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.
This is perfect! Maybe have the player pick a few words from a few lists to "describe" their char and have Ai write a backstory and boom. I find character creation to be so tedious. This has been needed for so long!
Nope, it was created by Benjamin Huffman of Sterling Vermin Adventure Co. It's one of five 3rd Party classes (not counting classes from the LotR 5E game) available on DNDBeyond
Looks very nice, and would be great if it has all the detail of the existing builder. But don't make/keep two builders - there should be only one. "Quick" implies that it is less complete, takes shortcuts and misses stuff, which isn't desirable. Make one builder that does it all and does it well. Easier said than done, I'm sure, but worthwhile.
It'd be amazing if this continued on for full character builder, with an option to switch between a newer one and the original. As well, it'd be great if there was a "Custom" mode/tab for stuff like spells, classes, books, and other stuff. So that a DM can choose to use 5.5e classes but also allow some of the Third-party classes built with 5e in mind like Illrigger. So that the DM has a little extra ability to preset-up the rules and options its using or omiting.
In the context of a campaign or in general. There should be a little button up in some corner or side that says something like: "rules selection" and when hovered over says default. Default would pick options from like the PHB, DMG, MM for 5.5e, while depending on the campaign your in (Ex: Helldivers in Avernus [Descent into Avernus]), you could select that and automatically it would omit or allow rules and sources depending on what the DM allowed (Dm's own selection screen would make this). Making it so new players or potential full character builder redesign could automatically allow or omit rules that the DM decides. Making it easier for both to make a character.
For the love of god add a "level up" screen for players (with the previous control still in place to fix things).
Leveling should be thematic not trying to fix an excel sheet.
I'd assume that's coming in the "Character Builder Overhaul".
Quickbuilder is just the beginning. Throughout the year, we’ll expand it into a fully modernized Character Builder that supports deeper customization, advanced options, and multiple creation paths, all powered by our new data-defined rules engine.
Any chance we can get the Quickbuilder added to the Campaign screen? It would be nice to not have to use the full builder, or the Premades, when adding a bunch of L1s to teach new players how to play.
Right now it's build it separately, then have it join and unclaim it.
I like the new setup both mechanically and visually. However, I hope that many of the missing features on the player sheet will be implemented, in addition to the character creation section. For example, interactions between talents, spells, or other elements and the sheet’s modifiers, HP, and so on. Here’s an example: if I have a wizard, I should be able to select “innate magic” on the character sheet without creating something homebrew and see the spell cooldowns change automatically. This is just one example of many other things that should have this mechanic.
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Posted Mar 28, 2026Pugilist isn’t WotC’s class.
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Posted Mar 28, 2026This is perfect! Maybe have the player pick a few words from a few lists to "describe" their char and have Ai write a backstory and boom. I find character creation to be so tedious. This has been needed for so long!
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Posted Mar 28, 2026Have AI take all the fun and nuance out of making a character
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Posted Mar 29, 2026wait, its not?
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Posted Mar 29, 2026Nope, it was created by Benjamin Huffman of Sterling Vermin Adventure Co. It's one of five 3rd Party classes (not counting classes from the LotR 5E game) available on DNDBeyond
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Posted Mar 29, 2026Looks very nice, and would be great if it has all the detail of the existing builder. But don't make/keep two builders - there should be only one. "Quick" implies that it is less complete, takes shortcuts and misses stuff, which isn't desirable. Make one builder that does it all and does it well. Easier said than done, I'm sure, but worthwhile.
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Posted Mar 29, 2026It'd be amazing if this continued on for full character builder, with an option to switch between a newer one and the original. As well, it'd be great if there was a "Custom" mode/tab for stuff like spells, classes, books, and other stuff. So that a DM can choose to use 5.5e classes but also allow some of the Third-party classes built with 5e in mind like Illrigger. So that the DM has a little extra ability to preset-up the rules and options its using or omiting.
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Posted Mar 29, 2026In the context of a campaign or in general. There should be a little button up in some corner or side that says something like: "rules selection" and when hovered over says default.
Default would pick options from like the PHB, DMG, MM for 5.5e, while depending on the campaign your in (Ex: Helldivers in Avernus [Descent into Avernus]), you could select that and automatically it would omit or allow rules and sources depending on what the DM allowed (Dm's own selection screen would make this). Making it so new players or potential full character builder redesign could automatically allow or omit rules that the DM decides. Making it easier for both to make a character.
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Posted Mar 29, 2026For the love of god add a "level up" screen for players (with the previous control still in place to fix things).
Leveling should be thematic not trying to fix an excel sheet.
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Posted Mar 29, 2026I'd assume that's coming in the "Character Builder Overhaul".
https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/2132-d-d-beyonds-2026-development-roadmap
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Posted Mar 29, 2026Any chance we can get the Quickbuilder added to the Campaign screen? It would be nice to not have to use the full builder, or the Premades, when adding a bunch of L1s to teach new players how to play.
Right now it's build it separately, then have it join and unclaim it.
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Posted Mar 29, 2026ngl this looks pretty sick, the ease of navigation is a brilliant update
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Posted Mar 30, 2026The books the classes come with cost money in real life too.
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Posted Mar 30, 2026its only a Quickbuilder so its built for newer players who are unfamiliar with dnd
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Posted Mar 30, 2026I like the new setup both mechanically and visually. However, I hope that many of the missing features on the player sheet will be implemented, in addition to the character creation section. For example, interactions between talents, spells, or other elements and the sheet’s modifiers, HP, and so on. Here’s an example: if I have a wizard, I should be able to select “innate magic” on the character sheet without creating something homebrew and see the spell cooldowns change automatically. This is just one example of many other things that should have this mechanic.
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Posted Mar 30, 2026The Survey appears to be broken on Firefox...