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

SAVeira · Jul 6, 2020

Was hoping that I would be able to see my players‘ characters, no just my own.

cbwjm · Jul 6, 2020

Retreater said:
Not free. You have to purchase every rules option you want to use that's not in the Basic Rules.

True, you have to purchase anything outside the SRD or enter it yourself as a homebrew option, but otherwise they provide the basic service free of charge which I'm not sure how common that is for other companies that offer 5e products but for me it was great as I was able to easily try out DnDBeyond using the builder in a few games before purchasing other options.

Retreater · Jul 6, 2020

cbwjm said:
True, you have to purchase anything outside the SRD or enter it yourself as a homebrew option, but otherwise they provide the basic service free of charge which I'm not sure how common that is for other companies that offer 5e products but for me it was great as I was able to easily try out DnDBeyond using the builder in a few games before purchasing other options.

Roll20 is free (with the SRD). And has a VTT.
DnDBeyond adds no value to that, and its UI is terrible.

Sacrosanct · Jul 6, 2020

SuperTD said:
Yeah, this exists - it's an extension called Beyond 20 and it gives you clickable buttons on all your abilities and attacks than roll through to your Roll20 campaign. The HP also links through so you only need to track your D&D Beyond sheet, but your HP updates in Roll20 so others can see at a glance. It's surprisingly good. You can see below what it looks like - a small Beyond 20 button appears in the tab on the right when you click on any rollable ability.

View attachment 123463ollable ability

Thank you! I wish I knew this before I bought the same books for Beyond AND Roll20...

cbwjm · Jul 6, 2020

Retreater said:
Roll20 is free (with the SRD). And has a VTT.
DnDBeyond adds no value to that, and its UI is terrible.

Disagree about the UI, I find it quite functional and easy to use.

Edit: Actually, I just recalled I've tried using Roll20 a few years back, I don't know if they have improved over the years but I recall that site being incredibly unfriendly and difficult to use anything on it. Might not be the case now, but it definitely wasn't intuitive for me to use it. I guess different people want different things though, personally, I'm not really all that interested in virtual tabletops.

Oofta · Jul 6, 2020

cbwjm said:
Disagree about the UI, I find it quite functional and easy to use.

Edit: Actually, I just recalled I've tried using Roll20 a few years back, I don't know if they have improved over the years but I recall that site being incredibly unfriendly and difficult to use anything on it. Might not be the case now, but it definitely wasn't intuitive for me to use it. I guess different people want different things though, personally, I'm not really all that interested in virtual tabletops.

Roll20 is still not great IMHO. I've kind of beaten it into submission, but mostly I get by with beyond20 and ignoring much of the functionality.

doctorbadwolf · Jul 6, 2020

Retreater said:
Not free. You have to purchase every rules option you want to use that's not in the Basic Rules.

Well, not quite.

You can also just input them manually as “homebrew”.

OblivionDrive · Jul 6, 2020

cbwjm said:
Disagree about the UI, I find it quite functional and easy to use.

Back when it first launched, D&D Beyond's UI was hot garbage (IMO) but when they did the massive character sheet revamp they did a year or two back, it got WAY better and more friendly. I know there was a big schism in the community when it happened but man, those old collapsing boxes that made it look like a badly designed webpage were just... ugh.

Maybe they haven't tried it since the early days? That's all I can hope because it's definitely way better now and (again, IMO) easier to deal with than R20's current sheet.

cbwjm · Jul 6, 2020

Oofta said:
Roll20 is still not great IMHO. I've kind of beaten it into submission, but mostly I get by with beyond20 and ignoring much of the functionality.

I'll be joining a friends campaign and I think they use it just for the basic map functionality, everything else is done via DnDBeyond.

cbwjm · Jul 6, 2020

OblivionDrive said:
Back when it first launched, D&D Beyond's UI was hot garbage (IMO) but when they did the massive character sheet revamp they did a year or two back, it got WAY better and more friendly. I know there was a big schism in the community when it happened but man, those old collapsing boxes that made it look like a badly designed webpage were just... ugh.

Maybe they haven't tried it since the early days? That's all I can hope because it's definitely way better now and (again, IMO) easier to deal with than R20's current sheet.

I do recall the character sheet needed improvement back in the day, definitely improved a lot now. If I'm recalling correctly, I tried out DnDBeyond when it first released and then left it until they improved the sheet. Once that happened I was back on it.