Text reads: D&D Beyond AMA. Image displays a pensive Owlin in the foreground, as two magic students practice their craft in the background.
Welcome to our monthly D&D Beyond Staff AMA! Each month we bring one of our team members to answer questions here in our forums about themselves and their work with D&D Beyond.
The guest for March 2022 is Jared Wasdin (he/him), a member of the D&D Beyond Seekers team. Jared will be answering questions throughout his workday on Thursday, March 3rd, between the hours of 07:00 - 16:00 PT / 09:00 - 17:00 CST (when is this for me?). We know that D&D Beyond has an international audience, so you can begin asking your questions now! The thread will be closed when Jared gives his last answer.
Who is Jared Wasdin?
Hi everyone, my name is Jared Wasdin. I am one of the Product Managers (PM) on DDB and I’m looking forward to fielding your questions today!
I live in Huntsville, AL, with my wife, two kids, a 6.5 yr old (I’m told the half is very important), a ten-month-old, and two fluffy Maine coon cats. I like to explore new places, read books, play games (D&D, board games, and MMOs), snow ski, and drink tea.
Before my current role as a PM, I worked as a TechOps Engineer on DDB and in the finance industry. I love merging my technical background with my passion as a PM to chart a bright the future for DDB.
What is the Seekers team?
I am the Product Manager for the Seekers Team, which manages the systems that tie users, major features, the marketplace, and the compendium content together. Additionally, we take the lead in pushing for accessibility across the entire site. You can think of it this way, if DDB was a big house, we own the foundation, the hallways, and the utilities.
What is an AMA?
AMA stands for "Ask Me Anything" - it's a thread on our forums, where you can go ahead and ask questions, and I'll answer them. Your questions can be anything from serious stuff about D&D Beyond, to general chat about whether Jared is playing Elden Ring or not.
AMA Guidelines
Please do not reply to nor answer the questions of other users, let our guest answer the questions given to them.
Unless more clarification is needed to properly answer your question, please refrain from asking follow-up questions to avoid clutter in the thread.
Remain respectful of our guest and their time. They will be answering questions throughout their regular workday, answers will not be instantaneous. While guests will try to answer every question, their department with the company may not be the right one for your inquiry. We will work to have guests from different departments each month.
Second, as you describe your team to be the ‘foundation’ of the house how do you manage that foundation to be flexible enough to support changes but also strong enough to keep supporting what you already have build?
*insert Harry Potters moving stairs as a image for how i see the bonework of this website and all behind*
"the systems that tie users, major features, the marketplace, and the compendium content together. Additionally, we take the lead in pushing for accessibility across the entire site. You can think of it this way, if DDB was a big house, we own the foundation, the hallways, and the utilities."
Could you explain this a little more? I assume this is different than the systems-- like the game log-- that bring together outputs from different sources (e.g., character sheets, encounters, etc.) Maybe an example would help. My first instinct was to ask you if your work ties in at all to the 'virtual game space' that used to get talked about regularly in dev updates (but has since disappeared from mention).
Of course, if you know anything about the progress of any work on something that would be advancing the site toward more virtual gamespace tools, I'd love to hear about that . . .
my question is: Are the currently non-supported features of Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, such as: Wish being available for genie warlocks, Armorer specific Artificer infusions, Superior Technique fighting style, and more specifically, the capability to switch Psionic and Clockwork spells from the Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul sorcerer still in development at all? When should we, as consumers, realistically expect these systems to be properly in place, and not fixed by homebrew work-arounds? Any ETA or recognition for a product that hasn’t been working properly since release over a year ago would be appreciated.
Are you a forever DM, perpetual player, or a hybrid?
What is your favorite class and why is it the bard? If it is not the bard, when do you plan to fix that?
If you can talk about them, are there any upcoming features on DDB that you are most excited for?
Have you gotten your 6.5 year old into D&D yet? I hear there are some modules for younger people.
Are you playing Elden Ring?
Hi Erik_Soong! Alright let me tackle these line by line --
I am a perpetual player for now... but I do want to stretch and DM sometime soon. Maybe after my youngest turns one, I can carve out some time. I hear good things about the Lost Mine of Phandelver is a good place to start. Do you have a campaign that you'd recommend starting with?
More often than not I play Paladins. As one of my co-workers says, it's because I probably am one, so I guess it fits most naturally with my disposition. The darkness shall not overcome the light! Regarding Bards, I do love this class, however, my versions always seem to come out like Fflewddur Fflam from the Black Cauldron series with uninspiring attempts at limericks and rhyming.
There is a lot on the horizon for DDB that I am excited about. Like a mechanic with an engine many of the parts I am excited about aren't things you can see on the outside, but changes that make the system run smooth and fast. However, my team is hard at work on improving Game Data Listings (monsters, spells, magic items, etc) and we are pumped to give some new life to this part of the site.
Not yet! She does love fairytale stories and make-believe. She has even crafted her very own superhero persona. A friend told me about Amazing Tales and I am eager to give that a try. Maybe that will be my first DM experience!
Alas, I am not. Little ones don't leave a lot of time for gaming in my world so I am just enjoying some of the classic ones I know I love right now. Turn-based games like CIV6 are super handy when parenting can call at any moment. Are you playing it? Initial thoughts?
Second, as you describe your team to be the ‘foundation’ of the house how do you manage that foundation to be flexible enough to support changes but also strong enough to keep supporting what you already have build?
*insert Harry Potters moving stairs as a image for how i see the bonework of this website and all behind*
Your visual reference of the moving stairs from HP is an accurate expression of how it feels some days. If you've listened in to some of the Dev Chats on Twitch you may have heard discussion about introducing micro-services, so we find ourselves like many tech organizations, straddling both old and new systems simultaneously. Our legacy system is super beefy and can handle a lot, so mostly we build and refactor with more modern frameworks little by little!
"the systems that tie users, major features, the marketplace, and the compendium content together. Additionally, we take the lead in pushing for accessibility across the entire site. You can think of it this way, if DDB was a big house, we own the foundation, the hallways, and the utilities."
Could you explain this a little more? I assume this is different than the systems-- like the game log-- that bring together outputs from different sources (e.g., character sheets, encounters, etc.) Maybe an example would help. My first instinct was to ask you if your work ties in at all to the 'virtual game space' that used to get talked about regularly in dev updates (but has since disappeared from mention).
Of course, if you know anything about the progress of any work on something that would be advancing the site toward more virtual gamespace tools, I'd love to hear about that . . .
AD
Sure! Like any site, you have the underlying stuff that handles how you create an account, how you manage it, how you purchase something, how we make sure you have access to the things you bought, etc. Then there are the "features" that use this context when you use encounters or the character sheet.
For example, enabling you to create an account is something that would fall in my wheelhouse, building characters that are associated with your account would fall on the Characters team.
While I can't speak directly to the virtual game space idea, in general, our intent is to make sure that everything we build moves towards being a more seamless experience from one area of the site to another. We want the tools to fade into the background so that you can stay immersed in your game! The way that the game log has been pulled into the character sheet is a prime example of how we want to make all of our current and future features work together in a fully integrated way.
my question is: Are the currently non-supported features of Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, such as: Wish being available for genie warlocks, Armorer specific Artificer infusions, Superior Technique fighting style, and more specifically, the capability to switch Psionic and Clockwork spells from the Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul sorcerer still in development at all? When should we, as consumers, realistically expect these systems to be properly in place, and not fixed by homebrew work-arounds? Any ETA or recognition for a product that hasn’t been working properly since release over a year ago would be appreciated.
Hi Brandonf and Elefong, thanks for your questions. I am going to tackle them together because they both fall outside of my scope and in the Character team's world. A lot of things in Tasha's have been complicated to solve from a technical perspective which is why you may be hearing a lot about the Generic Feature System and other system wide projects in the Dev Updates. We are working on building frameworks that will help us accomodate these unique game features, however, systems that have to handle a lot of variations take time to get right.
Alas, I don't have ETAs and timelines that I can share in that regard. Let me simply say that we hear you, we know that homebrew work-arounds can be frustrating, and we want to use Tasha's stuff on our character sheets too!
So happy DDB is willing to do something like this, and thank you personally for putting yourself out there for us,
As the PM what sort of insight can you give us into your backlog?
With only 1 team when you go to planing what gets pulled in? Things like:
Ratio of bug work to feature work?
What sorts of features make up most of the feature work? (foundation, halls, or utilities)
of course if you can list any of the new features that would be awesome too.
Hi Sinodux, I am happy to be here and to share! Thanks for participating.
Firstly, I can say that the backlog is long. There are so many different things that we would like to do fuelled by thousands of comments, recommendations, and questions from this community. Also, our backlog on the Seekers team is a mix of "big rocks" like improvements to Game Data listings and search, support for new D&D books, dependencies for other teams that need to pull data from the legacy stack, and lots of "little pebbles" like tweaks in user settings, SEO fixes, and of course, bugs.
When we hit planning at the beginning of a sprint we are usually looking out towards the horizon with two things in mind, what will delight our users, and what groundwork do we need to lay to get there? Currently, the Seekers team is doing some heavy lifting on the foundation, our legacy stack, so that everything built on top of it is more flexible and adaptable moving forward. It's complicated and we work hard to do it in a way that doesn't disrupt you all as you're out there creating amazing stories. Our bug to feature ratio is actually quite low at 4% for our team and I like it that way. A good majority of our work is internal, but the largest thing on the horizon that you'll be able to see, as I've mentioned a few times already in the AMA, is revamped Game Data Listings. Hopefully, you'll see me gushing about it on the Dev Stream at some point in the not-so-distant future!
Currently DNDBeyond has a place for Public and DM Notes on the main campaign page which is helpful as a DM. Do you ever see a time where the system will add a DM Notes option in the individual characters of a campaign?
I would love a place to store notes on a character level for my eyes but that relate to only that character.
Follow-up question: What is your favorite dragon type and why?
Is there anything you can share with regards to the general direction being taken for the "Streaming/Content Creator Tools"? As the producer of and a player in a live streamed game being able to communicate and show what is happening in the game is key to our success.
Currently DNDBeyond has a place for Public and DM Notes on the main campaign page which is helpful as a DM. Do you ever see a time where the system will add a DM Notes option in the individual characters of a campaign?
I would love a place to store notes on a character level for my eyes but that relate to only that character.
Follow-up question: What is your favorite dragon type and why?
Hi BlackHat_Monty, that's a neat idea. As you mentioned we have notes in the campaign area for DMs and the other notes area in Character sheets. While I can't speculate on that specific solution, note-taking, in general, is something that we think about often. I think there are some novel solutions to explore to a problem like notes that could help a DM keep track of all sorts of information, events, characters, and the lore of your campaign, and more. Our biggest concern, as I talked about in an earlier post, is to make sure that a system like that is helpful and unobtrusive as you are playing. To sum up, if a feature can help a DM weave a better story then it's certainly something we want to look into!
Mmm, dragons.... as a huge Tolkien fan I am of course partial to snarky talking dragons. In the D&D world, I like the Ghost Dragon from Fitzban's. There is just something intriguing storywise of a dragon still attached to it's hoard even after death fixating its obsession on a single object. It has some great hooks for a story, desire, yearning, greed, possessiveness, possibly even pity? It gives the dragon some depth beyond simple hoarding.
Is there anything you can share with regards to the general direction being taken for the "Streaming/Content Creator Tools"? As the producer of and a player in a live streamed game being able to communicate and show what is happening in the game is key to our success.
Hi Zaepho, well that's a good question. Unfortunately, while I wrote the farewell changelog, I'm not directly involved in dreaming up what's next for our streamers and content creators. What I can say is that we love what our content creators are doing and the intent is to make something even better to support this community's creative endeavors.
If you have ideas about what would improve your experience as a producer and player when streaming (both perspectives!) then please share them with us in the feedback forums. We don't always respond due to volume but we do read, collect, and categorize feedback and use it to inform our decisions. What helps us the most are problem statements. What experience do you want your viewers to have? What problem do you have as a streamer that needs to be solved?
Regarding search, well I think we can all agree that it needs some work. The type-ahead responses, the very particular spelling and spacing requirements, filtering, and the accuracy of results all need some attention. Search is a complicated problem to solve, even so, our intent is to get it to a place where it works the way you would assume it should and make some accurate assumptions about what you meant to type. As many engineers or designers can attest to though, making things intuitive is deceptively hard!
Regarding game data listings, we want to re-orient the way you browse and filter listings so that you don't have to scroll so much, keep the listing content front and center, revise the detailed filtering, and make it much better when viewing on mobile, and more!
Thank you all for the questions today! I am grateful to be a part of this community. If you didn't get a chance to ask your question, please feel free to DM or reach out on Twitter. I would be happy to hear your ideas, thoughts, or questions. With that, I am going to wrap up for the evening.
Farewell and many happy adventures to you all!
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Just another elf in the wide world.
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Text reads: D&D Beyond AMA. Image displays a pensive Owlin in the foreground, as two magic students practice their craft in the background.
Welcome to our monthly D&D Beyond Staff AMA! Each month we bring one of our team members to answer questions here in our forums about themselves and their work with D&D Beyond.
The guest for March 2022 is Jared Wasdin (he/him), a member of the D&D Beyond Seekers team. Jared will be answering questions throughout his workday on Thursday, March 3rd, between the hours of 07:00 - 16:00 PT / 09:00 - 17:00 CST (when is this for me?). We know that D&D Beyond has an international audience, so you can begin asking your questions now! The thread will be closed when Jared gives his last answer.
Who is Jared Wasdin?
Hi everyone, my name is Jared Wasdin. I am one of the Product Managers (PM) on DDB and I’m looking forward to fielding your questions today!
I live in Huntsville, AL, with my wife, two kids, a 6.5 yr old (I’m told the half is very important), a ten-month-old, and two fluffy Maine coon cats. I like to explore new places, read books, play games (D&D, board games, and MMOs), snow ski, and drink tea.
Before my current role as a PM, I worked as a TechOps Engineer on DDB and in the finance industry. I love merging my technical background with my passion as a PM to chart a bright the future for DDB.
What is the Seekers team?
I am the Product Manager for the Seekers Team, which manages the systems that tie users, major features, the marketplace, and the compendium content together. Additionally, we take the lead in pushing for accessibility across the entire site. You can think of it this way, if DDB was a big house, we own the foundation, the hallways, and the utilities.
What is an AMA?
AMA stands for "Ask Me Anything" - it's a thread on our forums, where you can go ahead and ask questions, and I'll answer them. Your questions can be anything from serious stuff about D&D Beyond, to general chat about whether Jared is playing Elden Ring or not.
AMA Guidelines
Hello Jared,
DM mostly, Player occasionally | Session 0 form | He/Him/They/Them
EXTENDED SIGNATURE!
Doctor/Published Scholar/Science and Healthcare Advocate/Critter/Trekkie/Gandalf with a Glock
Try DDB free: Free Rules (2024), premade PCs, adventures, one shots, encounters, SC, homebrew, more
Answers: physical books, purchases, and subbing.
Check out my life-changing
Hi there!
First, thanks for doing this!
Second, as you describe your team to be the ‘foundation’ of the house how do you manage that foundation to be flexible enough to support changes but also strong enough to keep supporting what you already have build?
*insert Harry Potters moving stairs as a image for how i see the bonework of this website and all behind*
"the systems that tie users, major features, the marketplace, and the compendium content together. Additionally, we take the lead in pushing for accessibility across the entire site. You can think of it this way, if DDB was a big house, we own the foundation, the hallways, and the utilities."
Could you explain this a little more? I assume this is different than the systems-- like the game log-- that bring together outputs from different sources (e.g., character sheets, encounters, etc.) Maybe an example would help. My first instinct was to ask you if your work ties in at all to the 'virtual game space' that used to get talked about regularly in dev updates (but has since disappeared from mention).
Of course, if you know anything about the progress of any work on something that would be advancing the site toward more virtual gamespace tools, I'd love to hear about that . . .
AD
Jared,
I wish I have a simple question, but I believe from your standpoint it's a tough one to answer.
Can you shed any light or progress that is being made witg the Sidekicks from Tasha's?
Hi there,
my question is: Are the currently non-supported features of Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, such as: Wish being available for genie warlocks, Armorer specific Artificer infusions, Superior Technique fighting style, and more specifically, the capability to switch Psionic and Clockwork spells from the Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul sorcerer still in development at all? When should we, as consumers, realistically expect these systems to be properly in place, and not fixed by homebrew work-arounds? Any ETA or recognition for a product that hasn’t been working properly since release over a year ago would be appreciated.
So happy DDB is willing to do something like this, and thank you personally for putting yourself out there for us,
As the PM what sort of insight can you give us into your backlog?
With only 1 team when you go to planing what gets pulled in? Things like:
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AlumniHey adventurers! Thanks for the initial questions, I am looking forward to chatting with you all today.
Hi Erik_Soong! Alright let me tackle these line by line --
Hi Eendmans, my pleasure, thanks for joining in!
Your visual reference of the moving stairs from HP is an accurate expression of how it feels some days. If you've listened in to some of the Dev Chats on Twitch you may have heard discussion about introducing micro-services, so we find ourselves like many tech organizations, straddling both old and new systems simultaneously. Our legacy system is super beefy and can handle a lot, so mostly we build and refactor with more modern frameworks little by little!
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AlumniSure! Like any site, you have the underlying stuff that handles how you create an account, how you manage it, how you purchase something, how we make sure you have access to the things you bought, etc. Then there are the "features" that use this context when you use encounters or the character sheet.
For example, enabling you to create an account is something that would fall in my wheelhouse, building characters that are associated with your account would fall on the Characters team.
While I can't speak directly to the virtual game space idea, in general, our intent is to make sure that everything we build moves towards being a more seamless experience from one area of the site to another. We want the tools to fade into the background so that you can stay immersed in your game! The way that the game log has been pulled into the character sheet is a prime example of how we want to make all of our current and future features work together in a fully integrated way.
Just another elf in the wide world.
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AlumniHi Brandonf and Elefong, thanks for your questions. I am going to tackle them together because they both fall outside of my scope and in the Character team's world. A lot of things in Tasha's have been complicated to solve from a technical perspective which is why you may be hearing a lot about the Generic Feature System and other system wide projects in the Dev Updates. We are working on building frameworks that will help us accomodate these unique game features, however, systems that have to handle a lot of variations take time to get right.
Alas, I don't have ETAs and timelines that I can share in that regard. Let me simply say that we hear you, we know that homebrew work-arounds can be frustrating, and we want to use Tasha's stuff on our character sheets too!
Just another elf in the wide world.
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AlumniHi Sinodux, I am happy to be here and to share! Thanks for participating.
Firstly, I can say that the backlog is long. There are so many different things that we would like to do fuelled by thousands of comments, recommendations, and questions from this community. Also, our backlog on the Seekers team is a mix of "big rocks" like improvements to Game Data listings and search, support for new D&D books, dependencies for other teams that need to pull data from the legacy stack, and lots of "little pebbles" like tweaks in user settings, SEO fixes, and of course, bugs.
When we hit planning at the beginning of a sprint we are usually looking out towards the horizon with two things in mind, what will delight our users, and what groundwork do we need to lay to get there? Currently, the Seekers team is doing some heavy lifting on the foundation, our legacy stack, so that everything built on top of it is more flexible and adaptable moving forward. It's complicated and we work hard to do it in a way that doesn't disrupt you all as you're out there creating amazing stories. Our bug to feature ratio is actually quite low at 4% for our team and I like it that way. A good majority of our work is internal, but the largest thing on the horizon that you'll be able to see, as I've mentioned a few times already in the AMA, is revamped Game Data Listings. Hopefully, you'll see me gushing about it on the Dev Stream at some point in the not-so-distant future!
Just another elf in the wide world.
Currently DNDBeyond has a place for Public and DM Notes on the main campaign page which is helpful as a DM. Do you ever see a time where the system will add a DM Notes option in the individual characters of a campaign?
I would love a place to store notes on a character level for my eyes but that relate to only that character.
Follow-up question: What is your favorite dragon type and why?
Is there anything you can share with regards to the general direction being taken for the "Streaming/Content Creator Tools"? As the producer of and a player in a live streamed game being able to communicate and show what is happening in the game is key to our success.
Can you give us a preview of the sorts of improvements your hoping to implement with game data and search?
AD
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AlumniHi BlackHat_Monty, that's a neat idea. As you mentioned we have notes in the campaign area for DMs and the other notes area in Character sheets. While I can't speculate on that specific solution, note-taking, in general, is something that we think about often. I think there are some novel solutions to explore to a problem like notes that could help a DM keep track of all sorts of information, events, characters, and the lore of your campaign, and more. Our biggest concern, as I talked about in an earlier post, is to make sure that a system like that is helpful and unobtrusive as you are playing. To sum up, if a feature can help a DM weave a better story then it's certainly something we want to look into!
Mmm, dragons.... as a huge Tolkien fan I am of course partial to snarky talking dragons. In the D&D world, I like the Ghost Dragon from Fitzban's. There is just something intriguing storywise of a dragon still attached to it's hoard even after death fixating its obsession on a single object. It has some great hooks for a story, desire, yearning, greed, possessiveness, possibly even pity? It gives the dragon some depth beyond simple hoarding.
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AlumniHi Zaepho, well that's a good question. Unfortunately, while I wrote the farewell changelog, I'm not directly involved in dreaming up what's next for our streamers and content creators. What I can say is that we love what our content creators are doing and the intent is to make something even better to support this community's creative endeavors.
If you have ideas about what would improve your experience as a producer and player when streaming (both perspectives!) then please share them with us in the feedback forums. We don't always respond due to volume but we do read, collect, and categorize feedback and use it to inform our decisions. What helps us the most are problem statements. What experience do you want your viewers to have? What problem do you have as a streamer that needs to be solved?
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AlumniHello adas!
Regarding search, well I think we can all agree that it needs some work. The type-ahead responses, the very particular spelling and spacing requirements, filtering, and the accuracy of results all need some attention. Search is a complicated problem to solve, even so, our intent is to get it to a place where it works the way you would assume it should and make some accurate assumptions about what you meant to type. As many engineers or designers can attest to though, making things intuitive is deceptively hard!
Regarding game data listings, we want to re-orient the way you browse and filter listings so that you don't have to scroll so much, keep the listing content front and center, revise the detailed filtering, and make it much better when viewing on mobile, and more!
Just another elf in the wide world.
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AlumniThank you all for the questions today! I am grateful to be a part of this community. If you didn't get a chance to ask your question, please feel free to DM or reach out on Twitter. I would be happy to hear your ideas, thoughts, or questions. With that, I am going to wrap up for the evening.
Farewell and many happy adventures to you all!
Just another elf in the wide world.