D&D 5E D&D Beyond Player Tools app is now live!

The free D&D Beyond Player Tools App is now available on the Apple App Store and Google Play! Access all of your characters online or offline! Track conditions, hit points, spell slots, and more!

Check out all the details and download now: The Official D&D Beyond Player App for iOS and Android | D&D Beyond

 

[Azzy]

I have heard of people having the problems with Discord you mention, but they havent seemed to happen to us yet. I will keep your solutions in mind in case.

My group uses TeamSpeak and that's worked out great for each of us. It gives you a lot of control over your mic and speaker/headphones settings.

 

[Azzy]

I (tried to) use DnD Beyond literally yesterday for another DM's game. He wants to use DNDB (against my preferences). I couldn't even create a fighter. I gave up. Will have to create my character by hand and input everything manually in their awful character sheet. And if you're doing that, you might as well just use a form-fillable PDF character sheet.

I'm not denying your experience, but I am pretty blown away by it—neither I nor the people I've introduced to DDB have had any similar issues. There's been some basic learning issues like how to equip arms, armor, attune magic items, finding where to modify gold, etc. But just straight up creating a character has been a breeze for all of us.

If you have any questions about the process, I would be more than happy to help guide you through character creation.

 

[EthanSental]

3 of the 5 people in our group are using Dndbeyond for out character sheet on iPads now. We haven’t had any issues creating our characters as it’s pretty simple, both the web based and app based versions. Having the spell info and other isuch thing a tap away is a win for me but made those gale force nine spell cards I purchased a couple years ago obsolete.

 

[Nebulous]

The GM of the campaign is the only one who has to buy - they may extend content to all the other players.

That's right. I have a guy who is addicted to buying 5e stuff. He has purchased every single book on DDB and then opened the campaign to everyone else, which I think lets you share with up to twelve people? Anyway, it was very generous.

 

[Nebulous]

I (tried to) use DnD Beyond literally yesterday for another DM's game. He wants to use DNDB (against my preferences). I couldn't even create a fighter. I gave up. Will have to create my character by hand and input everything manually in their awful character sheet. And if you're doing that, you might as well just use a form-fillable PDF character sheet.
I can't find a single thing it does that I prefer to Roll20 (which I'll grant you isn't perfect). Roll20 has a stable enough voice chat, automated rolling, facilitates online play (which is the only play I am doing now or in the foreseeable future).
Even in an in-person game, I could run the entire adventure using Roll20. DNDB would be a nightmare to navigate. You have to back out every time you want to look at a character or monster or read the PDF.
Sorry if I seem so negative about this, but I know there are better tech solutions. The wide adoption of DNDB just means that we're not going to get it. Even the 4E stuff 10 years ago was better.

I'm a little confused. As of now, you can't play online with DnD Beyond, it is not a VTT (yet, a few years from now it will be). So you have to use Beyond in conjunction with Roll20. As for not being able to create a fighter, the character builder walks you through it step by step, there's not really much of anything to figure out, you just click the arrows or next and the next step loads. There's even the quick build where you enter the race, class and your name and it automatically spits out a pdf of your PC.

 

[Umbran]

I'm a little confused. As of now, you can't play online with DnD Beyond, it is not a VTT (yet, a few years from now it will be).

VTT is for battlemaps. If you play Theater of the Mind, you don't need a VTT.

 

[Nebulous]

VTT is for battlemaps. If you play Theater of the Mind, you don't need a VTT.

that's true.

 

[Oofta]

That's right. I have a guy who is addicted to buying 5e stuff. He has purchased every single book on DDB and then opened the campaign to everyone else, which I think lets you share with up to twelve people? Anyway, it was very generous.

You can have up to 3 campaigns with 12 players in each campaign.

 

[Retreater]

Even when playing theater of the mind (which I've done for years in previous editions), I find I want the occasional sketch of a complex environment, handouts of NPC portraits or mood-setting scenes (or of complicated potential trap areas like what was provided in the modules of yore). Then you might want dice rolling - to see the results of an important roll, just to feel like you're at the table. Or you might need to access various character sheets (including monster stats) all at once in various windows. To my knowledge, DNDB doesn't do any of this. It can supplement other things by providing basically a glorified form-fillable PDF character sheet, but not much more. I don't understand why wanting a one-stop solution to all of this is a bad thing. I would expect even most of you DNDB supporters would recognize needing these features at your table.
Concerning making characters, here are a few issues. Limited number of slots. Having to add a character to a campaign before you can test builds with purchased content. Pressing the back arrow takes you out of the character builder entirely. Having to sign in with two accounts (DNDB and Twitch). Additionally, my characters have come out wrong from time-to-time.
But mostly it's that I don't want to pay for a third time to get something that Roll20 already does, when DNDB doesn't offer the functions I listed above.

 

[Mistwell]

Or you might need to access various character sheets (including monster stats) all at once in various windows

It does this.

providing basically a glorified form-fillable PDF character sheet

This is where I am confused by your position the most. It sounds like you're not even describing DnDBeyond. That's nothing like how it operates. It's much more similar to what existed near the end of 4e's active lifetime than that. Is it possibly you've ONLY explored the "my creations" section of the toolbase?

Having to sign in with two accounts (DNDB and Twitch).

This is not a thing.

I'll tell you how I use DNDBeyond the most often. My DM subscribes to "all content" (called the Legendary Bundle, which sometimes goes on sale but the normal price is 15% off everything). And with that he can share it out to up to 36 other people. So the cost per person, if they combine funds, is negligible (even at the full non-sale price right now it would be under $20 per person for everything if you all went in on a Legendary bundle, though admittedly it's unrealistic to expect you to find 36 people to share it all with). This would get you everything WOTC has ever published for 5e, and a couple of third party products too.

I then added a small tag to my Chrome browser so that any time I type the letters "dnd " followed by whatever it is I'd want to search for in any published D&D book in the address bar of my browser, it will automatically use the DNDbeyond toolset to search out and display that thing.

So if I want four different monsters and three different magic items and a class and subclass and the description of a Xanathar NPC from a particular adventure and a description of a room from an adventure all at once, I can do that, all in different Chrome windows, very quickly. You can open it in different windows as easily as you can open different Chrome browser windows since it literally is that. And of course I can run my character sheet also, and while using Beyond20 I can use that character sheet to directly roll anything in Roll20.

I get that DNDBeyond has some learning curve to really unlock it's potential, but once you get it going it's really an extremely powerful toolset. It's far beyond what you seem to be describing.

You can see some of this in this video starting around the 9 minute mark. Worth checking out, and keep in mind anything you see can just be opened in a separate tab on your browser simultaneous with everything else he does: