Disclaimer: I am rather new to dndbeyond (dnd for that matter) and probably don't understand a lot of the market dynamics. I know nothing about dndbeyond's product development capabilities. That said, I have a fairly decent history enabling developers to build on top of products (developers building on a product is what I mean by providing a "platform" in this context). I formed the questions and opinions for this post through wanting to build a simple dice roller that pushed results into my favorite chat tool. Take'em for a grain of salt.
My goal for this post is to influence bumping up the priority of the API.
In looking at the roadmap it appears the intent is for dndbeyond to build a lot of the tools themselves, and the vtt (Virtual Table Top) caught my eye in particular (https://trello.com/c/OdsstvVu/16-virtual-tabletop-gameboard.) I have not personally built something like a vtt (and I have no intention to do so) but I suspect it's one of those "much harder than we thought it was going to be" sort of problems. I would put any real-timey, synchronous collaboration type tool in that category, and these are things you need for a robust vtt experience. Many will claim "I can do that in a weekend" but those of us who know the difference between a prototype and a real product know better.
Should dndbeyond build a vtt?
Why not focus effort on brilliant content, the very well conceived building blocks (character sheets, campaigns, encounter-builder), and the API to integrate them. Let others with the motivation and core-competencies build amazing vtt experiences (or whatever they dream up). As more tool providers have less friction to integrate dndbeyond stuff they will build more, which strengthens and expands the reach of the dndbeyond platform.
DMs will use dndbeyond tools and content knowing they seamlessly integrate into their vtt/tool of choice (no export, import, manual copy, etc... let's have the machines do the work). Players will be drawn to the dndbeyond site (and content) as more DMs and their friends point them to it. Development partners will want to build on the platform as it's where the users are, has best-of-breed tools and content, and they are less likely to compete with a dndbeyond product directly. And critically important, the dndbeyond team don't have to build every integration themselves -- the network effect can occur un-hindered by the capacity of what I assume to be a relatively small dndbeyond team.
For the dndbeyond bottom line, there are many ways to monetize if your are a core part of the ecosystem.
A well conceived platform strategy should allow dndbeyond and its partners to prosper while creating better experiences for players. The whole boat rises. Thoughts?
Couldn't agree more. As a fledgling DM, I really appreciate the thought and work you've put into the character sheet and source integration. It is peerless.
If our group could have used your thoughtfully-developed, robust API, we could have integrated the beautiful work you've done to date, tailored to our own needs. All of my party would've purchased all of our content from you and we'd have used some virtual collab environment (a VTT, Skype, Discord, et. al.) to run our campaigns using DNDBeyond + API.
Instead we are in this weird limbo where some our content are on DNDBeyond and some are on other sites (which we'd dump if you had a rocking API), and some are in print.
With a killer API, we could make our hybrid approach work for a really long time and open source our integration code to let others do the same, driving more business your way, as well as giving you as much runway as you need or want to develop a kickass VTT (which, incidentally, you could speed up using code from community open source projects per the Valve model). If you put the same care and design-thinking into the VTT that you put into the character stuff, UX, and the source integration, I have no doubt that it also would be peerless. Well said, Chris.
If you spend a bit of time reading the boards, there are very divergent end-user expectations, priorities, and requests with a number of the opinion that D&D Beyond should have their own VTT yesterday and should be prioritizing as such and others with the opinion that the only thing D&D should focus on is updating content and folks can export their own data as needed.
Additionally, since D&D Beyond licenses the content from Wizards who also licenses that content to VTT platforms like roll20... there may be contractual requirements that prevent supporting the export of content here to other platforms.
As a side note, they are currently working on re-working the back-end framework and implementing micro-services to recover from historic technical debt on character data structure/storage and creating a more orchestrated flexible implementation vs what I assume was the classic chewing gum & bailing wire approach. I'm sure you both would agree that building public-facing APIs to hook into their old systems would be counter-productive and delay any actual progress in updating their systems or developing tools on-top of the new framework.
Not going to claim to know a lot about the market dynamics either, but keep in mind that this site basically makes money selling D&D content. They also sell subscriptions, but the primary point of subscriptions are for sharing said content. VTTs such as roll20 also sell content, so in a lot of ways they are direct competitors. And most VTTs I've seen also have (inferior) character sheet options that they will likely continue to develop and improve.
I agree that I'd rather have each side work on perfecting their primary product, but unless there's some kind of partnership (which seems legally very complicated) the way they make their money dictates that eventually there will be one site where you do it all. No one wants to have to buy books twice to run a game.
A well conceived platform strategy should allow dndbeyond and its partners to prosper while creating better experiences for players. The whole boat rises. Thoughts?
Ill touch on one specific point here based upon what I am hearing from the developers for DDB, is that what they're working on isnt really going to be a VVT experience given whats available out there now, and instead are going to innovate based upon their own view of how things should proceed. I know that for myself I would absolutely prefer to keep things centralized within DDB for my D&D experience rather than having to use multiple different services for that effort. So in this hypothetical future state they would have your character sheet, encounter builder, combat tracker, and virtual map with tokens all tied into your character where you can run combat sessions seamlessly all while providing the experience in house? I am all for that.
I say that as both a DM and a Player with my current group where (prior to the encounter builder and combat tracker) I was using Roll20 for the map, tokens and music, DDB for the Character sheets and info lookup, Discord for the Video and Voice, Google Sheets for the encounters and Google Docs for info about the fights and other points. If you roll the Encounter features into one solution I am eliminating at least 2-3 of those other sources giving me a more seamless experience.
Now, should they build out an API to allow for integration into other services at some point so as to broaden their user base and keep more people invested into their ecosystem? Absolutely! But at the same point, you have systems like Fantasy Grounds and Roll20 trying to sell their own versions of the D&D books and allowing someone like DDB who is competing for their money to simply integrate their character sheets and info into their own environment is not likely to happen without 3rd party plugins like Beyond20.
Edit: And unless DDB somehow comes up with a better system than Discord for video/voice chatting and chat programs, we're likely to stay there while using some form of World Builder tracker for the Homebrew world itself. So that gives us 3 total solutions rather than the 5+ DM's have to use now.
As a side note, they are currently working on re-working the back-end framework and implementing micro-services to recover from historic technical debt on character data structure/storage and creating a more orchestrated flexible implementation vs what I assume was the classic chewing gum & bailing wire approach. I'm sure you both would agree that building public-facing APIs to hook into their old systems would be counter-productive and delay any actual progress in updating their systems or developing tools on-top of the new framework.
I think that is one of the main issues, its an less experienced development team that started with a SQL Server mess and have been playing catch-up for a while now as things exploded.
My other concern is that they have that mindset of "we want to build all the software, we don't want anyone to access our platform for their own uses". Which would be a shame if they don't understand the value of making everyone dependent on your own software by letting community developers build hooks into it.
A well conceived platform strategy should allow dndbeyond and its partners to prosper while creating better experiences for players. The whole boat rises. Thoughts?
I say that as both a DM and a Player with my current group where (prior to the encounter builder and combat tracker) I was using Roll20 for the map, tokens and music, DDB for the Character sheets and info lookup, Discord for the Video and Voice, Google Sheets for the encounters and Google Docs for info about the fights and other points. If you roll the Encounter features into one solution I am eliminating at least 2-3 of those other sources giving me a more seamless experience.
Now, should they build out an API to allow for integration into other services at some point so as to broaden their user base and keep more people invested into their ecosystem?
Discord and Zoom you are never going to replace. I just don't want to support Roll20 since their owners are ******** (from what I read). An API to DDB to pull out the character info would speed up Roll20s demise as free community solutions eliminated the need for Roll20.
As a side note, they are currently working on re-working the back-end framework and implementing micro-services to recover from historic technical debt on character data structure/storage and creating a more orchestrated flexible implementation vs what I assume was the classic chewing gum & bailing wire approach. I'm sure you both would agree that building public-facing APIs to hook into their old systems would be counter-productive and delay any actual progress in updating their systems or developing tools on-top of the new framework.
I think that is one of the main issues, its an less experienced development team that started with a SQL Server mess and have been playing catch-up for a while now as things exploded.
My other concern is that they have that mindset of "we want to build all the software, we don't want anyone to access our platform for their own uses". Which would be a shame if they don't understand the value of making everyone dependent on your own software by letting community developers build hooks into it.
#1 has happened in dev teams far larger and more better funded, I'm not surprised that a platform that started out mostly licensing the digital books and then pivoted into a fully featured character builder may have not been able anticipate how wizards would evolve their content and implicit data structures.
The problem with #2 is that WOTC seem very protective of their IP and generally doesn't like making things freely available. I'm guessing the terms to DDB's license to D&D content heavily discourages making the data exportable, if only because then it would potentially interfere with roll20, another licensee of the same content, which might rock the boat a bit too much for wizards just because roll20 helped make D&D streaming on twitch a much more interactive medium.
I want D&DB to make their own VTT for the very reason I enjoy the rest of D&DB, a superb user experience for all things D&D5E.
I've used other VTTs and nothing made me want to stay on those platforms outside of the games I was required to use them for. Meanwhile I use D&DB constantly, and them having a VTT baked in with my playgroup that are all also familiar with D&DB is a no-brainer.
The problem with #2 is that WOTC seem very protective of their IP and generally doesn't like making things freely available. I'm guessing the terms to DDB's license to D&D content heavily discourages making the data exportable, if only because then it would potentially interfere with roll20, another licensee of the same content, which might rock the boat a bit too much for wizards just because roll20 helped make D&D streaming on twitch a much more interactive medium.
Nobody is talking about exporting the book content, just the stats needed for the current game
The stats are based on the content and if the stats were easily portable to roll20 or other VTTs then there would be less reason to buy content from roll20. This obviously would hurt roll20's revenue which could put a prominent VTT platform used for streaming at risk and both parts could ultimately impact wizard's bottom line.
There have been a number of community-built character sheets that have been shutdown or warned because they made stats based on sourcebook content freely available so wizards does seem to be sensitive to copyright implications of derivative works.
A well conceived platform strategy should allow dndbeyond and its partners to prosper while creating better experiences for players. The whole boat rises. Thoughts?
I say that as both a DM and a Player with my current group where (prior to the encounter builder and combat tracker) I was using Roll20 for the map, tokens and music, DDB for the Character sheets and info lookup, Discord for the Video and Voice, Google Sheets for the encounters and Google Docs for info about the fights and other points. If you roll the Encounter features into one solution I am eliminating at least 2-3 of those other sources giving me a more seamless experience.
Now, should they build out an API to allow for integration into other services at some point so as to broaden their user base and keep more people invested into their ecosystem?
Discord and Zoom you are never going to replace. I just don't want to support Roll20 since their owners are ******** (from what I read). An API to DDB to pull out the character info would speed up Roll20s demise as free community solutions eliminated the need for Roll20.
I would love to see what DDB does for a VTT someday since unlike most VTTs, they seem to have a nice grasp on both functionality needs and good interface design! However, in the meantime, I love Roll20 and not sure what you are reading, but from everything I’ve seen of them, the owners are decent people except in the opinions of the “But they are racist against whites” crowd after they didn’t renew one group’s streaming contract and trolls started a smear campaign against them.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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Disclaimer: I am rather new to dndbeyond (dnd for that matter) and probably don't understand a lot of the market dynamics. I know nothing about dndbeyond's product development capabilities. That said, I have a fairly decent history enabling developers to build on top of products (developers building on a product is what I mean by providing a "platform" in this context). I formed the questions and opinions for this post through wanting to build a simple dice roller that pushed results into my favorite chat tool. Take'em for a grain of salt.
My goal for this post is to influence bumping up the priority of the API.
In looking at the roadmap it appears the intent is for dndbeyond to build a lot of the tools themselves, and the vtt (Virtual Table Top) caught my eye in particular (https://trello.com/c/OdsstvVu/16-virtual-tabletop-gameboard.) I have not personally built something like a vtt (and I have no intention to do so) but I suspect it's one of those "much harder than we thought it was going to be" sort of problems. I would put any real-timey, synchronous collaboration type tool in that category, and these are things you need for a robust vtt experience. Many will claim "I can do that in a weekend" but those of us who know the difference between a prototype and a real product know better.
Should dndbeyond build a vtt?
Why not focus effort on brilliant content, the very well conceived building blocks (character sheets, campaigns, encounter-builder), and the API to integrate them. Let others with the motivation and core-competencies build amazing vtt experiences (or whatever they dream up). As more tool providers have less friction to integrate dndbeyond stuff they will build more, which strengthens and expands the reach of the dndbeyond platform.
DMs will use dndbeyond tools and content knowing they seamlessly integrate into their vtt/tool of choice (no export, import, manual copy, etc... let's have the machines do the work). Players will be drawn to the dndbeyond site (and content) as more DMs and their friends point them to it. Development partners will want to build on the platform as it's where the users are, has best-of-breed tools and content, and they are less likely to compete with a dndbeyond product directly. And critically important, the dndbeyond team don't have to build every integration themselves -- the network effect can occur un-hindered by the capacity of what I assume to be a relatively small dndbeyond team.
For the dndbeyond bottom line, there are many ways to monetize if your are a core part of the ecosystem.
A well conceived platform strategy should allow dndbeyond and its partners to prosper while creating better experiences for players. The whole boat rises. Thoughts?
Couldn't agree more. As a fledgling DM, I really appreciate the thought and work you've put into the character sheet and source integration. It is peerless.
If our group could have used your thoughtfully-developed, robust API, we could have integrated the beautiful work you've done to date, tailored to our own needs. All of my party would've purchased all of our content from you and we'd have used some virtual collab environment (a VTT, Skype, Discord, et. al.) to run our campaigns using DNDBeyond + API.
Instead we are in this weird limbo where some our content are on DNDBeyond and some are on other sites (which we'd dump if you had a rocking API), and some are in print.
With a killer API, we could make our hybrid approach work for a really long time and open source our integration code to let others do the same, driving more business your way, as well as giving you as much runway as you need or want to develop a kickass VTT (which, incidentally, you could speed up using code from community open source projects per the Valve model). If you put the same care and design-thinking into the VTT that you put into the character stuff, UX, and the source integration, I have no doubt that it also would be peerless. Well said, Chris.
If you spend a bit of time reading the boards, there are very divergent end-user expectations, priorities, and requests with a number of the opinion that D&D Beyond should have their own VTT yesterday and should be prioritizing as such and others with the opinion that the only thing D&D should focus on is updating content and folks can export their own data as needed.
Additionally, since D&D Beyond licenses the content from Wizards who also licenses that content to VTT platforms like roll20... there may be contractual requirements that prevent supporting the export of content here to other platforms.
As a side note, they are currently working on re-working the back-end framework and implementing micro-services to recover from historic technical debt on character data structure/storage and creating a more orchestrated flexible implementation vs what I assume was the classic chewing gum & bailing wire approach. I'm sure you both would agree that building public-facing APIs to hook into their old systems would be counter-productive and delay any actual progress in updating their systems or developing tools on-top of the new framework.
Not going to claim to know a lot about the market dynamics either, but keep in mind that this site basically makes money selling D&D content. They also sell subscriptions, but the primary point of subscriptions are for sharing said content. VTTs such as roll20 also sell content, so in a lot of ways they are direct competitors. And most VTTs I've seen also have (inferior) character sheet options that they will likely continue to develop and improve.
I agree that I'd rather have each side work on perfecting their primary product, but unless there's some kind of partnership (which seems legally very complicated) the way they make their money dictates that eventually there will be one site where you do it all. No one wants to have to buy books twice to run a game.
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
Agreed! D&D Beyond has so many good things going for it right now, an API would help keep the momentum up.
Ill touch on one specific point here based upon what I am hearing from the developers for DDB, is that what they're working on isnt really going to be a VVT experience given whats available out there now, and instead are going to innovate based upon their own view of how things should proceed. I know that for myself I would absolutely prefer to keep things centralized within DDB for my D&D experience rather than having to use multiple different services for that effort. So in this hypothetical future state they would have your character sheet, encounter builder, combat tracker, and virtual map with tokens all tied into your character where you can run combat sessions seamlessly all while providing the experience in house? I am all for that.
I say that as both a DM and a Player with my current group where (prior to the encounter builder and combat tracker) I was using Roll20 for the map, tokens and music, DDB for the Character sheets and info lookup, Discord for the Video and Voice, Google Sheets for the encounters and Google Docs for info about the fights and other points. If you roll the Encounter features into one solution I am eliminating at least 2-3 of those other sources giving me a more seamless experience.
Now, should they build out an API to allow for integration into other services at some point so as to broaden their user base and keep more people invested into their ecosystem? Absolutely! But at the same point, you have systems like Fantasy Grounds and Roll20 trying to sell their own versions of the D&D books and allowing someone like DDB who is competing for their money to simply integrate their character sheets and info into their own environment is not likely to happen without 3rd party plugins like Beyond20.
Edit: And unless DDB somehow comes up with a better system than Discord for video/voice chatting and chat programs, we're likely to stay there while using some form of World Builder tracker for the Homebrew world itself. So that gives us 3 total solutions rather than the 5+ DM's have to use now.
I think that is one of the main issues, its an less experienced development team that started with a SQL Server mess and have been playing catch-up for a while now as things exploded.
My other concern is that they have that mindset of "we want to build all the software, we don't want anyone to access our platform for their own uses". Which would be a shame if they don't understand the value of making everyone dependent on your own software by letting community developers build hooks into it.
Discord and Zoom you are never going to replace. I just don't want to support Roll20 since their owners are ******** (from what I read). An API to DDB to pull out the character info would speed up Roll20s demise as free community solutions eliminated the need for Roll20.
#1 has happened in dev teams far larger and more better funded, I'm not surprised that a platform that started out mostly licensing the digital books and then pivoted into a fully featured character builder may have not been able anticipate how wizards would evolve their content and implicit data structures.
The problem with #2 is that WOTC seem very protective of their IP and generally doesn't like making things freely available. I'm guessing the terms to DDB's license to D&D content heavily discourages making the data exportable, if only because then it would potentially interfere with roll20, another licensee of the same content, which might rock the boat a bit too much for wizards just because roll20 helped make D&D streaming on twitch a much more interactive medium.
I want D&DB to make their own VTT for the very reason I enjoy the rest of D&DB, a superb user experience for all things D&D5E.
I've used other VTTs and nothing made me want to stay on those platforms outside of the games I was required to use them for. Meanwhile I use D&DB constantly, and them having a VTT baked in with my playgroup that are all also familiar with D&DB is a no-brainer.
Nobody is talking about exporting the book content, just the stats needed for the current game
The stats are based on the content and if the stats were easily portable to roll20 or other VTTs then there would be less reason to buy content from roll20. This obviously would hurt roll20's revenue which could put a prominent VTT platform used for streaming at risk and both parts could ultimately impact wizard's bottom line.
There have been a number of community-built character sheets that have been shutdown or warned because they made stats based on sourcebook content freely available so wizards does seem to be sensitive to copyright implications of derivative works.
I would love to see what DDB does for a VTT someday since unlike most VTTs, they seem to have a nice grasp on both functionality needs and good interface design! However, in the meantime, I love Roll20 and not sure what you are reading, but from everything I’ve seen of them, the owners are decent people except in the opinions of the “But they are racist against whites” crowd after they didn’t renew one group’s streaming contract and trolls started a smear campaign against them.