Karghen's Profile

Probably stretching this analogy too far, but its not like most of the people here are the "anti-saloon" league.  Most of us were happy customers, coming to get our fill of beer and peanuts on a regular basis, when new management moved in, and after a few months lets slip that they plan on gouging the regulars crazy amounts of money, and that all those brews they allowed to be served up by independent microbreweries were now going to be shut out, or forced to pay crazy amounts of money to be considered to be put on tap.

If I was a customer at that bar I'd be pretty pissed at the management, just the same way I'm pissed at WotC for taking a perfectly good product that saw a large engagement from a large number of people and then tried to monopolize it all.  I'm about as pro-capitalist as they come and I get the stock market values short term earnings at an unreasonable level, but the good businesses, the ones you remember for decades and you keep coming back to are the ones that deliver a quality product with a customer friendly approach, and an industry developing attitude.  Sadly it seems more and more companies are chasing the short term penny, while ignoring the long term dollar these days.

We are not anti-D&D, quite the opposite, we want to see D&D thrive and prosper, but not at the expense of customers being treated badly, and with the anti-consumer mindsets being held by the WotC leadership.

As mentioned earlier, my subscription runs through August, and re-upping was based upon them not touching the OGL.  To their credit they seem to be complying with that request, though I have to say I'm still more than a little distrustful of their motives and actions at this point.  I will continue to wait and watch to see what happens, and if things remain status quo I will likely re-up in August so that I can play D&D with various folks.

That said, their unforced error has prompted my main gaming group to re-evaluate whether or not we even want to continue with D&D at all at this point.  We have started exploring Pathfinder 2e, and to be honest while I had been sitting on the PDF rule books for awhile now, I had only skimmed them previously.  Now that I'm actually reading them more carefully, and starting a Beginners Box adventure with a small subset of my regular players I'm finding I kinda like what Pathfinder 2e is offering quite a bit better.

The main advantage D&D has/had was DNDBeyond, but with the recent leaks noting that their leadership despises DNDBeyond and wants to see it killed off and replaced with what sounds like a skinner box style micro-transactions oriented VTT I'm not sure I want to keep riding this train to its eventual destination.  And Pathfinder has DNDBeyond competing products out there with new ones coming soon that may close the gap sufficiently that it just won't matter.

Honestly I played D&D cause it was the default option and comfortable.  WotC really screwed up cause it gave the swift kick that I think a lot of folks needed to go exploring options.  I really do hope this busted WotC's near 80% dominance in online RPG playing and helps to bring other games into the light.  I don't expect parity, but I think good market competition is probably the best check on WotC's unbridled greed.

On an annual master membership that's not due again til August.  I have submitted my cancellation, and I have the time required to transition my players to something else if it comes to that.  I hope the message I left in my cancellation will give them pause for reconsideration as I prefer to offer a carrot, along with using the stick.  As a customer I represent their highest tier of membership, along with owning just about every book on dndbeyond they offer.  (think I've skipped the Rick and Morty adventure and that's about it).  So I'm about as big a whale as they have on this site, and I'm fully ready to swim to warmer seas.

My cancellation message:

I will re-up my subscription when WotC decides to leave OGL 1.0 in place with ZERO alterations.  I am already beginning discussions with my players on whether or not we should switch systems, and I will be suspending any further purchases of any new source books until WotC apologizes and announces they will not be pursuing ANY updates to the OGL.

I've experienced this on one of my characters, and one of my players in my campaign have had this issue also.  We were able to get my player squared away, but my character still has this problem.

I know this is probably not an ideal solution, but while you wait, have you tried to re-create the various Firearms you would like to use, using the Homebrew system and classifying those weapons as the same category as say Crossbows, or Bows?  Basically just copy/paste the original Firearms stats onto a new item with a different weapon classification.

It's a cheeky trick if it works, but it might allow you to bend around their restrictions.  Just spit-balling ideas here.

Yup, we are aware that non-content holders have to create a character within the campaign page to access shared content within that campaign.  The problem is for a subset of our players, they seem to just have the default "free" content regardless of whether they create/level/modify a character within a campaign or not.  What's strange is that other players don't seem to have any issue at all and are of the same subscription level (free) as the problem players.  If had to guess based on my own programming experience, I'm thinking the issue might be account specific rather than campaign specific.  This is partly due to the fact that when the same players joined a second campaign, again with me as the content holder who is sharing content, the same arrangement of problems/no problems recreated for the same sets of players.

My group is also experiencing similar problems.  I am the content holder for our group as I bought the legendary bundle and have a DNDBeyond Master level annual account.  My brother is the DM and created the campaign of which I am a player in and he has enabled all content sharing.  Previously none of the other players had an issue accessing shared content.  However, upon recently leveling up, one of our players wanted to pick a feat and found that only the free basic feats were visible (i.e. Grappling and some other UA items).  She also does not have access to any of the race options from the various manuals we've purchased if she attempts to create a new character.  What's strange is another player in our campaign is able to see everything just fine.  Neither of them are subscribers, and after talking with each them over Discord and even screen sharing with the one having the problem, I could discern nothing of difference between the two of them.

Ultimately we got around this for the moment due the player deciding on a raw stat increase, but considering we are rolling up new characters for a new campaign in the next week, it would be nice to make sure all our players have access to all the shared content.  If the devs would like to see the problem reproduced, I'm sure the player in question, along with myself could make ourselves available.

Well I think you need to look at this holistically to properly understand the current model and then to be able to request adjustments accordingly.  There are three main services DNDBeyond is selling here.  First is content, second is character management, and third is campaign management(albeit that area is pretty feature light in comparison to the other two offerings, but will hopefully improve in the future).  Right now their model provides a fairly simple and straightforward model for users to pick the level of investment they want to engage in, with fairly generous sharing options if we are being honest especially considering the limitations that physical books would normally present.

I think to facilitate the original requestors idea one of two features could be added to address these problems while still allowing DNDBeyond to keep a reasonable level of control on the sharing.

Feature option number 1 could be to shift sharing function to an account centric model, where in the Content holder instead of sharing content with campaigns, could share content with specific accounts.  Where this might get messy is when an account that is getting access to content from one content holder, then goes and joins a campaign that holder is not a part of.  I have a feeling there might be some legal limitations that enforce the relationship between sharer and sharee to center around the construct we know as the campaign.

Feature option number 2 (and the one I think is probably more easily implementable) is to allow unlimited campaign creations, but to only have up to 3 (or whatever subscriber level permits) concurrent campaigns be active at a given time.  Campaigns could be switched to active and inactive states as the users of those campaigns need them.  I know a situation my group is about to face is we are currently playing in one campaign under one DM, but we are about to pause that campaign to play another campaign run by another DM (who plays as a player in the first campaign).  Granted we still have a campaign left to use but for the sake of example, lets say we knew we were not coming back to the first campaign for a few months, we could deactivate that campaign, essentially freezing the characters and other managed items while we go play in another active campaign.  When we are finished or ready to pause the second campaign, we could then create a third campaign and so on.  With up to 3 concurrent active campaigns and an unlimited number of inactive campaigns this would allow subscribers to dance between as many campaigns as they please so long as they are only active in their concurrent limit of campaigns at a time.  To prevent the abuse of just switching campaigns on and off as needed, provide a monthly allowance of toggles of say 4 (or some other even number since you need to toggle one off and one on) that only get refreshed after 30 days elapse.

That second option essentially allows content holders with top tier subscriber access to then host as many worlds with as many combinations of allowable source materials as they like over time for their group(s) but still limits how many they share with at any single moment in time.

I believe this is a function of the formatting to PDF.  With minimal text, the fonts will be larger (though I agree at times it gets unreasonably large).  However if you are verbose, the conversion will attempt to shrink the text to a point where it fits in the box provided.  The PDF will not adjust the box sizes and instead cram as much text as possible into them.  My best suggestion for things like background stories, notes, and other verbose text blocks is to copy/paste those into a separate document and print those independently (assuming you need paper copies), and then only print those PDF pages with the more dynamic aspects of the character sheet like stat blocks/saves/etc.  For one you will save yourself paper (I don't need 10 copies of my background story for instance), and you will have each section in a more readable format.

Can confirm I've seen this behavior as well.

To reproduce:

Browser - Chrome

Move mouse cursor to the "search everything" text box at the top of the site, and click into the box to set the focus, and bring up cursor.  Upon moving cursor away from search box, and over one of the context menus along the top (Creations, Game Rules, Sources, Tools, Market Place, Media, Forums, New Player Guide) the focus is then pulled from the search bar regardless of whether or not the associated pop up menu unfurls.  This means even a brief mousing over of one of the menus will pull the focus from the search bar.