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.

 

[A2Z]

I'd love to give this a try, but apparently it doesn't work in Firefox

 

[Echohawk]

I'd love to give this a try, but apparently it doesn't work in Firefox

The Quickbuilder works fine in Firefox, but I think you might be going to an incorrect starting URL that does indeed not display anything. Try here instead.

 

[A2Z]

The Quickbuilder works fine in Firefox, but I think you might be going to an incorrect starting URL that does indeed not display anything. Try here instead.

Hey man, I just followed the link I was given

Thanks though, it does indeed work now

 

[purgatory101]

I wonder if accounting for all the decisions you need to make while levelling is a blocker. DDB used to offer random characters, but they were hilariously unplayable. We used to do them for whacky one shots ("I'm a gnome barbarian with an 8 strength who put all his ASIs into Charisma!")

I do strongly believe that a character is functionally just a set of choices...but understanding the dependent downstream choices does get complicated. For level 1 you still don't really have to tackle this problem. At higher levels there are more and more dependent choices that are all a bit unique so the challenge of handling that is tricky. I'll be curious if WOTC manages to take this beyond starter characters. Building sensible selection algorithms on top of those choices so that generated characters are reasonable is also another piece of the puzzle.

 

[Clint_L]

I’d like to see them give the option of a level 1 or level 3 character, at least, as many groups start at level 3. All they would need to add is a “subclass” button.