WotC D&D Beyond Launches Its Character Quickbuilder

Mentioned in their roadmap last month, D&D Beyond has now launched its Character Quickbuilder, designed to make creating your first character as easy and fast as possible. This is in incremental progress, and the Quickbuilder will continue to develop based on feedback.

Our design process started with talking to players about their pain points, and conducting player research labs on prototypes (For those interested in User experience research, the prototype sessions were qualitative, moderated 1:1 sessions with an average of 8 participants per round, split across two prototype rounds).

Our goal is to learn not only about the challenges with the current builder but also about players’ end-to-end D&D experience.

Here are some of the design principles we developed from those early conversations and research studies that have guided the design explorations and concepts we’re showing you today.

• You shouldn’t have to be an expert in the rules to build a character.
• It should feel great to use across all device sizes, from phones to 4K monitors.
• Lead with iconic D&D art, not walls of text and rules details in tiny pop-ups.
• Provide easy default selections and let players decide how deeply to customize their characters.
• Put the DM back in control of their campaign, including which rules it uses or omits.
• Help players see and avoid common builder mistakes, such as forgetting ability score bonuses or picking duplicate skill proficiencies.

 

[R_J_K75]

That's a lot of options!

I'm no mathematician and almost failed statistics class in college just because I just never got advanced math. But I think the character possibilities look something like 21 x 15 x 94 x 59 x 96 x 56 = 9,391,818,240. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but is that 9.4 billion character possibilities?

 

[Echohawk]

Presumably it would be (21+15) x (94+59) x (96+56) or 837,216 combinations of class, species and background, because you wouldn't choose both a 5e and a 5.5e option. There is some duplication between the 5e and 5.5e options though, so that total would include, say, two tabaxi artificer farmers -- one using the artificer from Tasha's and one the artificer from Forge of the Artificer.

 

[R_J_K75]

Presumably it would be (21+15) x (94+59) x (96+56) or 837,216 combinations of class, species and background, because you wouldn't choose both a 5e and a 5.5e option. There is some duplication between the 5e and 5.5e options though, so that total would include, say, two tabaxi artificer farmers -- one using the artificer from Tasha's and one the artificer from Forge of the Artificer.

Good point, I had a feeling I was wrong but after all I'm no math wizard. My friends always used to tell me when I DM'd I used newfangled math. Matter of fact it was a running joke for years. Still, that's a lot of combinations.