While I love the global search, it seems problematic that it includes snippets directly in the search results, including from modules that are not actually available.
For example, if I was running CoS and one of my players typed 'Strahd' in the search box, they would get a page that tells them the following with no further clicks:
Strahd Zombies exist, and are vulnerable to bludgeoning and slashing damage.
Strahd is meant to toy with them, and will seal them in catacombs if he overcomes them.
Strahd believes his soul is lost to evil.
Strahd retreats to his coffin if reduced to 0 hit points.
Strahd must be in his coffin to be completely destroyed.
Strahd will roam the realm and terrorize characters.
Strahd is a vampire and wizard.
Strahd is a shapechanger, and can polymorph into a bat, a wolf or mist.
The Tome of Strahd and the Sunsword are artifacts related to Strahd.
Madame Eva's people, the Vistani, lure people into Strahd's domain.
Strahd's goals for the adventure.
... and much more. This seems bad, especially if I'm planning to alter aspects of the story line -- for the module I'm actually running, searching certain NPC or location names reveals much of what the original intention was, but that's not in fact what's going on in my game, so it's doubly misleading. It also means my plan of not actually buying modules here (to avoid sharing the full module text with players) is insufficient to avoid spoilers.
What do others do about this? Are there indications that the devs are aware of the problem?
I play with folks that will not go spoil things for themselves, so if they did type "Strahd" into the global search (which they probably wouldn't do since that seems like something that would intentionally give them spoilers about Strahd) they'd click one of those big round buttons at the top like "characters" or whatever so that their search results show only things which are actually relevant to them as a player before reading whatever results showed up.
Also, players knowing that there is a monster called a Strahd Zombie that is vulnerable to particular sorts of damage is entirely irrelevant - they won't automatically know when they are facing that kind of zombie rather than some other kind, unless they should know, so the knowledge doesn't actually change anything for them unless it is appropriate for it to do so. And it's not like they'd have to know the creature is actually vulnerable just to use the right type of damage - bludgeoning and slashing damage are all over my party's normal choices of weapons.
And it is less problematic, not more, if you are actually altering those details which the players might find if they are the type to go looking for spoilers - because then you can see which player(s) were actually trying to cheat by reading up on the adventure and using what they read to gain unfair advantage, when they start using all the info they found without that being either a reasonable thing for any character to be doing (i.e. attacking a zombie with a sword or hammer when a sword or hammer is among the weapons readily present at the time) or something that their character specifically does know about (where you would have told them the altered version of the information). And once you identify the cheater, you can do the best thing for your group and kick them out.
However, yes, there have been enough people asking for ways to limit what is or isn't shared with their players (even though such methods serve no purpose if one plays with trustworthy people) that the devs are aware of the desire and have mentioned it might get a change in the future.
To be clear, I'm not worried about cheaters (I trust my players), but about inadvertent spoilers that diminish the players' enjoyment. The Strahd example was deliberately contrived, but you can try searching totally benign words like 'resistant' (perfectly reasonable, for someone who wants to look up what it means), and see spoiler snippets from three major modules on the very first page.
I imagine this would be much worse once there are tools like a campaign diary. A player searching an NPC's name to remind herself when the party encountered them would presumably see snippets from the main module.
I admit I'm not totally sure how I think this should work. Perhaps a global account switch for 'DM mode' or 'player mode' (this bring the default), where the latter returns no results from adventure modules by default? As I said, I want to protect not against cheating players (they can always just get the books themselves), but against unintended spoilers.
Players wanting to avoid spoilers can do so by reading from left to right, top to bottom; each search result cites its source preceding any details, so the player can simply stop reading a search result upon seeing that it is from a book they don't want to spoil for them self.
Also, "resistant" wasn't a great example either, since the top result when searching for that word is the answer to the question the player was asking by searching for that term in the first place - so none of the potential spoilers that show up after that result even need to be looked at unless the player is actually looking for something else (i.e. spoilers).
This seriously needs to be addressed. My players unwittingly uncovered a secret they weren't supposed to see because of that "Search Everything" bar, and as you said, it was just on the top of the results page. They couldn't have avoided it if they'd tried. They were just searching for an item they wanted to add to their inventory.
This seriously needs to be addressed. My players unwittingly uncovered a secret they weren't supposed to see because of that "Search Everything" bar, and as you said, it was just on the top of the results page. They couldn't have avoided it if they'd tried. They were just searching for an item they wanted to add to their inventory.
Can I ask what item they were looking for and what secret they uncovered? You say they couldn't have avoided it if they tried, but that seems like hyperbole to me given my experience of the the search everything function and how results are displayed.
I don't remember all the details because it's been several weeks. I believe she was pulling up details on the staff of defense and saw information about villainous characters in the Lost Mines of Phandelver that she wasn't supposed to see.
I don't remember all the details because it's been several weeks. I believe she was pulling up details on the staff of defense and saw information about villainous characters in the Lost Mines of Phandelver that she wasn't supposed to see.
If that is the case, then all that had to be done to avoid spoilers was read the first search result - that's the one that tells everything a player really needs to know about that item - and not read any further search results... which maybe it's a screen resolution preference thing, but I actually had to scroll down after the search results came up before I got to anything even remotely spoiler-y.
Bottom line is that the only things that should be searchable for the players in adventure modules are items, new player options, and the like. They don't need access to the story, maps, monsters, or NPCs. If you want them to access that information for whatever reason, at least make it a toggle so we have the option. Now I'm having to tell my players to avoid the search everything box, or at least be very careful with it. I assume this is on the developers' radar and will be addressed soon.
@AaronOfBarbaria, I have to admit I'm not quite sure why you're finding this topic controversial. Yes, of course DMs need to trust their players to not look for spoilers actively, and of course players always can, where the game is not completely homebrew, buy the relevant material themselves. This doesn't really change the fact that the current situation is broken.
Think of it this way: Much of the information that @Scolai and I have called out as appearing on the very first search results page with no further clicks required is such that I would expect it to be covered by a spoiler tag on any forum-like medium -- indeed a moderator would probably edit posts to add such tags (and I wish I had added a spoiler tag to my initial post, though I'm actually not sure what the syntax is here -- is it just [spoiler]this[/spoiler]?).
As an aside, I now see this kind of issue has been discussed before, though in a thread about preventing players from reading adventure modules that are shared with them, which is why I didn't initially find it. The discussion there seems to have degenerated into something irreconcilable, and I'm keen to avoid that here, so let me propose a solution that I think everyone should be happy with: Use spoiler tags.
Concretely, compendium information that comes from sources other than the PHB could be treated as if it were spoilers by default. This means that if you search something, any full-text snippets that quote from the module would be under a "Spoiler (click to show)" tag, while the actual source (e.g. COMPENDIUM - COMPENDIUM->ADVENTURES->CURSE OF STRAHD) is still visible. This allows everybody to decide for themselves whether they want to reveal the information. As a secondary refinement, the default could be tweaked so that compendium entries you own are not treated as spoilers for you -- in this way if I'm running CoS and bought it, the search results from that would display in full, but the results from SKT would still require me to click. And, of course, you could add a per-user preference that says "show me compendium spoilers everywhere". Would that be satisfactory?
@AaronOfBarbaria, I have to admit I'm not quite sure why you're finding this topic controversial.
It's not controversy - it's just an attempt at helping the devs perform better "triage" when it comes to their treatment of the things folks mention as ailments. There are things which are far more important than stopping players from learning things that they don't want to and can already stop themselves from learning, but without any "it's not as significant of an issue as it has been claimed to be" posts like mine it might appear that is not the case... and that could mean things that are a larger problem for a larger number of users get fixed later, rather than sooner, because the devs put this minor- to non-issue too far up the priority list in response to the hyperbolic posts of "this is ruining games!" (but not so "ruined" as to be memorable enough to actually confidently remember of what got ruined a couple of weeks later).
As for the spoiler block feature on this forum, I'm not sure the coding syntax - but there is an "!" button on the tool bar that puts in the block for you.
And no, we shouldn't be treating all non-PHB information as spoilers by default - knowing the rules of the game, like what stats some random monster has, is not a spoiler any more than knowing what damage some random weapon type does is; that's just knowing the rules, and it's not a problem if a player knows the rules.
Text from adventures, and only adventures, being treated as spoilers by default might make sense - but anything beyond that and you get into the realm of implying things like that a person must choose to be either a player or a DM, because if they ever DM and as a result read anything that would be "spoilers" for a player they can never be just a player in any campaign ever again, which is very much not true and uncool to imply - and really personally chafes me because I've had other DMs treat me terribly as a player for reasons that boil down to me being a DM and them thinking along the lines of "anything outside the PHB is spoilers."
I was a part of this conversation but it was shut down (rightfully due to a comment made with really poor judgment) but it really got super redundant super quick.
check it out here, i agree we need the search to be better and not have spoilers.
Edit: Post 5 gives a thorough example. I also want to point out that the search results seemingly change -- at the time my example for searching "elemental" gave the top result as Elemental Gem, I just did the search again today, and teh top result is info on the Elemental Cults of PotA adventure, which is what the problem is -- If a player is searching for a spell/item they potentially get info on the adventure that they (a) aren't looking for and (b) can ruin their game-play experience.
I'm keen to avoid this thread descending into protracted arguments. I believe we've showed that there is a problem with how search results are displayed to the user, and it's up to the dev team to prioritize this feature, which I hope will be helped by the fact that "treat compendium content from sources other than the PHB as opt-out spoiler-box-covered information" is a fairly concrete suggestion that I think should make everybody happy.
For completeness, can anyone imagine other solutions they'd be satisfied with?
Yeah I decided to delete a comment. I think having blurbs from search results is useful but not necessary, however i also think that they shouldn't be there for anything from an adventure/campaign.
If they are included it should be an extra step to include them, not an extra step to exclude them. What i mean is search results should just be titles by default, and maybe have a checkbox to include the blurbs, or even have the results have the button to fan out/expand for more info, but by default the results are collapsed.
..."treat compendium content from sources other than the PHB as opt-out spoiler-box-covered information" is a fairly concrete suggestion that I think should make everybody happy.
Nope. If D&D Beyond treats some things which are just the mechanics of the game, like the game rules found in the DMG which are there rather than the PHB because they are optional not because players aren't supposed to know what they are, and even character options from other books that should be treated no differently from those in the PHB, as being spoilers unless you opt-out of that treatment, I will be very unhappy. That process doesn't just address the issue of people being able to stumble upon spoilers for themselves, it supports the erroneous and community-at-large-harming idea that the ideal player is one that is ignorant of the game rules - which means that DMs that want to play a character every now and again in some other DM's campaign are less desirable players, which is not at all cool.
A solution that doesn't carry support of that completely awful other thing, and just fixes the issue of people being able to stumble upon spoilers, would be required in order for it to make me happy.
Which is fine, because Mehetmet has already hit upon such a solution; make the search results present the title and citation of source like they already do, but have the blurb of text currently shown by default be collapsed instead so that it takes a deliberate click rather than errant scrolling and/or darting of the eyes to see the information that would spoil something for the user. And I would be fine with that being applied equally to all search results regardless of source, or if it specifically only applied to search results from sources that are adventures, because in either of those cases no/minimal "just the rules of the game" results would be treated as if they aren't okay for anyone to know.
OK, then I think we are coming to a consensus. Whether the DMG and MM are spoilers or not is perhaps open to interpretation and will always depend on the particular group, but at least it sounds like we agree that compendium content from adventure modules should always be considered spoilers.
But AaronOfBarbaria is right -- the solution of having the text snippets in search results always collapsed by default sounds technically easier to implement.
For the record, I think what I'm suggesting is a continuation of that. After the first step of always collapsing snippets and requiring a click, there are several possible refinements that will make the experience closer to what is there now, but which are otherwise optional:
Always automatically expand snippets from a blessed list of "non-spoiler" sources (including at least the PHB and basic rules, but possibly also DMG and MM).
Always automatically expand snippets from content that is owned by the logged-in user (on the assumption that if they bought it, they have read it and making it easier to find the passage they are looking for is more valuable than hiding information behind a click).
Provide a list of settings in the user account preferences that allow, for each source, to specify "collapse" or "expand" (with a default of only expanding non-spoiler sources, or possibly purchased sources).
But, as I said, even just the first step would already fix the current situation of inadvertent spoilers.
Whether the DMG and MM are spoilers or not is perhaps open to interpretation...
Nope. There is no logic that excludes the rules content from the DMG and MM as "spoilers" that doesn't equally apply to some sections of the Player's Handbook itself.
It's not "interpretation" to say that a player knowing what information is listed under, to use a single example, 'Goblin' in the Monster Manual is not a spoiler, because they do not know what campaign will include goblins, when those goblins will be encountered, what role they are serving in the story, or even if they will be exactly as found in the Monster Manual or altered in some way. It's just the definition of "spoiler" not applying in any meaningful way.
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While I love the global search, it seems problematic that it includes snippets directly in the search results, including from modules that are not actually available.
For example, if I was running CoS and one of my players typed 'Strahd' in the search box, they would get a page that tells them the following with no further clicks:
... and much more. This seems bad, especially if I'm planning to alter aspects of the story line -- for the module I'm actually running, searching certain NPC or location names reveals much of what the original intention was, but that's not in fact what's going on in my game, so it's doubly misleading. It also means my plan of not actually buying modules here (to avoid sharing the full module text with players) is insufficient to avoid spoilers.
What do others do about this? Are there indications that the devs are aware of the problem?
(Edit: Insert a spoiler tag around the list.)
I play with folks that will not go spoil things for themselves, so if they did type "Strahd" into the global search (which they probably wouldn't do since that seems like something that would intentionally give them spoilers about Strahd) they'd click one of those big round buttons at the top like "characters" or whatever so that their search results show only things which are actually relevant to them as a player before reading whatever results showed up.
Also, players knowing that there is a monster called a Strahd Zombie that is vulnerable to particular sorts of damage is entirely irrelevant - they won't automatically know when they are facing that kind of zombie rather than some other kind, unless they should know, so the knowledge doesn't actually change anything for them unless it is appropriate for it to do so. And it's not like they'd have to know the creature is actually vulnerable just to use the right type of damage - bludgeoning and slashing damage are all over my party's normal choices of weapons.
And it is less problematic, not more, if you are actually altering those details which the players might find if they are the type to go looking for spoilers - because then you can see which player(s) were actually trying to cheat by reading up on the adventure and using what they read to gain unfair advantage, when they start using all the info they found without that being either a reasonable thing for any character to be doing (i.e. attacking a zombie with a sword or hammer when a sword or hammer is among the weapons readily present at the time) or something that their character specifically does know about (where you would have told them the altered version of the information). And once you identify the cheater, you can do the best thing for your group and kick them out.
However, yes, there have been enough people asking for ways to limit what is or isn't shared with their players (even though such methods serve no purpose if one plays with trustworthy people) that the devs are aware of the desire and have mentioned it might get a change in the future.
To be clear, I'm not worried about cheaters (I trust my players), but about inadvertent spoilers that diminish the players' enjoyment. The Strahd example was deliberately contrived, but you can try searching totally benign words like 'resistant' (perfectly reasonable, for someone who wants to look up what it means), and see spoiler snippets from three major modules on the very first page.
I imagine this would be much worse once there are tools like a campaign diary. A player searching an NPC's name to remind herself when the party encountered them would presumably see snippets from the main module.
I admit I'm not totally sure how I think this should work. Perhaps a global account switch for 'DM mode' or 'player mode' (this bring the default), where the latter returns no results from adventure modules by default? As I said, I want to protect not against cheating players (they can always just get the books themselves), but against unintended spoilers.
Players wanting to avoid spoilers can do so by reading from left to right, top to bottom; each search result cites its source preceding any details, so the player can simply stop reading a search result upon seeing that it is from a book they don't want to spoil for them self.
Also, "resistant" wasn't a great example either, since the top result when searching for that word is the answer to the question the player was asking by searching for that term in the first place - so none of the potential spoilers that show up after that result even need to be looked at unless the player is actually looking for something else (i.e. spoilers).
This seriously needs to be addressed. My players unwittingly uncovered a secret they weren't supposed to see because of that "Search Everything" bar, and as you said, it was just on the top of the results page. They couldn't have avoided it if they'd tried. They were just searching for an item they wanted to add to their inventory.
I don't remember all the details because it's been several weeks. I believe she was pulling up details on the staff of defense and saw information about villainous characters in the Lost Mines of Phandelver that she wasn't supposed to see.
Bottom line is that the only things that should be searchable for the players in adventure modules are items, new player options, and the like. They don't need access to the story, maps, monsters, or NPCs. If you want them to access that information for whatever reason, at least make it a toggle so we have the option. Now I'm having to tell my players to avoid the search everything box, or at least be very careful with it. I assume this is on the developers' radar and will be addressed soon.
@AaronOfBarbaria, I have to admit I'm not quite sure why you're finding this topic controversial. Yes, of course DMs need to trust their players to not look for spoilers actively, and of course players always can, where the game is not completely homebrew, buy the relevant material themselves. This doesn't really change the fact that the current situation is broken.
Think of it this way: Much of the information that @Scolai and I have called out as appearing on the very first search results page with no further clicks required is such that I would expect it to be covered by a spoiler tag on any forum-like medium -- indeed a moderator would probably edit posts to add such tags (and I wish I had added a spoiler tag to my initial post, though I'm actually not sure what the syntax is here -- is it just [spoiler]this[/spoiler]?).
As an aside, I now see this kind of issue has been discussed before, though in a thread about preventing players from reading adventure modules that are shared with them, which is why I didn't initially find it. The discussion there seems to have degenerated into something irreconcilable, and I'm keen to avoid that here, so let me propose a solution that I think everyone should be happy with: Use spoiler tags.
Concretely, compendium information that comes from sources other than the PHB could be treated as if it were spoilers by default. This means that if you search something, any full-text snippets that quote from the module would be under a "Spoiler (click to show)" tag, while the actual source (e.g. COMPENDIUM - COMPENDIUM->ADVENTURES->CURSE OF STRAHD) is still visible. This allows everybody to decide for themselves whether they want to reveal the information. As a secondary refinement, the default could be tweaked so that compendium entries you own are not treated as spoilers for you -- in this way if I'm running CoS and bought it, the search results from that would display in full, but the results from SKT would still require me to click. And, of course, you could add a per-user preference that says "show me compendium spoilers everywhere". Would that be satisfactory?
It's not controversy - it's just an attempt at helping the devs perform better "triage" when it comes to their treatment of the things folks mention as ailments. There are things which are far more important than stopping players from learning things that they don't want to and can already stop themselves from learning, but without any "it's not as significant of an issue as it has been claimed to be" posts like mine it might appear that is not the case... and that could mean things that are a larger problem for a larger number of users get fixed later, rather than sooner, because the devs put this minor- to non-issue too far up the priority list in response to the hyperbolic posts of "this is ruining games!" (but not so "ruined" as to be memorable enough to actually confidently remember of what got ruined a couple of weeks later).
As for the spoiler block feature on this forum, I'm not sure the coding syntax - but there is an "!" button on the tool bar that puts in the block for you.
And no, we shouldn't be treating all non-PHB information as spoilers by default - knowing the rules of the game, like what stats some random monster has, is not a spoiler any more than knowing what damage some random weapon type does is; that's just knowing the rules, and it's not a problem if a player knows the rules.
Text from adventures, and only adventures, being treated as spoilers by default might make sense - but anything beyond that and you get into the realm of implying things like that a person must choose to be either a player or a DM, because if they ever DM and as a result read anything that would be "spoilers" for a player they can never be just a player in any campaign ever again, which is very much not true and uncool to imply - and really personally chafes me because I've had other DMs treat me terribly as a player for reasons that boil down to me being a DM and them thinking along the lines of "anything outside the PHB is spoilers."
I was a part of this conversation but it was shut down (rightfully due to a comment made with really poor judgment) but it really got super redundant super quick.
check it out here, i agree we need the search to be better and not have spoilers.
http://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/d-d-beyond-feedback/6350-need-to-control-what-will-be-shared-with-players
Edit: Post 5 gives a thorough example. I also want to point out that the search results seemingly change -- at the time my example for searching "elemental" gave the top result as Elemental Gem, I just did the search again today, and teh top result is info on the Elemental Cults of PotA adventure, which is what the problem is -- If a player is searching for a spell/item they potentially get info on the adventure that they (a) aren't looking for and (b) can ruin their game-play experience.
How do you get a one-armed goblin out of a tree?
Wave!
@Mehetmet, thanks for the additional background.
I'm keen to avoid this thread descending into protracted arguments. I believe we've showed that there is a problem with how search results are displayed to the user, and it's up to the dev team to prioritize this feature, which I hope will be helped by the fact that "treat compendium content from sources other than the PHB as opt-out spoiler-box-covered information" is a fairly concrete suggestion that I think should make everybody happy.
For completeness, can anyone imagine other solutions they'd be satisfied with?
Yeah I decided to delete a comment. I think having blurbs from search results is useful but not necessary, however i also think that they shouldn't be there for anything from an adventure/campaign.
If they are included it should be an extra step to include them, not an extra step to exclude them. What i mean is search results should just be titles by default, and maybe have a checkbox to include the blurbs, or even have the results have the button to fan out/expand for more info, but by default the results are collapsed.
How do you get a one-armed goblin out of a tree?
Wave!
OK, then I think we are coming to a consensus. Whether the DMG and MM are spoilers or not is perhaps open to interpretation and will always depend on the particular group, but at least it sounds like we agree that compendium content from adventure modules should always be considered spoilers.
But AaronOfBarbaria is right -- the solution of having the text snippets in search results always collapsed by default sounds technically easier to implement.
For the record, I think what I'm suggesting is a continuation of that. After the first step of always collapsing snippets and requiring a click, there are several possible refinements that will make the experience closer to what is there now, but which are otherwise optional:
But, as I said, even just the first step would already fix the current situation of inadvertent spoilers.
Nope. There is no logic that excludes the rules content from the DMG and MM as "spoilers" that doesn't equally apply to some sections of the Player's Handbook itself.
It's not "interpretation" to say that a player knowing what information is listed under, to use a single example, 'Goblin' in the Monster Manual is not a spoiler, because they do not know what campaign will include goblins, when those goblins will be encountered, what role they are serving in the story, or even if they will be exactly as found in the Monster Manual or altered in some way. It's just the definition of "spoiler" not applying in any meaningful way.