I’d like to share one major reason many players in my circles avoid using your Virtual Tabletop.
When a player can’t attend a session, our group’s policy is to have someone else temporarily control their character. Unfortunately, this is far more cumbersome in D&D Beyond than it needs to be. The current system requires the absent player to unassign their character so someone else can claim it—often impossible if that player is unavailable. The result? The stand-in has to roll everything manually, click by click, which makes running combat painfully slow.
By contrast, platforms like Roll20 with the Beyond20 Chrome extension make this seamless: any authorized player or DM can roll for another character quickly and cleanly.
Please consider adding easier “temporary control” or “shared access” options to your backlog. This single improvement would make D&D Beyond far more usable for real groups running real campaigns.
I feel like a lot of players would not want to have a feature that let other people access and run their characters without their permission. Especially when it's pretty common for characters to be assumed to be "in the back" doing something off-screen when their player has to miss a session.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
I feel like a lot of players would not want to have a feature that let other people access and run their characters without their permission. Especially when it's pretty common for characters to be assumed to be "in the back" doing something off-screen when their player has to miss a session.
Easy fix is just to make it a toggle so it can only happen if it's enabled in the specific campaign. If there's problems after that, it's something to be dealt with by speaking to the group openly, not restricting possible features for everyone else in the community.
The DM has no more access to the PC than another player does.
I completely agree with Athanar90. Make it a toggle at the campaign level.
Weird. In at least three of my campaigns (stopped checking after that), as DM I can roll my players checks for them, and have it appear in the log. Works fine, as intended.
EDIT: And I can even edit my player's characters if I feel like it. Does your player have their Privacy set to "Campaign" or "Private"?
Is the issue that the DM role is fixed? So if Person A is the creator of the campaign, but person B is the real DM, that causes issues if I remember rightly.
Part of the issue is that in Roll20, the role of DM can be assigned out so it's not just strictly the creator of the campaign that has that power. Last I checked, DDB didn't have that flexibility.
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If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
I feel like a lot of players would not want to have a feature that let other people access and run their characters without their permission. Especially when it's pretty common for characters to be assumed to be "in the back" doing something off-screen when their player has to miss a session.
Don't you typically only play D&D with people you trust? There really shouldn't be an issue with this.
I feel like a lot of players would not want to have a feature that let other people access and run their characters without their permission. Especially when it's pretty common for characters to be assumed to be "in the back" doing something off-screen when their player has to miss a session.
Don't you typically only play D&D with people you trust? There really shouldn't be an issue with this.
There are different degrees of trust. Playing a game with people I'm not interacting with physically doesn't require a huge amount of trust. Also, there's the fact that the complaint was mostly "we had to roll dice manually." Which is really not a huge hardship.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
I feel like a lot of players would not want to have a feature that let other people access and run their characters without their permission. Especially when it's pretty common for characters to be assumed to be "in the back" doing something off-screen when their player has to miss a session.
Don't you typically only play D&D with people you trust? There really shouldn't be an issue with this.
It’s not an issue of trust. It’s an issue of bad luck and the player coming back next week to find their character died when they weren’t around.
I feel like a lot of players would not want to have a feature that let other people access and run their characters without their permission. Especially when it's pretty common for characters to be assumed to be "in the back" doing something off-screen when their player has to miss a session.
Don't you typically only play D&D with people you trust? There really shouldn't be an issue with this.
Imagine a group that's playing on StartPlaying or something similar, where the only tie to each other is the game, and because it's paid, you only have a certain level of control over who's involved.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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To the D&D Beyond product team:
I’d like to share one major reason many players in my circles avoid using your Virtual Tabletop.
When a player can’t attend a session, our group’s policy is to have someone else temporarily control their character. Unfortunately, this is far more cumbersome in D&D Beyond than it needs to be. The current system requires the absent player to unassign their character so someone else can claim it—often impossible if that player is unavailable. The result? The stand-in has to roll everything manually, click by click, which makes running combat painfully slow.
By contrast, platforms like Roll20 with the Beyond20 Chrome extension make this seamless: any authorized player or DM can roll for another character quickly and cleanly.
Please consider adding easier “temporary control” or “shared access” options to your backlog. This single improvement would make D&D Beyond far more usable for real groups running real campaigns.
I feel like a lot of players would not want to have a feature that let other people access and run their characters without their permission. Especially when it's pretty common for characters to be assumed to be "in the back" doing something off-screen when their player has to miss a session.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
The DM can run the PC.
Easy fix is just to make it a toggle so it can only happen if it's enabled in the specific campaign. If there's problems after that, it's something to be dealt with by speaking to the group openly, not restricting possible features for everyone else in the community.
The DM has no more access to the PC than another player does.
I completely agree with Athanar90. Make it a toggle at the campaign level.
Weird. In at least three of my campaigns (stopped checking after that), as DM I can roll my players checks for them, and have it appear in the log. Works fine, as intended.
EDIT: And I can even edit my player's characters if I feel like it. Does your player have their Privacy set to "Campaign" or "Private"?
This isn't true, the DM has full access to the character sheet
Also this isn't the place for giving feedback on Maps, you want to use the feedback tab in Maps itself.
Find my D&D Beyond articles here
Is the issue that the DM role is fixed? So if Person A is the creator of the campaign, but person B is the real DM, that causes issues if I remember rightly.
Part of the issue is that in Roll20, the role of DM can be assigned out so it's not just strictly the creator of the campaign that has that power. Last I checked, DDB didn't have that flexibility.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
Don't you typically only play D&D with people you trust? There really shouldn't be an issue with this.
There are different degrees of trust. Playing a game with people I'm not interacting with physically doesn't require a huge amount of trust. Also, there's the fact that the complaint was mostly "we had to roll dice manually." Which is really not a huge hardship.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
It’s not an issue of trust. It’s an issue of bad luck and the player coming back next week to find their character died when they weren’t around.
Imagine a group that's playing on StartPlaying or something similar, where the only tie to each other is the game, and because it's paid, you only have a certain level of control over who's involved.