Behind the Screen: The New Quickbuilder and Future Character Builder Concepts

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.

Let’s dive right in.

• Quickbuilder: A First Step
• Design Principles
• Early Concept Video
• Feedback Survey

Help Us Shape D&D Beyond's Tools

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!

Update 3/31/2026: The survey is now closed. Thanks to everyone who participated!

• View the Early Concept Video

Quickbuilder: A First Step

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.

Update 3/31/2026: The survey is now closed. Thanks to everyone who participated!