Mid-Year Update: D&D Beyond’s 2026 Development Roadmap

Hello world!

Today, we get to provide you with a deeper dive into many of the things we announced at Gen Con. Here’s what ahead that we want to cover, all now updated in the D&D Beyond roadmap.

Let’s jump in, starting with Zac sharing all of the new tools coming soon to Dungeon Masters and Maps.

• DM Scene Prep
• Custom Uploads
• DM Tools Outside of Maps
• Game Platform & Rules Engine
• New Play Experience
• Revamped Site Search
• D&D Beyond Drops
• Looking for Group

DM Scene Prep

Stop jumping between tabs and flipping between pages to find the notes you wrote for this scene. Instead, put just what you need, right where you’re already playing. Scene Prep gives DMs the ability to put their prep notes straight into maps, keying them to scene pins on the map. We’re putting the final touches on this feature and will get that in your hands real soon!

Custom Uploads

We’re working on two different ways to upload custom content into Maps – drag-and-drop for temporary, one-time use stickers, reveals, and replacement token art, as well as persistent storage for custom Stickers and Reveals. Populate a tavern with Commoners that all look different, draw a picture of the boat your players stole last session and use it as a sticker, or reveal an image of a strange glyph with an embedded clue to the puzzle you homebrewed. Custom Uploads will let you play however you want – whether it’s official content or a fully homebrewed world.

DM Tools Outside of Maps

Here at DDB, we love playing D&D on Maps. We also love to play with physical minis, physical dice, and physical maps. We know that sometimes you don’t need a map, but would still appreciate having some digital assistance to stay organized and keep the game flowing.

To better support DMs no matter how they prefer to play, physical or online, with Maps or with other VTTs, we’re kicking off an initiative to lift the DM tools we’ve been building inside of Maps to be accessible even if you aren’t using the VTT. And yes, this will also include a refresh of the Encounter Builder!

Now I’ll turn it over to Laura Thompson, engineering manager for the new D&D Beyond game platform.

Game Platform & Rules Engine

Last year we set out to build what we want to become the most powerful data-driven rules engine and game data platform for tabletop roleplaying games. Instead of hard-coding rules separately into every experience, we defined game elements like classes, feats, items, prerequisites, and effects, as reusable, composable data, allowing us to model and create entirely new mechanics that work across D&D Beyond.

We combined this with our own take on a tried-and-true video game architecture: the Entity-Component-System framework. While D&D isn’t a video game, the framework is useful to make our rules architecture flexible to support your imagination. Our version lifts that up to the cloud, delivering high performance and flexibility to users across the platform. The rules engine is just one System in that architecture. Applications like our new play experience are Systems too.

We’re just at the beginning phase of realizing this vision. Internally, we are finally at the stage of testing our new game platform with real data. We have a Charlatan Halfling Rogue we lovingly call Charlie that we’re currently using to test the platform as a whole. After that, we’ll begin to migrate in more content types and characters and test the engine on even more scenarios.

Today, we’re laying the foundation for some of our most exciting content yet: the war-torn realm of Azeroth, the brutal grit of Dark Sun, the epic drama of Dragonlance, the shadowed depths of the Underdark, the latest chapter in Greyhawk’s living legacy and larger-than-life adventures across a galaxy far, far away.

But what about the worlds you create? We’ll have more to share about homebrew later.

New Play Experience

Adela chiming in here to tell you about our new play experience and search. We think D&D is the best way to have fun with your friends, and most players prefer to play together in person, but still rely on a combination of digital and analog tools to do so. We designed our new mobile app with that in mind. It puts your character’s most important actions and options on the device most of us always have with us, so you can spend less time navigating pages and more time playing.

Use it to see what your character can do, track resources like spells and Hit Points, and manage conditions such as being Stunned or concentrating on a spell. It can handle the rolls when you need them, or you can roll your favorite physical dice and update your character yourself. Use as much or as little digital assistance as you want while staying focused on the game and the people around you.

This first release is coming as soon as possible (likely early 2027) and is focused on making in-person play simpler and more approachable. Later in 2027, it will grow to support more characters, more content, and more ways to play.

Revamped Site Search

As we’ve been developing the rules assistant feature that was on our roadmap for a bit, the team realized we were already getting close to a modern-day semantic search system. So, we decided to pivot the Rules Assistant work into revamping full site search instead.

Finding a rule, spell, or condition shouldn’t bring the game to a halt. The new search interface will have all the modern standards like predictive type-ahead suggestions organized into contextual categories, helping you identify the right result before you even finish typing. Better filtering and categorization will make it easier to narrow results, while improved short descriptions will clarify what each result contains before you open it.

Search will also better understand D&D terminology, abbreviations, and misspellings. Whether you type PHB, misspell Grapple, or aren’t sure which category something belongs to, Search should guide you to useful results instead of sending you to a dead end.

Finally, you’ll be able to choose which rule set appears in your results: 5e, 5.5e, or both.

D&D Beyond Drops

Hello everyone! Jay piping in here at the end to share in the excitement of all the stuff that's been announced before my section! One of the benefits we have with D&D Beyond Drops is that I get a sneak peek at all the cool stuff we're building! This means that whenever we create content for Drops, I can make sure that it'll take advantage of any forthcoming features even before we tell you about the feature!

For example: while many of you appreciated the idea behind the Drop-in Encounters, it was commonly felt that the execution was lacking; particularly because we weren't providing much context or a story with each of the maps. Thanks to Scene Prep, our existing (and future) Drop-in Encounters will level up into Storied Encounters!

And thanks to the flexibility of what Zac and the team are building, you can easily yoink these Scenes, alter it to fit your game, then get ready to run it without any extra prep!

While not all of these will be available as Storied Encounters immediately, the plan is to have them all converted within a few weeks of the DM Scene Prep feature going live.

Looking for Group

Brian again! At Gen Con I got to announce and launch D&D Group Finder on stage. We know the #1 barrier keeping people from playing D&D is having others to play with. We want to help make that easier. That starts with:

• D&D Event Finder. Find a local event at a WPN local game store near you now right on D&D Beyond. In the future we want to make it easier to save and RSVP for events here.
• StartPlaying. For a limited time, you can schedule a D&D game with a professional Dungeon Master on Start Playing for just $0.99. We love what StartPlaying is doing and how it helps match players with great DMs. If you can’t find a local group to play with, this is a great way to find a game you’ll have high confidence is fun.
• D&D Discord. Our Discord server has a very active Looking for Group section that helps match the community together.

This is just the start of how we want to help connect players together. The team has a lot of ideas here we want to try out. Together is the best thing about D&D and at the same time the hardest things to overcome to start playing. We will continue to look for any way we can make it easier for players to find each other and just get right to playing this amazing game.

Wrap-Up

We have so much the team is working on bringing to you over the next few months and your feedback has been so helpful along the way.

Speaking of continuing the conversation, I want to host another AMA on r/dndbeyond and will answer every question I can about what we announced or even what we didn’t get a chance to talk about here. Join me at 10 AM PT on August 19 at r/dndbeyond!

Talk again soon!