As I’m writing these lines, I’ve committed wholly to the D&D Beyond experience. For those who don’t know what this is, D&D Beyond is a set of online tools that allow you, among other things, to create D&D 5e characters, consult them online during play and access the contents (including art) of official published D&D product as well as homebrewed content shared by its community.
We use it for my Godless Lands campaign and we’ve played 2 sessions so far. Everyone used it to create their characters, and played the game with various devices to access their characters and abilities.
The tl;dr takeway from D&D Beyond: It’s an amazing ,albeit very expensive tool that gives me 90% of what I need at the table. But the missing 10% can be real annoying sometimes.
D&D’s Private Club
First off, D&D Beyond is the tabletop equivalent of one of those fancy club membership. While you can access it for free through its ad-driven browser or mobile app interfaces, in order to get the “Dungeon Master” level of access that removes ads, allows you to run up to three campaigns, and share the content of any of the books you’ve purchased, you need to pay $55 USD a year.
But here’s the big catch, you have to BUY any D&D book (i.e. Core, Source, or Adventure) in order to unlock its content. Out of the box, it comes with the Basic Rules and all the free players guides Wizards of the Coast published. So not only are we talking $55 for a year’s access, you need to cough up $30 per core/source book, plus $15-25 for any of the official adventures you want to run. The marketplace has no DM’s Guild products, and can’t import from outside sources.
There is still a method to add your own content: since you can create notes in your campaign and import links, images, videos, code blocks and dice rollers, if you’re willing to put in the work, you can add other sources and create your own content.
Does it Deliver?
So yeah, the entry point to get D&D Beyond interesting for a gaming group is hefty. But once you’ve committed, is it worth it?
I’d say yes. Mostly for two sets of reasons:
First, it delivers a completely paperless solution for players. Once everyone completed their PCs, they decided to use their devices to play the game instead of printing their character sheets. Not counting my own laptop, I had a MacBook, 3 iPads, a MS Surface and a Pixel 2 phone around the table. Everyone accessed their PC’s sheets through web browsers as the mobile apps only works as a reference tool to check the contents of the books we purchased or share. (More about that later.)
The character sheet is a great example of good user interface design. All mechanic and social elements of the character sheet are available on a section containing tabs to outline various categories such as “Attacks, Equipment, Class Abilities, Spells, etc.” What’s especially useful is that everything is dynamic and linked with the rules on the sheet. You can buy equipment and see lists appear. You can equip your armor and your AC adjust itself automatically. You prepare spells and you not only have them appear on your spell slots, you can read their description (including having the math all worked out for casting it) just by doing a mouseover (or tapping) its name.
Heck, it’s even easy to figure out how to equip weapons for two-weapon fighting.
While my players couldn’t understand why all of this wasn’t available in the mobile app, and I also was a bit disappointed given the price of it all, I can guess what the D&D Beyond Dev team is up against. I’m part of a small team that develops an app for both iOS, Android, consoles, web pages and PC at the same time. I know how expensive and time consuming this shit really is. I understand why they’re doing it in installment.
Still, as a mobile experience, not the best first impression here.
Long story short, my players have adopted it, even the more classicists among them. (Although some bemoan how weird it feels to no longer have a table filled with sheets, pencils, maps and minis.)
Second: D&D Beyond solves a LOT of my pet peeves with 5e. You see, I was spoiled rotten by 4e’s online toolset, and I want to spend the time at the table DMing the game, not looking up rules, flipping pages and looking for monster stats.
What D&D Beyond does really well is cross index the relevant rulesy-bits in a published adventure. That means you’re always one mouse-over or one click away from the stuff you need while running. For instance, if a scene from a published adventure has goblins in them, a right-click gives me a compact stat-block with their ability scores and skills. It’s got everything I need to roll opposed checks for things like Stealth, Intimidate, and Persuasion.
Left-clicking gets me a new tab with the monster’s full stats. That means I can have as many tabs opened to as many monsters I want when running a homebrewed game. That’s gold for me right there.
I still need to track initiative and monster hit points though, D&D Beyond doesn’t have a toolset for that yet (except, now that I think of it, the private DM notes feature would allow me to do so in my web browser in my campaign space.)
As a (paying) DM, I can share the content of everything I bought to each players I’ve invited in any of my three campaigns (why just three, I don’t quite know). This means everyone around the table can consult the entirety of the sourcebooks I have. And all character creation content from each book is seamlessly integrated with the character generator.
After 2 full sessions, I’m happy to with the service. My players were fully invested in the game, they weren’t needlessly distracted by their devices, we had amazing roleplaying scenes, and combat was fast and easy to run for all.
But here’s where the whole “Online” thing really shone for me: After our first session, I told everyone they could level up to 2. I asked them to do it before the next game, two weeks later. Turns out everyone were done less than 5 min later, leaving me with six level 2 characters in my Godless Lands campaign cloud.
Yeah, that’s hard to beat.
Up Next: Of Goblins and Charlatans.
I absolutely LOVE D&D Beyond! With the buy-in, it’s painful to transition, but if you are fine with getting the books from DDB instead of hardcopy, it is incredible. They are at least as cheap as Amazon (and with coupon codes they are often cheaper!) and have far more functionality than a printed book.
But what really sold it for me was the content sharing. It’s one of those features that is largely useless for some people, but is incredible for others. For me, I have had two of my kids start groups with their friends, and with content sharing, it let me grant them access to every book. It really helped draw in their interest, and I can support two groups of brand new gamers, many of whom could never afford the books on their own.
The main downsides for me have been the various features I wished they already had, but at least they have been very reliable about rolling out new features (plus, new features tend to be very well done since their philosophy is definitely “take the time to do it right” rather than “get something half-baked out quick”), and I’d love for them to work out something with DMs Guild to include some of that content.
Content sharing is amazing. And I hadn’t thought about “lending” one of my 3 campaign slots to my son. I shall do that! Thanks for the idea!