything in. The whole value of this site is not having to do that imo.
Stop with the "your just being lazy" excuse because so are the staff in cases where we could do it ourselves. Baring prior/current instruction from wizards that it must be taken down and not sharable. This now feels less applicable since they are a part of WotC but they still take orders from someone.
We're all being lazy it's why I use this site. It's one of it's biggest selling features it literally does make DND easier and it frees up my time to spend doing other things either for my own games or for the community at large. The less time we have to spend doing our own UA is ,per person who intends to use it, hours of time that could go to something more productive for their own games, the community or just their lives in general.
Let me be clear though I do not expect they will do UA anytime soon or ever. I just am no where near on their side of this because they could choose to at least do the bare minimum but their all/perfect or nothing attitude holds this site back a lot in general.
Ofc the big caveat being UA not having perfect integration could be a problem if they were receiving all sorts of feedback from those who lack common sense. If that's the case well.. it's understandable to only want to cater UA to people who will actually read the stuff because they will actually have to to either a) homebrew system it or b)write it down on their character sheet irl.<-- This is, in my mind, the only reasonable reason (that I can think of atm) to block it out completely unless you manually do it yourself.
again its not like its something you cannot do, you can do it with homebrew alone. so why would they spend time and precious hours of work on something you the user, can do yourself ?
You could say this about nearly everything on this site. If nothing was integrated I wouldn't purchase here. UA was one of the main reasons at the time I moved to dndbeyond. Asking millions to do the work of one person and not allowing that work to be shared is crappy. Even if they don't have time it still sucks. I don't believe they are working 24/7 so they probably have time it's just stuff that requires a dev to develop something new they don't have (paid) time for. If your saying it can be done in the homebrew system they should be doing it - even if in their free time and their not getting paid. Their love of the game and community they preach so much should allow them to spend some time on DND outside work. I would do it in a heart beat (I do spend significant time developing things for the dndbeyond community outside work for free). Again this is just for stuff that can already be made in the homebrew tools. New development stuff I understand. Even if I think the stuff they can't get mechanically working they should fill in the text as if it was a paper sheet character but that's less of an issue as copy paste is pretty quick for the masses anyway.
The bare minimum would take 1 person a few minutes, a fully fledged out UA might take a few hours (if already supported by the homebrew system). Now multiply that by potential millions by asking their customers to do it. There's a reason they can sell the integration as a feature of their digital version and why people say it has value to repurchase the content. I and my group personally lost a lot of value on dndbeyond (that was unique to dndbeyond) when they made this decision. Again asking them to allow sharing of UA at a bare minimum should be a possibility now that they are part of WotC.
Yes I want work done for me that's why I use this site to begin with. I wouldn't be using it if I had to buy the phyiscal copies and manually put everything in. The whole value of this site is not having to do that imo.
Stop with the "your just being lazy" excuse because so are the staff in cases where we could do it ourselves. Baring prior/current instruction from wizards that it must be taken down and not sharable. This now feels less applicable since they are a part of WotC but they still take orders from someone.
We're all being lazy it's why I use this site. It's one of it's biggest selling features it literally does make DND easier and it frees up my time to spend doing other things either for my own games or for the community at large. The less time we have to spend doing our own UA is ,per person who intends to use it, hours of time that could go to something more productive for their own games, the community or just their lives in general.
Let me be clear though I do not expect they will do UA anytime soon or ever. I just am no where near on their side of this because they could choose to at least do the bare minimum but their all/perfect or nothing attitude holds this site back a lot in general.
Ofc the big caveat being UA not having perfect integration could be a problem if they were receiving all sorts of feedback from those who lack common sense. If that's the case well.. it's understandable to only want to cater UA to people who will actually read the stuff because they will actually have to to either a) homebrew system it or b)write it down on their character sheet irl.<-- This is, in my mind, the only reasonable reason (that I can think of atm) to block it out completely unless you manually do it yourself.
You know what else is crappy..... All the time spent implementing UA that could have been used fixing content issues that have been around since the PHB. Summon spells and pet companions still have yet to be implemented properly. Containers have only recently been worked on. If so much time hadn't been spent on thrown out content Those features would be done by now.
not to mention "brand damage/confusion" from Ua content. I've seen people get pissed and walk away because they couldn't use Game breaking un-finished UA at AL tables. keeping a clear divide between official finished content and Test material is important. They are now getting better at clearly communicating in the UI what is "legacy" or "Critical role" and that starts to help.
Once those two issues are clearly established maybe we'll get some better ways of using UA but I certainly hope not before.
You know what else is crappy..... All the time spent implementing UA that could have been used fixing content issues that have been around since the PHB. Summon spells and pet companions still have yet to be implemented properly. Containers have only recently been worked on. If so much time hadn't been spent on thrown out content Those features would be done by now.
This is a giant stretch to assume any of that let alone all those features would be done by now based on the UA that is doable in the homebrew tools (what I was focusing on) even if it was all UA I think that's a stretch. If it was building new tools I already said I can see time being an issue for that but it's still a giant stretch to assume the amount of time UA was taking would have made THAT large of an impact. The backlog is gigantic. I wouldn't say there's been a noticeable impact in development speed since they stopped (at least from the view of a user). There's also the possibility that UA gave them a leg up on some features that otherwise would have missed book releases - we don't really know.
If labeling is a problem for the AL community ofc that should be addressed. If dndbeyond had more AL filters/tools I wouldn't complain even though I don't play AL. I don't think everything needs to cater to every audience. Do I think AL tools should come at the expense of other features? No. I feel the same about UA.
I assure you though that even just crowd sourcing it there are plenty of great people in the community that would build UA as best as possible using the tools available. This probably includes some staff/dev/mods. There are ways to implement, as best as possible, a lot of UA without dev time. That's why they are telling us to do it ourselves because it's possible without being a dev for DNDBeyond and that's what I was primarily discussing - along with the DNDBeyond business model relying on us being too lazy to use the homebrew system for everything. A lot of users think that buying things here is worth it for the integration alone even if you already own the books and many are disgruntled when they find out they have to use the homebrew system and don't get stuff for free when they do have the books. Either way the homebrew system is not something most people seem to want to spend their time wrestling - even when it could save them money. I don't think people are just being lazy either as it's a preference to what they spend their time on. No one has unlimited free time and we all have our priorities.
You may disagree about its affect but still 35 UA's have been released Since the creation of dnd beyond. and several were intensive changes to pre determined systems. many of which were simplified along the way and it became easy to implement instead of whole new resources to track and make formulas account for.
If labeling is a problem for the AL community ofc that should be addressed. If dndbeyond had more AL filters/tools I wouldn't complain even though I don't play AL. I don't think everything needs to cater to every audience. Do I think AL tools should come at the expense of other features? No. I feel the same about UA.
I no longer Play AL but the principle stands. a significant amount dms dont want people thinking UA is official or even available for use. Clear distinction is good and brand confusion is bad.
As for the rest I agree, Priorities should be on current content and new content ready to be published at book releases.
We don't know! Maybe. They haven't said anything about it and it's doubtful that they would put it back without having an increase in the size of their team.
The best way they can address this is by making Homebrew tools more extensive. Then they need to make a way for UA to be moved to your Homebrew collection.
The best way they can address this is by making Homebrew tools more extensive. Then they need to make a way for UA to be moved to your Homebrew collection.
which is what they are doing, but they need to redo the entirety of the homebrew section. this is not a bening task. they need to redo the entirety of the thing. they needed to redo the sheet, they needed to redo the database, they needed to redo a lot of stuff... which made homebrew tool a deprecated tool. right now, its on the roadmap. but thats all they can say about it.
they have a lot of other stuff to do.
PS:
you have to know these facts #1 - they dont like the way the leveling up tool worksand thus wants to redo the entirety of how you create characters. #2 - they want to redo the entirety of the homebrew tool which was done really fast on the corner of the table. #3 - they eventually want to create a onster builder based on the homebrew tool, but that can just automatically add stuff for you. #4 - all of the above are projects that are on the back burner for like 4 years at least.
DM of two gaming groups. Likes to create stuff. Check out my homebrew --> Monsters --> Magical Items --> Races --> Subclasses If you like --> Upvote, If you wanna comment --> Comment
Play by Post Games --> One Shot Adventure - House of Artwood (DM) (Completed)
How about now that Wizards of the Coast have a partnership with you.. Will you be adding back Unearthed Arcana?
The answer is: does it get them money?
Jokes aside, no. Its too much of a hassle, and with so much new content coming in, D&D Beyond staff have probably been really struggling behind the scenes.
One thing they could do which would monetize the UA content would be for WoTC to publish an actual HC book titled "Unearthed Arcana" (as was done in earlier editions) and simply make clear that zero content from the book is AL-legal, but is a one-stop-shop where all prior (unofficial) UA content has been collected for those interested in it as either inspiration for homebrew or for use in home games. In this way, UA up to a particular date could be packaged and sold, both in physical copy as well as made available to players through DnD Beyond, but could be tagged herein similarly as CR or Eberron content might be tagged, as "unofficial", such that users would have to switch that content on to make it available in their character sheet.
There are dozens of unused subclasses, races, feats, spells, and rules presented in UA over the past 7(?) years which are more than enough to suffice for a stand-alone product.
One thing they could do which would monetize the UA content would be for WoTC to publish an actual HC book titled "Unearthed Arcana" (as was done in earlier editions) and simply make clear that zero content from the book is AL-legal, but is a one-stop-shop where all prior (unofficial) UA content has been collected for those interested in it as either inspiration for homebrew or for use in home games. In this way, UA up to a particular date could be packaged and sold, both in physical copy as well as made available to players through DnD Beyond, but could be tagged herein similarly as CR or Eberron content might be tagged, as "unofficial", such that users would have to switch that content on to make it available in their character sheet.
There are dozens of unused subclasses, races, feats, spells, and rules presented in UA over the past 7(?) years which are more than enough to suffice for a stand-alone product.
That's not a bad idea, but for the fact that the DMG has many optional rules that aren't supported on D&D Beyond either. So WotC could publish such a book (and you're basically talking about the 3.5e version of a book titled UA; the 1e UA book was much like a Xanathar's or Tasha's).
Also all prior UA for 5e is already freely available in PDF format from WotC anyway, so they should monetize something they've been giving away for the history of the edition?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Now that D&D Beyond is part of wizards the should have a person on the UA team at Wizards be added to make the UA stuff for on here and have a section that input can be given. I honestly don’t know how many people actually test the UA stuff let alone give input about it.
I bet more people would test it out and give input if they could test it out on here and easily give feedback. Plus have someone on the team looking on here to gather said input.
Also all prior UA for 5e is already freely available in PDF format from WotC anyway, so they should monetize something they've been giving away for the history of the edition?
That's obviously part of the consideration for them (as profitability always should be for a company), but I would certainly buy it and I suspect a lot of DMs and players would. Having it all in a single, physical place is simply too convenient.
One thing they could do which would monetize the UA content would be for WoTC to publish an actual HC book titled "Unearthed Arcana" (as was done in earlier editions) and simply make clear that zero content from the book is AL-legal, but is a one-stop-shop where all prior (unofficial) UA content has been collected for those interested in it as either inspiration for homebrew or for use in home games. In this way, UA up to a particular date could be packaged and sold, both in physical copy as well as made available to players through DnD Beyond, but could be tagged herein similarly as CR or Eberron content might be tagged, as "unofficial", such that users would have to switch that content on to make it available in their character sheet.
There are dozens of unused subclasses, races, feats, spells, and rules presented in UA over the past 7(?) years which are more than enough to suffice for a stand-alone product.
bad way of representing it...
WotC has been pretty liberate with the free stuff... now you are telling me they should sell everything including their BETAs, which leads to even more problems wiht people saying the hobby cost too much. their goal is not to make money, they have plenty of already... their goal is to make good tools ! UA doesn't make them good tools. its the inverse, its time passed doing something that is not gonna stay anyway. lost time is what it is.
when it comes to homebrew, my point was that you cna make it there... but guess what you can't make in there ? the exact mechanics. just like sub classes, people can make them, but the mechanics aren't there. this is why they want to redo the whole homebrew tools. but they need time, time they didn't have... between the company buy outs and the number of notes going up the chain and down the chain, everything been down to a crawl already.
as i said often, its been a bother to them since day 1. the same can be said about the homebrew tools, hence why they stopped working on that as well.
the entire thing needs to be rebuild and as the time needed to do that pass by, they realise they have way too much on their plate already. just look at the encounter builder... took them over a year in alpha ! in dev updates they simply said... by the guy responsible for it... "i had it with it, i worked too darn long on it, needed a break !" that should tell people something !
look at AboveVTT development... one could think that having 50+ people workiong on it, they'd already be higher then version 1.0. yet 3 years later they aren't ! you know why, because things aren't as easy as they look. time is what people need, time is the only thing nobody has control over. most of those people also work on other things then DDB. now that they are part of WotC we can see things going forward more... but again... UA is a bother, you dont develop something that is gonna last a month and then get deleted. it still will be the same bother once everything is finished here.
and now to finish this wall of mine... we know big changes to D&D are coming in 2024... thats either 5.5 or 6th edition ! imagine them having to finish everything now before that happen, or finishing here while working on the new stuff from that time. madness i tell you.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
DM of two gaming groups. Likes to create stuff. Check out my homebrew --> Monsters --> Magical Items --> Races --> Subclasses If you like --> Upvote, If you wanna comment --> Comment
Play by Post Games --> One Shot Adventure - House of Artwood (DM) (Completed)
Great to see all the updates today and the latest updates on UA. Would be great to have an option to build this into characters as a toggle (like other content). It would make it easier for me to test with groups who are so embedded on D&D Beyond for tools etc. Trying to get some going back to paper is harder work but I do get the complexities. Would allow for a far more rigorous playtest.
you are using the old arguments and the reason why they had it in the first place... now you should go forward and push that reasoning... why did they remove it ?
their reason for removing it was simple... they didn't have any time whatsoever to develop their own stuff and add the stuff... only to have it removed later on because of new stuff or archived stuff. when it comes to homebrew, you can actually do it yourself and itisn't that long to do. so one has to wonder... why would they lose precious time developping something you can already do with their own tools ?
basically what you are asking them, is to do stuff for you cause you are too lazy to do it yourself.
again it isn't because they dont want to, they already were working it before... but the reason they stopped !
its a lot of time and effort spent on something that's not gonna stick... its something you will remove about 3 to 4 months later and will have to redesign entirely because of new books coming up. as far as a developpers go, this is hours betterly spend on real books or real features people want.
again its not like its something you cannot do, you can do it with homebrew alone. so why would they spend time and precious hours of work on something you the user, can do yourself ?
also, you are describing beta tests... but UA aren't beta tests. while they pass as such, they are not...they are still design in progress, meaning they can literally be anything else when a book comes out, or literally nothing when they get archived and removed for good.
This is not like games you've been seeing in the last 5 years... those games aren't gonbna go anywhere and as such they can open their betas... here, the game is always changing, they cannot make beta like those video games. because the mechanics might change entirely.
DM of two gaming groups.
Likes to create stuff.
Check out my homebrew --> Monsters --> Magical Items --> Races --> Subclasses
If you like --> Upvote, If you wanna comment --> Comment
Play by Post Games
--> One Shot Adventure - House of Artwood (DM) (Completed)
You could say this about nearly everything on this site. If nothing was integrated I wouldn't purchase here. UA was one of the main reasons at the time I moved to dndbeyond. Asking millions to do the work of one person and not allowing that work to be shared is crappy. Even if they don't have time it still sucks. I don't believe they are working 24/7 so they probably have time it's just stuff that requires a dev to develop something new they don't have (paid) time for. If your saying it can be done in the homebrew system they should be doing it - even if in their free time and their not getting paid. Their love of the game and community they preach so much should allow them to spend some time on DND outside work. I would do it in a heart beat (I do spend significant time developing things for the dndbeyond community outside work for free). Again this is just for stuff that can already be made in the homebrew tools. New development stuff I understand. Even if I think the stuff they can't get mechanically working they should fill in the text as if it was a paper sheet character but that's less of an issue as copy paste is pretty quick for the masses anyway.
The bare minimum would take 1 person a few minutes, a fully fledged out UA might take a few hours (if already supported by the homebrew system). Now multiply that by potential millions by asking their customers to do it. There's a reason they can sell the integration as a feature of their digital version and why people say it has value to repurchase the content. I and my group personally lost a lot of value on dndbeyond (that was unique to dndbeyond) when they made this decision. Again asking them to allow sharing of UA at a bare minimum should be a possibility now that they are part of WotC.
Yes I want work done for me that's why I use this site to begin with. I wouldn't be using it if I had to buy the phyiscal copies and manually put everything in. The whole value of this site is not having to do that imo.
Stop with the "your just being lazy" excuse because so are the staff in cases where we could do it ourselves. Baring prior/current instruction from wizards that it must be taken down and not sharable. This now feels less applicable since they are a part of WotC but they still take orders from someone.
We're all being lazy it's why I use this site. It's one of it's biggest selling features it literally does make DND easier and it frees up my time to spend doing other things either for my own games or for the community at large. The less time we have to spend doing our own UA is ,per person who intends to use it, hours of time that could go to something more productive for their own games, the community or just their lives in general.
Let me be clear though I do not expect they will do UA anytime soon or ever. I just am no where near on their side of this because they could choose to at least do the bare minimum but their all/perfect or nothing attitude holds this site back a lot in general.
Ofc the big caveat being UA not having perfect integration could be a problem if they were receiving all sorts of feedback from those who lack common sense. If that's the case well.. it's understandable to only want to cater UA to people who will actually read the stuff because they will actually have to to either a) homebrew system it or b)write it down on their character sheet irl.<-- This is, in my mind, the only reasonable reason (that I can think of atm) to block it out completely unless you manually do it yourself.
How to get your dice to look like the ones in my profile picture and a full site dark mode.
Tutorial thread by Hyrkali
You know what else is crappy..... All the time spent implementing UA that could have been used fixing content issues that have been around since the PHB. Summon spells and pet companions still have yet to be implemented properly. Containers have only recently been worked on. If so much time hadn't been spent on thrown out content Those features would be done by now.
not to mention "brand damage/confusion" from Ua content. I've seen people get pissed and walk away because they couldn't use Game breaking un-finished UA at AL tables. keeping a clear divide between official finished content and Test material is important. They are now getting better at clearly communicating in the UI what is "legacy" or "Critical role" and that starts to help.
Once those two issues are clearly established maybe we'll get some better ways of using UA but I certainly hope not before.
This is a giant stretch to assume any of that let alone all those features would be done by now based on the UA that is doable in the homebrew tools (what I was focusing on) even if it was all UA I think that's a stretch. If it was building new tools I already said I can see time being an issue for that but it's still a giant stretch to assume the amount of time UA was taking would have made THAT large of an impact. The backlog is gigantic. I wouldn't say there's been a noticeable impact in development speed since they stopped (at least from the view of a user). There's also the possibility that UA gave them a leg up on some features that otherwise would have missed book releases - we don't really know.
If labeling is a problem for the AL community ofc that should be addressed. If dndbeyond had more AL filters/tools I wouldn't complain even though I don't play AL. I don't think everything needs to cater to every audience. Do I think AL tools should come at the expense of other features? No. I feel the same about UA.
I assure you though that even just crowd sourcing it there are plenty of great people in the community that would build UA as best as possible using the tools available. This probably includes some staff/dev/mods. There are ways to implement, as best as possible, a lot of UA without dev time. That's why they are telling us to do it ourselves because it's possible without being a dev for DNDBeyond and that's what I was primarily discussing - along with the DNDBeyond business model relying on us being too lazy to use the homebrew system for everything. A lot of users think that buying things here is worth it for the integration alone even if you already own the books and many are disgruntled when they find out they have to use the homebrew system and don't get stuff for free when they do have the books. Either way the homebrew system is not something most people seem to want to spend their time wrestling - even when it could save them money. I don't think people are just being lazy either as it's a preference to what they spend their time on. No one has unlimited free time and we all have our priorities.
How to get your dice to look like the ones in my profile picture and a full site dark mode.
Tutorial thread by Hyrkali
You may disagree about its affect but still 35 UA's have been released Since the creation of dnd beyond. and several were intensive changes to pre determined systems. many of which were simplified along the way and it became easy to implement instead of whole new resources to track and make formulas account for.
I no longer Play AL but the principle stands. a significant amount dms dont want people thinking UA is official or even available for use. Clear distinction is good and brand confusion is bad.
As for the rest I agree, Priorities should be on current content and new content ready to be published at book releases.
Will this change now that Hasbro/WotC now own D&D Beyond?
We don't know! Maybe. They haven't said anything about it and it's doubtful that they would put it back without having an increase in the size of their team.
Buyers Guide for D&D Beyond - Hardcover Books, D&D Beyond and You - How/What is Toggled Content?
Everything you need to know about Homebrew - Homebrew FAQ - Digital Book on D&D Beyond Vs Physical Books
Can't find the content you are supposed to have access to? Read this FAQ.
"Play the game however you want to play the game. After all, your fun doesn't threaten my fun."
The best way they can address this is by making Homebrew tools more extensive. Then they need to make a way for UA to be moved to your Homebrew collection.
Sa souvraya niende misain ye
which is what they are doing, but they need to redo the entirety of the homebrew section.
this is not a bening task. they need to redo the entirety of the thing. they needed to redo the sheet, they needed to redo the database, they needed to redo a lot of stuff...
which made homebrew tool a deprecated tool. right now, its on the roadmap. but thats all they can say about it.
they have a lot of other stuff to do.
PS:
you have to know these facts
#1 - they dont like the way the leveling up tool worksand thus wants to redo the entirety of how you create characters.
#2 - they want to redo the entirety of the homebrew tool which was done really fast on the corner of the table.
#3 - they eventually want to create a onster builder based on the homebrew tool, but that can just automatically add stuff for you.
#4 - all of the above are projects that are on the back burner for like 4 years at least.
DM of two gaming groups.
Likes to create stuff.
Check out my homebrew --> Monsters --> Magical Items --> Races --> Subclasses
If you like --> Upvote, If you wanna comment --> Comment
Play by Post Games
--> One Shot Adventure - House of Artwood (DM) (Completed)
How about now that Wizards of the Coast have a partnership with you..
Will you be adding back Unearthed Arcana?
PbP - The Land of Kyralia - DM
The answer is: does it get them money?
Jokes aside, no. Its too much of a hassle, and with so much new content coming in, D&D Beyond staff have probably been really struggling behind the scenes.
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I mean.. I would totally buy the book..
and I know of other's that would aswell..
PbP - The Land of Kyralia - DM
One thing they could do which would monetize the UA content would be for WoTC to publish an actual HC book titled "Unearthed Arcana" (as was done in earlier editions) and simply make clear that zero content from the book is AL-legal, but is a one-stop-shop where all prior (unofficial) UA content has been collected for those interested in it as either inspiration for homebrew or for use in home games. In this way, UA up to a particular date could be packaged and sold, both in physical copy as well as made available to players through DnD Beyond, but could be tagged herein similarly as CR or Eberron content might be tagged, as "unofficial", such that users would have to switch that content on to make it available in their character sheet.
There are dozens of unused subclasses, races, feats, spells, and rules presented in UA over the past 7(?) years which are more than enough to suffice for a stand-alone product.
That's not a bad idea, but for the fact that the DMG has many optional rules that aren't supported on D&D Beyond either. So WotC could publish such a book (and you're basically talking about the 3.5e version of a book titled UA; the 1e UA book was much like a Xanathar's or Tasha's).
Also all prior UA for 5e is already freely available in PDF format from WotC anyway, so they should monetize something they've been giving away for the history of the edition?
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Now that D&D Beyond is part of wizards the should have a person on the UA team at Wizards be added to make the UA stuff for on here and have a section that input can be given. I honestly don’t know how many people actually test the UA stuff let alone give input about it.
I bet more people would test it out and give input if they could test it out on here and easily give feedback. Plus have someone on the team looking on here to gather said input.
That's obviously part of the consideration for them (as profitability always should be for a company), but I would certainly buy it and I suspect a lot of DMs and players would. Having it all in a single, physical place is simply too convenient.
bad way of representing it...
WotC has been pretty liberate with the free stuff... now you are telling me they should sell everything including their BETAs, which leads to even more problems wiht people saying the hobby cost too much. their goal is not to make money, they have plenty of already... their goal is to make good tools ! UA doesn't make them good tools. its the inverse, its time passed doing something that is not gonna stay anyway. lost time is what it is.
when it comes to homebrew, my point was that you cna make it there... but guess what you can't make in there ? the exact mechanics. just like sub classes, people can make them, but the mechanics aren't there. this is why they want to redo the whole homebrew tools. but they need time, time they didn't have... between the company buy outs and the number of notes going up the chain and down the chain, everything been down to a crawl already.
as i said often, its been a bother to them since day 1. the same can be said about the homebrew tools, hence why they stopped working on that as well.
the entire thing needs to be rebuild and as the time needed to do that pass by, they realise they have way too much on their plate already.
just look at the encounter builder... took them over a year in alpha ! in dev updates they simply said... by the guy responsible for it... "i had it with it, i worked too darn long on it, needed a break !" that should tell people something !
look at AboveVTT development... one could think that having 50+ people workiong on it, they'd already be higher then version 1.0. yet 3 years later they aren't !
you know why, because things aren't as easy as they look. time is what people need, time is the only thing nobody has control over. most of those people also work on other things then DDB. now that they are part of WotC we can see things going forward more... but again... UA is a bother, you dont develop something that is gonna last a month and then get deleted. it still will be the same bother once everything is finished here.
and now to finish this wall of mine...
we know big changes to D&D are coming in 2024...
thats either 5.5 or 6th edition !
imagine them having to finish everything now before that happen, or finishing here while working on the new stuff from that time.
madness i tell you.
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Now that D&D owns DnD beyond. Can the UA library go back to being published on Dndbeyond.com?
Great to see all the updates today and the latest updates on UA. Would be great to have an option to build this into characters as a toggle (like other content). It would make it easier for me to test with groups who are so embedded on D&D Beyond for tools etc. Trying to get some going back to paper is harder work but I do get the complexities. Would allow for a far more rigorous playtest.
Yeah I'm having a hard time understanding why it's presently like this.
Let's put our UA material on the website which explicitly stated they will not incorporate UA material into their functionality.