I feel that it is rather rotten for D&D and Beyond to charge their subscription to use homebrew creations. People created those for other people to use in their own creations. With the pay wall to use the creations not everyone has access to use them. Now I could understand charging for it if the creators got something for somebody using their creations but they do not as far as I am aware. I feel a good example of what I am talking about is the Steam mod creations. Steam allows everyone to access the mod creations for free. I know some people would say the subscription is there to support the people working on this website and D&D in general. I am not saying that the subscription system should go away but I do think that it should no longer be required to use homebrew content.
Once a Steam mod is downloaded, Steam's job directly related to the mod ends until an update. Even so, Valve offers no support for the mods.
Using homebrew content on DDB requires the managed, online DDB application to use the content, and DDB offers support as it can.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider. My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong. I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲 “It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
Yep, there are plenty of other third party sites that provide free homebrew for you to take to your notebook or whatever, and you can upload to them. for anyone to take, the equivalent of what Steam mods do. D&D Beyond allows you to integrate your homebrew with the characters sheets and (I believe) the encounter builder/combat tracker. I see no moral or business "wrong" being committed here.
You can put your stuff on DMsGuild even and charge nothing for it if you really wanted a free distribution apparatus.
D&D Beyond is a product and service. You are using a product (software) that is hosted and maintained by a company. They can charge as much as they want to make that product and service available for your use. If you don't like the price, don't use the product. Demanding things for free is childish, self centered, and demonstrative of a lack of knowledge as to how the world actually works.
The homebrew system seems to be nontrivial to implement and maintain and it goes above and beyond my expectations of what D&D Beyond should provide for free. So I'm okay with paying for it.
The point is not that I want it free. My point is that I do not want D&D profiting from nice people trying to share their creations.
You don't want D&D aka wizards profiting from homebrew than go complain about DMs Guild. Paying for homebrew creation tools (that this website created and allows for integration into their other parts of the website) on this site has nothing to do with the company that makes D&D profiting.
Lights need to be kept on, and this website has the right and justification to charge people to use the tools they designed.
But why? They are the ones paying for the lights to be on with this site and it’s not anymore than the membership. they don’t charge a subscription for access. That’s a thing thrown in with the membership?
if they have to pay to run the site and make things work with character sheets, why wouldn’t it be limited to those that subscribe? If they charged per homebrew, absolutely I’d be with you. A separate subscription for it? Maybe then I’d raise an eyebrow. But the situation right now feels more than fair to me
The point is not that I want it free. My point is that I do not want D&D profiting from nice people trying to share their creations.
People can share their creations in any way they see fit. If that way includes using the DDB toolset, then a small fee will be required from those wanting to use them. Does it really need pointing out that using the tools on this site shouldn't necessarily be free? If I want my players to use some homebrew class or spell list I made and I don't want them to have to pay for that, I'll offer it to them in text form. If they want the convenience of getting that homebrew content integrated in the site's tools, then they'll have to pay. The toolset and its convenience is what people pay for. That doesn't change just because you want that convenience applied to something you created yourself.
edit: never mind that people can recreate any homebrew you get to them as text or an image in the DDB toolset themselves, if they want. In other words, the only convenience they pay for is not even having to do that.
The point is not that I want it free. My point is that I do not want D&D profiting from nice people trying to share their creations.
A few points regarding this statement:
”D&D” is not an entity, it’s a product sold by WotC, a subsidiary of Hasbro. (Like “Windows” isn’t an entity, it’s a product sold by Microsoft; or like the “Big Mac” isn’t an entity, it’s a product sold by McDonald’s.) So “D&D” can’t profit from anything because it isn’t a legal entity, and therefore is incapable of owning anything.
D&D Beyond (aka DDB) is an entity, but it is neither owned nor operated by WotC or Hasbro, it is instead owned by a company called Fandom.
DDB does not charge anyone a single penny to use any of the homebrewed content that has been published on this site. Absolutely anyone with internet access can look up any of those homebrews at any time and use them. They can also bookmark the pages to reference at their leisure, and even “Print Screen” to make a long-lasting hardcopy for themselves, and tuck it directly into their PHB for convenient safekeeping if they wish.
DDB does restrict users’ ability to add homebrew published here to one’s “Homebrew Collection,” but, that is not required to “use” that homebrewed content in general. Adding homebrew to one’s collection is only required to have that homebrew function within DDB’s proprietary character sheet framework and interactive digital “character builder.” What the subscription money pays for is not the use of the homebrewed content, but rather DDB’s digital toolset for use with that content. It’s the digital integration that is “locked behind a paywall,” not the actual homebrewed content itself. (In that regard it’s not entirely dissimilar from renting a power tool from Home Depot.)
A one month “Hero Tier” subscription to DDB costs $2.99+tax (USD).^1 That’s only 4¢ more expensive than a “Tall Caffe Latte” at Starbucks current price^2 of $2.95+tax (USD). That coffee will be gone in about an hour for most folks, but the DDB subscription lasts an entire month for everyone. During that month, a subscriber could theoretically add… (1 homebrew/second × however many seconds per month… *muttering* carry the 1… *more muttering*) • …approximately 2.59 million homebrews to their collection if they didn’t sleep. • If they slept 6 hours per day and spent every waking second adding homebrew to their collection they could add around 1.94 million homebrews during that month. • If they actually slept, ate, bathed, and such like most people, and only spent around 2 hours per day adding homebrews to their collection, they could still reasonably add around a quarter of a million homebrews in a month. • If they behave like actual human beings, it would still be reasonable for someone to conceivably add at least a thousand homebrews to their collection in a month if that was a goal for them. At the end of that month, the subscription would expire, but that user would still have every single one of those homebrews in their collection, and they would all still function the exact same within DDBs system as when that subscription was active. With that lowest figure of 1,000 homebrews added in one month’s time at the cost of $2.99, even if DDB gave every single penny divided evenly to the authors, each author would get less than ⅓ ¢ (USD).
Everyone in the world has full access to all of the following information before ever even creating an account on this website needed to create homebrew here (let alone publishing that not-yet created homebrew):
TL/DR: “D&D” cannot make any profit because it doesn’t legally exist as an entity, DDB doesn’t charge any money at all to access homebrewed content published on this website, and the authors of those homebrews had full access to the complete details regarding DDB’s policies on and use of homebrewed creations published here before ever having written any content at all.
There are plenty of things D&D Beyond should reasonably be called to task over without manufacturing any. Anyone familiar with me is likely aware of a multiple instances when I have publicly spoken out about what I feel are some of DDB’s flaws and shortcomings. (I could likely fill entire threads in these forums regarding genuine complaints I have about this site, it’s policies, products, and services.) This company has quite a few problem areas, some of which are absolutely glaring, but in my opinion, this issue of a subscription being required to add homebrew to one’s collection isn’t really one of them.
As someone who created many homebrew for my own campaigns, I find it disgusting that especially after the OGL scandle WotC still decided to steal peoples creations for their own financial gains. Some of my creations have been made public from before the OGL, and now they lock my content that I provided to other GM/players freely, behind a paywall. They haven't even offered any payment to me, so I suspect no one gets money for their intellectual property.
Without the ability to include a specific homebrew into your library you cannot use them in your campaigns if you use dndbeyond for character sheets. While I have almost severed my connection to WotC, including not even running any dnd games for my games, some of the gaming groups I play with still use dndbeyond for characters. And I have a hard tiome using any of the homebrew for those characters.
Interesting side note. There were several HB that were taken from non WotC sources, Grim Hollow as an example. This was done before the buyout by Hasbro btw. These were so people using dndbeyond for their campaigns could use those sources due to dndbeyond being exclusively a WotC platform. Only by making HB of those feats, MI, subclasses, and spells, were players able to include them in their games. Technically this means WotC is benifiting from stealing other companies intellectual property since these still exist on the platform. I have a few in my personal library.
WotC is not "stealing" anything; people are choosing to publish their content on this site, and has already been outlined, people are not charged simply to view this material; they're charged to use this material with D&DB's special character sheet system, which is a piece of intellectual property that WotC does own, paid to acquire, and continues to pay employees to maintain. If less than $10 a month is too rich for your blood for access to this convenience among others that is your prerogative, but trying to cast this as WotC "stealing" and "profiting from" other peoples' work is categorically incorrect.
Interesting side note. There were several HB that were taken from non WotC sources, Grim Hollow as an example. This was done before the buyout by Hasbro btw. These were so people using dndbeyond for their campaigns could use those sources due to dndbeyond being exclusively a WotC platform. Only by making HB of those feats, MI, subclasses, and spells, were players able to include them in their games. Technically this means WotC is benifiting from stealing other companies intellectual property since these still exist on the platform. I have a few in my personal library.
Technically this means people are violating the D&D Beyond ToS. If a user copies third party content into homebrew and makes it publicly available (keeping it private is probably fair use), they're violating the copyright and, if DDB becomes aware of it, it will be taken down.
Now, D&D Beyond does acquire rights to anything that you publish on their platform, but that's pretty much the universal standard for fan discussion boards and is irrelevant anyway: if you think your homebrew content is valuable enough to steal, don't post it on any public forum, regardless of the exact TOS they have.
As someone who created many homebrew for my own campaigns, I find it disgusting that especially after the OGL scandle WotC still decided to steal peoples creations for their own financial gains. Some of my creations have been made public from before the OGL, and now they lock my content that I provided to other GM/players freely, behind a paywall. They haven't even offered any payment to me, so I suspect no one gets money for their intellectual property.
Without the ability to include a specific homebrew into your library you cannot use them in your campaigns if you use dndbeyond for character sheets. While I have almost severed my connection to WotC, including not even running any dnd games for my games, some of the gaming groups I play with still use dndbeyond for characters. And I have a hard tiome using any of the homebrew for those characters.
Interesting side note. There were several HB that were taken from non WotC sources, Grim Hollow as an example. This was done before the buyout by Hasbro btw. These were so people using dndbeyond for their campaigns could use those sources due to dndbeyond being exclusively a WotC platform. Only by making HB of those feats, MI, subclasses, and spells, were players able to include them in their games. Technically this means WotC is benifiting from stealing other companies intellectual property since these still exist on the platform. I have a few in my personal library.
A few points of clarification:
The requirement of a subscription to add published homebrew to your collection was not a decision by Wizards of the Coast, but D&D Beyond before Wizards of the Coast acquired them.
Your homebrew is not being "stolen", if you choose to publish your homebrew on D&D Beyond, you must first acknowledge that you have read the D&D Beyond homebrew publication rules and guidelines, in addition to the sites terms of service and agree to them before publishing (that's why that confirmation dialogue comes up.
The subscription cost is to allow others to add your published homebrew to their collection and use it in the digital character sheets, they can view it for free and if they want to, copy it into their sheets manually. This is actually no different to how sharing homebrew works outside of digital toolsets.
You can share homebrew completely for free via campaigns, no subscription required. So if the issue is you wanting to use homebrew content in your campaigns, you don't have to spend a single penny.
Users publishing any homebrew content that is not their own original work are in violation of the homebrew rules and guidelines and are likely to be subject to having that homebrew taken down at the very least.
If you have added homebrew of third party works to your collection rather than reporting it, you are benefiting from others violating the sites rules and guidelines as much as you believe Wizards of the Coast to be.
you see, the thing is that the main reason that dnd beyond is popular is because its the official online site so they should at least give you the option to either make it free or make people pay for it
I feel that it is rather rotten for D&D and Beyond to charge their subscription to use homebrew creations. People created those for other people to use in their own creations. With the pay wall to use the creations not everyone has access to use them. Now I could understand charging for it if the creators got something for somebody using their creations but they do not as far as I am aware. I feel a good example of what I am talking about is the Steam mod creations. Steam allows everyone to access the mod creations for free. I know some people would say the subscription is there to support the people working on this website and D&D in general. I am not saying that the subscription system should go away but I do think that it should no longer be required to use homebrew content.
Once a Steam mod is downloaded, Steam's job directly related to the mod ends until an update. Even so, Valve offers no support for the mods.
Using homebrew content on DDB requires the managed, online DDB application to use the content, and DDB offers support as it can.
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider.
My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong.
I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲
“It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
Yep, there are plenty of other third party sites that provide free homebrew for you to take to your notebook or whatever, and you can upload to them. for anyone to take, the equivalent of what Steam mods do. D&D Beyond allows you to integrate your homebrew with the characters sheets and (I believe) the encounter builder/combat tracker. I see no moral or business "wrong" being committed here.
You can put your stuff on DMsGuild even and charge nothing for it if you really wanted a free distribution apparatus.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
D&D Beyond is a product and service. You are using a product (software) that is hosted and maintained by a company. They can charge as much as they want to make that product and service available for your use. If you don't like the price, don't use the product. Demanding things for free is childish, self centered, and demonstrative of a lack of knowledge as to how the world actually works.
Unfortunately, for many, this is how the modern world works (so many things are "free").
The homebrew system seems to be nontrivial to implement and maintain and it goes above and beyond my expectations of what D&D Beyond should provide for free. So I'm okay with paying for it.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
Gonna say yeah. They made the system. They don’t just give people a place to put homebrew. They give people a place to integrate it
The point is not that I want it free. My point is that I do not want D&D profiting from nice people trying to share their creations.
You don't want D&D aka wizards profiting from homebrew than go complain about DMs Guild. Paying for homebrew creation tools (that this website created and allows for integration into their other parts of the website) on this site has nothing to do with the company that makes D&D profiting.
Lights need to be kept on, and this website has the right and justification to charge people to use the tools they designed.
But why? They are the ones paying for the lights to be on with this site and it’s not anymore than the membership. they don’t charge a subscription for access. That’s a thing thrown in with the membership?
if they have to pay to run the site and make things work with character sheets, why wouldn’t it be limited to those that subscribe? If they charged per homebrew, absolutely I’d be with you. A separate subscription for it? Maybe then I’d raise an eyebrow. But the situation right now feels more than fair to me
People can share their creations in any way they see fit. If that way includes using the DDB toolset, then a small fee will be required from those wanting to use them. Does it really need pointing out that using the tools on this site shouldn't necessarily be free? If I want my players to use some homebrew class or spell list I made and I don't want them to have to pay for that, I'll offer it to them in text form. If they want the convenience of getting that homebrew content integrated in the site's tools, then they'll have to pay. The toolset and its convenience is what people pay for. That doesn't change just because you want that convenience applied to something you created yourself.
edit: never mind that people can recreate any homebrew you get to them as text or an image in the DDB toolset themselves, if they want. In other words, the only convenience they pay for is not even having to do that.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
A few points regarding this statement:
• …approximately 2.59 million homebrews to their collection if they didn’t sleep.
• If they slept 6 hours per day and spent every waking second adding homebrew to their collection they could add around 1.94 million homebrews during that month.
• If they actually slept, ate, bathed, and such like most people, and only spent around 2 hours per day adding homebrews to their collection, they could still reasonably add around a quarter of a million homebrews in a month.
• If they behave like actual human beings, it would still be reasonable for someone to conceivably add at least a thousand homebrews to their collection in a month if that was a goal for them.
At the end of that month, the subscription would expire, but that user would still have every single one of those homebrews in their collection, and they would all still function the exact same within DDBs system as when that subscription was active. With that lowest figure of 1,000 homebrews added in one month’s time at the cost of $2.99, even if DDB gave every single penny divided evenly to the authors, each author would get less than ⅓ ¢ (USD).
TL/DR: “D&D” cannot make any profit because it doesn’t legally exist as an entity, DDB doesn’t charge any money at all to access homebrewed content published on this website, and the authors of those homebrews had full access to the complete details regarding DDB’s policies on and use of homebrewed creations published here before ever having written any content at all.
There are plenty of things D&D Beyond should reasonably be called to task over without manufacturing any. Anyone familiar with me is likely aware of a multiple instances when I have publicly spoken out about what I feel are some of DDB’s flaws and shortcomings. (I could likely fill entire threads in these forums regarding genuine complaints I have about this site, it’s policies, products, and services.) This company has quite a few problem areas, some of which are absolutely glaring, but in my opinion, this issue of a subscription being required to add homebrew to one’s collection isn’t really one of them.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
As someone who created many homebrew for my own campaigns, I find it disgusting that especially after the OGL scandle WotC still decided to steal peoples creations for their own financial gains. Some of my creations have been made public from before the OGL, and now they lock my content that I provided to other GM/players freely, behind a paywall. They haven't even offered any payment to me, so I suspect no one gets money for their intellectual property.
Without the ability to include a specific homebrew into your library you cannot use them in your campaigns if you use dndbeyond for character sheets. While I have almost severed my connection to WotC, including not even running any dnd games for my games, some of the gaming groups I play with still use dndbeyond for characters. And I have a hard tiome using any of the homebrew for those characters.
Interesting side note. There were several HB that were taken from non WotC sources, Grim Hollow as an example. This was done before the buyout by Hasbro btw. These were so people using dndbeyond for their campaigns could use those sources due to dndbeyond being exclusively a WotC platform. Only by making HB of those feats, MI, subclasses, and spells, were players able to include them in their games. Technically this means WotC is benifiting from stealing other companies intellectual property since these still exist on the platform. I have a few in my personal library.
WotC is not "stealing" anything; people are choosing to publish their content on this site, and has already been outlined, people are not charged simply to view this material; they're charged to use this material with D&DB's special character sheet system, which is a piece of intellectual property that WotC does own, paid to acquire, and continues to pay employees to maintain. If less than $10 a month is too rich for your blood for access to this convenience among others that is your prerogative, but trying to cast this as WotC "stealing" and "profiting from" other peoples' work is categorically incorrect.
Technically this means people are violating the D&D Beyond ToS. If a user copies third party content into homebrew and makes it publicly available (keeping it private is probably fair use), they're violating the copyright and, if DDB becomes aware of it, it will be taken down.
Now, D&D Beyond does acquire rights to anything that you publish on their platform, but that's pretty much the universal standard for fan discussion boards and is irrelevant anyway: if you think your homebrew content is valuable enough to steal, don't post it on any public forum, regardless of the exact TOS they have.
A few points of clarification:
Find my D&D Beyond articles here
you see, the thing is that the main reason that dnd beyond is popular is because its the official online site so they should at least give you the option to either make it free or make people pay for it
No I don’t think it is they lock it behind a pay wall mean while I have to make my own home brew(not very good) just to use it