Dungeons & Dragons Has a New Home Webpage

Dungeons & Dragons has a brand new landing site. You can check out the redesigned homepage for Dungeons & Dragons here, which contains starting points for building your own character, finding organized play at stores, and checking out various D&D media, such as games and movies. We'll add that currently the video game and live-action sections of the webpage are a bit short on content right now, but there are plans to expand D&D in both formats in the nearish future.

This appears to be a shift away from using D&D Beyond as the homepage for the game. D&D previously had a separate homepage that served as the announcement page for various initiatives, news, and more, but they eventually merged the website in favor of making D&D Beyond their sole portal for D&D content. The reasoning behind that move was that D&D Beyond got substantially more traffic than the D&D webpage, but it appears that the powers that be at Wizards of the Coast (and we'll note that there has been some large shifts in terms of who's in charge at D&D recently) has changed their mind.

 

[Li Shenron]

It looks pretty nice on a smart phone!

Interesting that 3.5 is skipped. They did get the 2024 version with the 5.5e tag.

They also didn't mention the various versions of "Basic"... The 2024 version of course needs mentioning since it's the one currently on the shelves, but as for the past they just summarized.

 

[Scribe]

I mean it looks nice? It looks flashy? Given 30 seconds was I already annoyed with it and it made me recall the worst of the Flash Era of website design?

Yep.

Give me function, give me clean design, give me quality and depth without needless fluff.

Whats that? Shadowdark is my favourite RPG? Hmm, odd that.

 

[Simon The Hunter]

Not a fan (in general too) of those long scrolling sites with images and text fading in and out... tedious.

 

[Marandahir]

This was needed, ever since they retired the D&D Webpage in an effort to consolidate eyes on D&D Beyond.
D&D Beyond's home page especially had been transformed to be basically unnavigatable.

This at least gives different jumping off points.

 

[Gambit42]

I remember when WotC statted up Santa one year on the D&D website, good times.

This is fine, I remember Gleemax, now that was a s***show.

Mod edit for language. ~Umbran

 

[Weiley31]

Look, you guys are being really harsh. I think the AI did a fantastic job on the new site.

I didn't know Alexa (AKA Skynet) was a DND buff.

Good for her. Good for her.

 

[GMMichael]

That dwarf seems wide open. Just one bite and he probably couldn't even bring his arms down.

But that dwarf is the epitome of D&D player-characters.

DM: "While you stand on the precipice, there's a deep rumbling from below. The trees sway, some crack and tumble. A colossal dragon yawns upward at you, for disturbing its . . . "

Dwarf PC: "I attack! Rolling initiative!"

 

[Umbran]

This is fine, I remember Gleemax, now that was a s***show.

Mod note:

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Did you not see the scroll starting with the white pamphlets going through the deades?

No, actually I didn't.

I only saw it this time because I was looking for it. The website is laggy and everything appears slowly, I scrolled right past it before it loaded. Further, it looks unprofessional. It looks amateurish - and not in a good "hobby game" way, but in a sort of "generic web design used excessively and incompetently" kind of way.

This whole thing is clunky, slow, wildly over-animated, and yet very bland. It's not crisp, it's not energized, it just doesn't really feel like anything much imho. A lot of the text is also excessively small and slowly animates in, in a way that doesn't such much draw the eye as cause the foot to tap. You say I'm ADHD or w/e, because I literally am, but guess what? Most people have shorter attention spans than me, so if it's making me roll my eyes...

Again, maybe on mobile this all looks good/works good, but I haven't tried it on that yet.

EDIT - I should add that my PC is a long way above-average even for a PC used for gaming in terms of performance, so that ain't why it's laggy, it's because of the timings on the animations, I suspect.

 

[Zaukrie]

I wonder if they'll start publishing the stuff that has been on beyond here? Like how to play a druid type stuff?

I'm not even sure what this home page is trying to tell me?