Salutations! I’m Kevin, and I manage the user experience design team for D&D Beyond. I'm here to talk to you today about D&D Beyond's new Quickbuilder and our planned refurbishment of the Character Builder tool.
I have the pleasure of inviting you behind the proverbial DM screen to give feedback on our new Quickbuilder—as it stands today—as well as some early concepts for the future improvements to the Character Builder.
We want D&D Beyond's tools to be the best way to play D&D your way—so we need your help!
At the end of this post, we share a concept video and a feedback survey where you can help steer the direction of our development. The survey will remain open until March 31, 2026, so be sure to get your feedback in before then if you'd like to help contribute towards the future of this tool!
Today, we’ve launched D&D Beyond's new Quickbuilder as our first step towards our overall vision of improving the character creation experience on D&D Beyond for all players.
Eventually, we want the Character Builder to be easier to use, more fully support the game rules, suggest smart defaults, stay flexible for customization, and put more emphasis on inspiration and fun.
We’re starting with an incremental update to our Quickbuilder method of character creation, which has always been focused on letting new players easily make a level 1 character.
Compared to our standard builder, the Quickbuilder doesn’t see much use, which makes it a great place to try out new approaches, test new tech, and get feedback with little risk of disrupting your ongoing games.
Design Principles
Our design process started with talking to players about their pain points, and conducting player research labs on prototypes (For those interested in User experience research, the prototype sessions were qualitative, moderated 1:1 sessions with an average of 8 participants per round, split across two prototype rounds).
Our goal is to learn not only about the challenges with the current builder but also about players’ end-to-end D&D experience.
Here are some of the design principles we developed from those early conversations and research studies that have guided the design explorations and concepts we’re showing you today.
You shouldn’t have to be an expert in the rules to build a character.
It should feel great to use across all device sizes, from phones to 4K monitors.
Lead with iconic D&D art, not walls of text and rules details in tiny pop-ups.
Provide easy default selections and let players decide how deeply to customize their characters.
Put the DM back in control of their campaign, including which rules it uses or omits.
Help players see and avoid common builder mistakes, such as forgetting ability score bonuses or picking duplicate skill proficiencies.
Early Concept Video
To be clear, most of what you’ll see in this concept video hasn’t been built yet and is an early design concept.
We want to show you how what we shipped today in Quickbuilder could expand to provide an intuitive and full-featured Character Builder. I'm so excited to share this early design concept with our players, and I look forward to sharing more in the future.
Please know that what you see in the video may not be what is eventually released, after all, the whole point is to learn and incorporate your early feedback.
Feedback Survey
Our team is really excited by this overall direction, but more importantly, we want to know what you think, and what could be even better. We invite you to participate in a feedback survey on the concept video, which will remain open until March 31, 2026.
It is very nice to see such cool things coming in the future. I just hope, they don’t forget things like the pdf creation (needs some improvements) and custom/homebrew stuff. The survey link is… funny. They could maybe have also a section for criticism😅, but they‘ll know what information they need…
To be clear, it looks like a rearrangement of the existing tools with some new screens and randomize buttons added. Not sure what the real benefits are.
At first glance this seems great. I gave it some more thougt and used it with beginners.
- easy way to create a realy generic boring character
- the look and feel is great. You can tell that people with UX experience wolred on this
- for beginners: this is worse that the normal caracterbuilder since now they have a character but they never had to make real choices. Especially for casting classes. New players are lost because the did not realy create their character. For all my inteoduction senssions with beginners the learn the most by creating a character
So all in all: for veterans this is not needed, for beginners it takes away essential effort that realy helps understand the game. It looks and feels amazing but who is this for? Maybe for casial players? I think this is great to show investors and boardmembers who dont play the game to show product improvements
If I can make a suggestion, when you show subclasses maybe include ability scores they use (ex. INT for Eldritch Knight) so first time players could have a better idea where to put their scores
I think that’s a fantastic idea! Especially for those new to that class/subclass!
OK. Im an old hat when it comes to D&D, so this looks a little overly simplistic to me. But I can see the benefits for newer players. As long as the current character creator continues to be an option. What if we had an AI persona (Like Dungeon master from the cartoon) come on screen and ask a player questions about what kind of character they want to play? What do they have in mind? This can lead to a series of questions to see what that players interests are and then give them a suggestion that meets closely to their idea, followed by a couple of other suggestions if the first one isn't quite right. Like the "Sorting Hat".
Normally at my table, we do that for the new players ourselves. But someone just getting started or even some more veteran players could use this to make characters that meet their needs.
Resources the program pulls from for character generation is a setting in the first page in character creation. unselect the options you do not want it to use.
The survey link seems to be broken. I like the idea and especially the design, nicely done! For reasons of roleplay, I would choose race and background before class, but I guess it's personal preference. I would love a KI-Option that helps direct me towards a more refined character when I'm unsure about certain choices.
as someone who introduces a lot of new people to dnd, mainly though DND beyond I tend to go through the following steps
Do you want to be more magical, physical or a bit of both.
~ magical
right so you have a few main types of magical focused classes,
The wizard where you studdy and learn to use magic, starting off weaker but yet more powerful and versatile as they get more powerful.
Druid where they get their power from nature and have the ability to transform into creatures.
Sorcerer where you are born with it from your bloodline, they are like a barrel of power.
The bard class is someone who empowers themselves or others though their songs and or storytelling, and is welcomed all around
The cleric is a class that learns magic and gifted part of a gods or aspects power that can use it for themselves or usually in need by others
extra
Then go on like this for the other classes to help find the class they relate to the most. giving context or story tends to sell a class but I aim not to give direct storys or examples when first explaining as it narrows the new players view to that's only what the class can do.
on the other hand, Picture! the more pictures for species the better as there's a lot of "what's a kobald" what's a teifling, where usually show the character picture or find a bunch on Pinterest to give examples of different types or ideas.
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Posted Mar 27, 2026HE'S BACK
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Posted Mar 27, 2026This is pretty fantastic
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Posted Mar 27, 2026It is very nice to see such cool things coming in the future. I just hope, they don’t forget things like the pdf creation (needs some improvements) and custom/homebrew stuff. The survey link is… funny. They could maybe have also a section for criticism😅, but they‘ll know what information they need…
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Posted Mar 27, 2026To be clear, it looks like a rearrangement of the existing tools with some new screens and randomize buttons added. Not sure what the real benefits are.
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Posted Mar 27, 2026At first glance this seems great. I gave it some more thougt and used it with beginners.
- easy way to create a realy generic boring character
- the look and feel is great. You can tell that people with UX experience wolred on this
- for beginners: this is worse that the normal caracterbuilder since now they have a character but they never had to make real choices. Especially for casting classes. New players are lost because the did not realy create their character. For all my inteoduction senssions with beginners the learn the most by creating a character
So all in all: for veterans this is not needed, for beginners it takes away essential effort that realy helps understand the game. It looks and feels amazing but who is this for? Maybe for casial players? I think this is great to show investors and boardmembers who dont play the game to show product improvements
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Posted Mar 27, 2026Good job !
DnDB need more old school images
Keep on the good work
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Posted Mar 27, 2026The survey link just goes to a blank page.
EDIT: Apparently it's some sort of caching issue in Chrome. I copied the link and opened it in Microsoft Edge and it worked.
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Posted Mar 27, 2026Edit: not used to commenting here.
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Posted Mar 27, 2026I think that’s a fantastic idea! Especially for those new to that class/subclass!
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Posted Mar 27, 2026This
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Posted Mar 27, 2026This is absolutely fantastic work. Going to make players' lives so much easier.
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Posted Mar 27, 2026OK. Im an old hat when it comes to D&D, so this looks a little overly simplistic to me. But I can see the benefits for newer players. As long as the current character creator continues to be an option. What if we had an AI persona (Like Dungeon master from the cartoon) come on screen and ask a player questions about what kind of character they want to play? What do they have in mind? This can lead to a series of questions to see what that players interests are and then give them a suggestion that meets closely to their idea, followed by a couple of other suggestions if the first one isn't quite right. Like the "Sorting Hat".
Normally at my table, we do that for the new players ourselves. But someone just getting started or even some more veteran players could use this to make characters that meet their needs.
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Posted Mar 27, 2026Resources the program pulls from for character generation is a setting in the first page in character creation. unselect the options you do not want it to use.
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Posted Mar 27, 2026Looks great.
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Posted Mar 27, 2026The survey link seems to be broken. I like the idea and especially the design, nicely done! For reasons of roleplay, I would choose race and background before class, but I guess it's personal preference. I would love a KI-Option that helps direct me towards a more refined character when I'm unsure about certain choices.
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Posted Mar 27, 2026as someone who introduces a lot of new people to dnd, mainly though DND beyond I tend to go through the following steps
Do you want to be more magical, physical or a bit of both.
~ magical
right so you have a few main types of magical focused classes,
The wizard where you studdy and learn to use magic, starting off weaker but yet more powerful and versatile as they get more powerful.
Druid where they get their power from nature and have the ability to transform into creatures.
Sorcerer where you are born with it from your bloodline, they are like a barrel of power.
The bard class is someone who empowers themselves or others though their songs and or storytelling, and is welcomed all around
The cleric is a class that learns magic and gifted part of a gods or aspects power that can use it for themselves or usually in need by others
extra
Then go on like this for the other classes to help find the class they relate to the most. giving context or story tends to sell a class but I aim not to give direct storys or examples when first explaining as it narrows the new players view to that's only what the class can do.
on the other hand, Picture! the more pictures for species the better as there's a lot of "what's a kobald" what's a teifling, where usually show the character picture or find a bunch on Pinterest to give examples of different types or ideas.
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Posted Mar 27, 2026When can I start using it?!?!
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Posted Mar 27, 2026While this is a fun interface, it's not very "quick"? I think new players will like it, but us old timers might find it cumbersome?
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Posted Mar 27, 2026It actually looks great!
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Posted Mar 28, 2026please, for the love of god, stop hiding cool classes like artificers and pugilists, and the other subclasses behind a paywall.