D&D 5E D&D Beyond No Longer Supporting Unearthed Arcana

Announced on their livestream Dev Update, D&D Beyond will be refocusing development on new features and content, citing an inability to keep up with Unearned Arcana in a timely fashion.


We at D&D Beyond regret to inform you that we will no longer be supporting Unearthed Arcana content on our platform.

While we have loved giving users the opportunity to use new Unearthed Arcana playtest material offered by Wizards of the Coast on D&D Beyond, there are a multitude of factors that have made it difficult for us to do so in a way that presents the content the way it was intended, and in a timely way that does not divert our development resources.




 
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Rabulias

the Incomparably Shrewd and Clever
Okay, so Fantasy Grounds was first released 17 years ago, right? So their product was "on the market" for 13 years by the time D&D Beyond was released? And we're surprised that a company that has been around for three times as long seemingly runs a tighter ship?
And in all that time (and to this day) Fantasy Grounds supported a wider range of games (and thus game mechanics) than just D&D/d20 type games. I think their framework can handle more "curveball" changes to the rules more easily because they have coded all manner of different mechanics into it in one module or the other.
 

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doctorbadwolf

Heretic of The Seventh Circle
No they are not. As discussed below, at least one other software development team faced with exactly the same requirements is succeeding at doing what DDB has failed at and is giving up on.
Tbh I wouldn’t use FG for free, much less pay for it. What I hear from others who do use it is that it “covers” more but doesn’t actually do much with most of what it covers, but since I have no interest in a VTT and haven’t ever enjoyed any attempt I’ve made to get into FG, I wouldn’t know. 🤷‍♂️
 


@LordEntrails i didn’t know that. Cool for them.
Did they get the Strixhaven UA?
I don't know why they wouldn't. They have all UA articles from January 2018 and on (WotC revoked publishing rights for everything before that date, impacted DMsG stuff too). I'm sure I would have heard complaints on the forums if they didn't have it. The details would be included in one of the release notes but would be buried in with all the other updates.
Okay, so Fantasy Grounds was first released 17 years ago, right? So their product was "on the market" for 13 years by the time D&D Beyond was released? And we're surprised that a company that has been around for three times as long seemingly runs a tighter ship?
Nope, I'm not surprised, for that reason and others. Its one of the reasons I chose FG as my digital platform of choice when I decided to get into 5E. I just always find it interesting how many people forgot their are other digital options for D&D than DDB. (FG, DDB, Roll20, d20 Pro? has a little)
Tbh I wouldn’t use FG for free, much less pay for it. What I hear from others who do use it is that it “covers” more but doesn’t actually do much with most of what it covers, but since I have no interest in a VTT and haven’t ever enjoyed any attempt I’ve made to get into FG, I wouldn’t know. 🤷‍♂️
Everyone is entitled to their opinion. And not every application is the best chose for every user either. I will say from my experience and comments of many others, what you hear from others seems inaccurate. Of course it depends upon what one is looking for, but FG has far more automation than any other VTT I'm aware of. Its part of why people complain about it, because it has so much power it can be complex to learn. Hence why the community has put together so many tutorials and free classes to help people get up to speed quickly.
 


Xotli

Explorer
Speaking as a professional software developer for the past 34 years—including running my own software development business for 12 of those years—and also speaking as someone who's been playing D&D for even longer than that, and also speaking as someone who's tried to create my own versions of character builders throughout the years, I would agree with most of what @Ruin Explorer has said in the thread. I would say they're dead wrong in describing it as: "It's a database with a front-end. That's all it is." ... 'cause, let me assure you, it is not merely that. People have been trying to make character builders for literally decades now, and no one's ever really succeeded. That's not a fluke or a coincidence. Doing it is hard, and doing it in a way that allows for homebrew is even harder, and ignoring homebrew makes it unappealing to too big a chunk of the (formerly quite narrow) vertical market. But it is certainly possible. If I had the resources of D&D Beyond, I could have done it myself a few times over by now. It is not easy to implement, but the initial design choices really do make a huge difference, as someone pointed out. And, while @Umbran is correct that's it's not possible to create "generally expandable" software, you can certainly create software that would handle 90+% of homebrew, and WotC ain't doing nothing in UA that most of us here haven't tried in a homebrew context at one time or other. The Strixhaven example is certainly an extreme one, but, given a sufficiently open-ended design, it wouldn't have been as hard to add those things as it apparently was for DDB. And, as some in the thread have also pointed out, "cheating" (by making each subclass a set of subclasses, one for each class it was allowed for, which I'm sure would have been perfectly satisfactory for the majority of users) would have made it even easier.

But, hey: we don't need to have 6 pages of argument about whether it's possible or not. @HawaiiSteveO provided the answer to that question right on page 1: Shard. Shard has issues, sure, and maybe it couldn't have handled the Strixhaven stuff (I'm not 100% sure on that one), but it defintely handles a lot more homebrew possibilities than DDB, and it was built to be scalable from the ground up, and they did it with significantly fewer resources than DDB and also without official support from WotC. Whether it's possible or not is not a hypothetical. It's a thing that exists in the world already. If the guys who built Shard had been the ones who started D&D Beyond, we'd all be a lot happier right now, and this thread would definitely not exist.

(To be fair, the guys at Shard have a lot of hindsight to go on, and they were able to learn from DDB's mistakes. But AFAIC
they definitely settle the question of whether or not it's possible, and that seems to be what the thread has mostly devolved into.)

Side note: At one point @Oofta said: "If you're creating classes from scratch you are a tiny market niche for a niche application." I don't think that's true, first of all, but I also don't think that it's 100% relevant. Any class that wasn't created by WotC is technically a homebrew class, and, other than a privileged few (e.g. blood hunter), even classes from major sources have to be entered as "homebrew." Suppose I want to play a feywalker from EN World's Masterclass Codex (which I am in fact doing in one of my games). Suppose I want to play an illrigger from MCDM. These are very high-selling products, but a character creator that doesn't allow homebrew classes can't handle them. That seems problematic if DDB wants to "win" the market in the long run.


EDIT: FIxed typo, added links.
 
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Nathaniel Lee

Adventurer
And in all that time (and to this day) Fantasy Grounds supported a wider range of games (and thus game mechanics) than just D&D/d20 type games. I think their framework can handle more "curveball" changes to the rules more easily because they have coded all manner of different mechanics into it in one module or the other.

As per Fantasy Grounds’ own website, the application started off supporting only basic d20 functionality, and it seems like it stayed that way for the most part until Doug Davison purchased them five years later. A key factor to highlight here is that Davison went in with the intent to expand the application to be able to support all manner of RPGs and not just D&D, and being a programmer himself, he drove the refactor and designed the new underlying architecture that allowed the platform to support RPGs more broadly.

Consider that Fantasy Grounds didn’t actually fully support 3.5E until six years after that revised edition came out. My point is not to dig at Fantasy Grounds, but rather an observation to show how silly it is to compare what Fantasy Grounds is and does now, well over a decade into its life, to what D&D Beyond is doing now, especially considering the stark difference in what Curse has apparently wanted Beyond to be in contrast to what Davison wanted Fantasy Grounds to be.

As far as Fantasy Grounds being able to have features ready much more quickly, a lot of that is due to the relationship between Wizards and Smiteworks. They undoubtedly get a huge heads up on what’s coming, while the D&D Beyond team finds out what they may need to support the same day the rest of us do.
 

Nathaniel Lee

Adventurer
If I had the resources of D&D Beyond, I could have done it myself a few times over by now.
If the D&D Beyond team had the resources at the beginning that they do now, and — just as importantly — the support of the people with the money, I'm sure they could have done a much better job. I think it's a tad too easy for a lot of us to talk about how we could have done a much better job than they did given their much better financial situation now as well as the benefit of hindsight. You mention that you tried to create your own character builder more than once and acknowledge the difficulty that lies in such a project — imagine that's what you're trying to do with a team of 2-3 developers and no real financial backing in the hopes of getting something out the door that people would be willing to actually pay money for with the ability to scale as an open, web-based application would need to. Like you said, not even remotely easy to accomplish. Possible, yes? But with a lot of support and on the backs of people who have already made mistakes. :)
It is not easy to implement, but the initial design choices really do make a huge difference, as someone pointed out.
Absolutely. In an ideal development lifecycle, most of the engineering effort should be in the design and architecture phase. The implementation should be fairly straightforward because you've already done all the heavy lifting... and, of course, we all know that we can see into the future and anticipate every single possible problem and never release bugs because our code is always perfect ;).

By all accounts, the development lifecycle of that first iteration of D&D Beyond was far from ideal, and they haven't really ever gone in and done any significant refactoring (although they seem to be on the cusp of releasing major changes to at least one aspect of their platform) that might warrant a new major version... they've essentially been building on top of the original foundation as best they could, because the people who gave them lots of money had a very specific vision for what they wanted the platform to be.
you can certainly create software that would handle 90+% of homebrew, and WotC ain't doing nothing in UA that most of us here haven't tried in a homebrew context at one time or other.
You can, if that was something that was even on your roadmap to think about in your architecture, and despite what some people seem to think, homebrew classes are not things that the majority of the player base these days really use. Most 5E players have never played another version of D&D before. The market exploded a few years ago, thanks to things like Critical Role and Stranger Things, and many players don't see much beyond just the core rulebooks — a huge swath of the market is casual players who aren't buying up every single new book but rather just playing for free in some local game store or at the library with their classmates. Homebrew in general isn't necessarily a niche market, but most players have never heard of Matt Colville or his Illrigger (which first saw light of day only a couple of years ago, long after D&D Beyond came out) or the Pugilist on DM's Guild, arguably the single most popular homebrew class that wasn't done by someone with the first name Matt.

As I mentioned in an earlier comment in this thread, I've actually had in-person conversations with some of the development team in the past who indicated that homebrew classes were simply not a priority for the business because there wasn't actually demand from that many users for it. I'm sure demand has increased for such a feature since the team more recently mentioned that they potentially have that on their roadmap, but it's far future stuff because it's not something nearly as desirable as something like a VTT... and you can be sure that Curse as a business is going to push the team to make the things that the majority of their user base actually want.
And, as some in the thread have also pointed out, "cheating" (by making each subclass a set of subclasses, one for each class it was allowed for, which I'm sure would have been perfectly satisfactory for the majority of users) would have made it even easier.
Sure, but that's still time that the development team would have to put into doing it, when they couldn't even be reasonably sure that Wizards would actually follow through with it and when Curse obviously has much bigger things they want the team to be working on. As someone who has been in the industry for as long as you have, you should know just as I do that the engineers are rarely the people making these kinds of decisions. There are a lot of things about the platform that my team and I work on that I would love to refactor, optimize, enhance, or otherwise improve, but there's no way my company lets us invest the necessary time to do everything when there are tons of features that paying customers actually want us to do.
To be fair, the guys at Shard have a lot of hindsight to go on, and they were able to learn from DDB's mistakes.
This, 1000%.
Any class that wasn't created by WotC is technically a homebrew class, and, other than a privileged few (e.g. blood hunter)
You mean privileged one. LOL

There have been a few unofficial subclasses introduced into D&D Beyond although the only ones that stuck around were ones by, you guessed it, Matt Mercer.

They had the Runeterra stuff up for a little while, but that was taken down a long time ago.
Suppose I want to play a feywalker from EN World's Masterclass Codex (which I am in fact doing in one of my games). Suppose I want to play an illrigger from MCDM. These are very high-selling products, but a character creator that doesn't allow homebrew classes can't handle them. That seems problematic if DDB wants to "win" the market in the long run.
Again, not really, since the majority of players don't use homebrew classes in the first place. While I don't deny that products like those you've mentioned make decent coin, the numbers of people who are actually buying these things up is a miniscule fraction of the total 5E player base. If Wizards is to be believed, there are over 50 million 5E players right now. The Pugilist class, arguably the most popular class on sale on DM's Guild and objectively one of the most highly regarded homebrew classes created for this edition, is an Adamantine seller, which means that 5,001+ units have been sold. Of course, we don't know what that number is, but I highly doubt it's anywhere even remotely close to even just one million. Heck, I'd be surprised if it's even 100,000.

As far as whether not having this feature will prevent them from "winning" the market in the long run, what I can say with a lot of confidence is that Curse is going to prioritize features that users have actually indicated that they wanted since they want to, you know, make money. If everyone and their mother wanted a homebrew class feature for the platform, they would be prioritizing that. They aren't.
 

Nathaniel Lee

Adventurer
Consider that Fantasy Grounds didn’t actually fully support 3.5E until six years after that revised edition came out.
I want to correct myself here. They didn't fully support the 3.5E SRD until six years after the revised books were published. Not the full, paid set of rules but "just" the portion of it that was open. Granted, 3.5E is a substantially more complex ruleset than 5E ever could be.
 


Xotli

Explorer
@Nathaniel Lee, I think the majority of your points are good ones, and I certainly don't mean to start an argument. But I would like to dive down just a bit on this one part:
Again, not really, since the majority of players don't use homebrew classes in the first place. ...
I still don't quite buy this ... I wish there was some statistic we could consult that would settle the question, but I don't believe there is. In the end, we mostly have to agree to disagree, but there are a couple of points that seem salient.

In my very first game of D&D (this woud have been Basic rules, I believe), we homebrewed. Then I moved on to 1e, and we homebrewed. Then 2e, and then 3e, and then 3.5e, and then Pathfinder: homebrewing every time. Now we're on 5e, and we're still homebrewing. I don't think I ever even met anyone who wasn't doing at least some homebrewing in their games. Now, as you point out, the majority of current 5e players aren't like me (or most of us on this site, I suspect): they haven't been playing forever, and thus homebrewing forever. But a significant number of these players—perhaps even a majority—are learning about D&D from streams and podcasts. What DMs are they watching/listening to that don't do any homebrewing? Not Mercer, Colville, or McElroy(s); not Iyengar or Woll or Walters; not Phoenix, nor Mulligan, nor Hulmes, nor Vorpahl, nor Tang. Maybe they're not learning from actual play, but more from advice streams? Dungeon Coach talks about homebrewing a lot, as does Nerdarchy, or Dael Kingsmill .... It just seems to me that, even if you're brand new, you would have been exposed to the concept of homebrewing, and you've explicitly been sold on D&D being a game where you can play whatever you like. So I'm not sure why the majority of these new players wouldn't be homebrewing.

As far as whether not having this feature will prevent them from "winning" the market in the long run, what I can say with a lot of confidence is that Curse is going to prioritize features that users have actually indicated that they wanted since they want to, you know, make money. If everyone and their mother wanted a homebrew class feature for the platform, they would be prioritizing that. They aren't.
I hope you're right. Whether a company actually produces what their customer wants isn't a given, though. Especially at the scale DDB is now ... it's possible (and I stress I'm not saying this is true, just that it's possible, based on my experience in the industry) that the folks at the bottom (devs, customer support, etc) are telling the higher-ups that this is what customers want, but the higher-ups aren't listening. Unless they're doing some focus group testing or that sort of thing, corporate executives can be sadly unaware of what their customers actually want.

On the other hand, I know Morrus is on this site every day, and he knows what his customers want, and he's producing homebrew material. And I know that Colville is doing surveys asking his customers what they want, and he's producing homebrew material. So somebody must be asking for it. :)

You mention that you tried to create your own character builder more than once and acknowledge the difficulty that lies in such a project — imagine that's what you're trying to do with a team of 2-3 developers and no real financial backing in the hopes of getting something out the door that people would be willing to actually pay money for with the ability to scale as an open, web-based application would need to. Like you said, not even remotely easy to accomplish.
This is another excellent point that you make. I do want to clarify, though, that my lack of resources had nothing to do with being able to handle homebrew: that's a question of designing for that up front, which I have always done in every one of my attempts. My lack of resources mean that none of my results have been scalable, which as you (and Umbran) noted, is crucial to producing something that people can actually use. Otherwise, you're just producing toy software ... which is, sadly, all I've ever managed to produce. :confused:

So the DDB devs managed to produce something scalable which doesn't handle homebrew very well, which, from my perspective, feels like they got the hard part right and whiffed the easy bit. But I do concede that I don't have any special knowledge of their challenges, so obviously I'm just projecting my own mindset onto them.

Counterintuitively adding engineers makes a project take LONGER.
Heheh. Yes, that's the main thesis of The Mythical Man-Month, which should be required reading for all developers. :) But Brooks also tells us how to address those problems, which is the real point of the book.
 

@LordEntrails i can’t find any news of it not any commentary. Like it never happened or no one cares.
Never used the UA myself, but I have the module in FG and it looks like Strixhaven is there. If you want me to look for anything specific, just let me know;
1628399885140.png

As far as Fantasy Grounds being able to have features ready much more quickly, a lot of that is due to the relationship between Wizards and Smiteworks. They undoubtedly get a huge heads up on what’s coming, while the D&D Beyond team finds out what they may need to support the same day the rest of us do.
All the digital partners get pre-release copies of new content. I suspect they all get it when the final copy goes to the printer. Part of how we know that DDB does indeed get pre-release info is some of the upcoming release spoilers are directly done because people interrogate the DDB API and find new stuff. For instance; shows how this method was used to discover the Name of Fizban's book.
 

FoolishFrost

Adventurer
As a programmer and game designer, let me put the problem this way….

some things are easy for computers to understand, but hard for people.
some things are impossible for computers to understand, but simple for people.

this rule cannot be be more true than in the rpg industry. Many rules and simple concepts in rpg games using paper and pencil are impossible for a computer to follow.

example. Fate core is an rpg that simplifies all gameplay into narrative tropes based on the keywords chosen by each character for its aspects. It is one of the simplest rpg systems on the market (one of, not the), and is very human usable.

computers would have no idea how to parse and use it in a computer game. what is a small simple rule set for a human, is a massive tree of if this then do that instructions attached to the whole of human knowledge…

every rules that is even slightly differing from the rules that came before have to be reworked. Not only to add the new feature, but to make sure every feature still works eight after it’s added. This becomes exponentially more complicated as development progresses.
 

As a programmer and game designer, let me put the problem this way….

some things are easy for computers to understand, but hard for people.
some things are impossible for computers to understand, but simple for people.

...

every rules that is even slightly differing from the rules that came before have to be reworked. Not only to add the new feature, but to make sure every feature still works eight after it’s added. This becomes exponentially more complicated as development progresses.
Yes but...
As already mentioned, other software (FG specifically) is faced with the same challenges DDB is faced with, and somehow FG has managed to do what DDB has decided it can't or won't do anymore. So we do know its possible for DDB to solve the issue, if their application architecture was designed appropriately.

I think the key take-away or argument in this thread is that DDB has not built themselves a viable architecture. And as such they have been unable to implement all the rules and variations that have come out for D&D. (But again, others face those same challenges and have managed to succeed.)
 

FoolishFrost

Adventurer
Yes but...
As already mentioned, other software (FG specifically) is faced with the same challenges DDB is faced with, and somehow FG has managed to do what DDB has decided it can't or won't do anymore. So we do know its possible for DDB to solve the issue, if their application architecture was designed appropriately.

I think the key take-away or argument in this thread is that DDB has not built themselves a viable architecture. And as such they have been unable to implement all the rules and variations that have come out for D&D. (But again, others face those same challenges and have managed to succeed.)
Yup. I was responding to the more generic programming theory discussion.

in the case of this, yeah, looks like they may have painted themselves into a corner. It‘s real easy for a programmer to do, and why rebuilds of a project from scratch happen so often.

but… doing it “properly” is not the only issue. Sometimes, it’s about hindsight being 20/20, and not having the experience to know a problem could come to roost in the future.

the y2k bugs are the most famous of those kinds of planning failure. They were not doing it to save time, or make it easier to program. They just didn’t see the flaw in doing the way they did, or thought the code would be replaced before the problem would trigger…
 

darjr

I crit!
Never used the UA myself, but I have the module in FG and it looks like Strixhaven is there. If you want me to look for anything specific, just let me know;
View attachment 141831

All the digital partners get pre-release copies of new content. I suspect they all get it when the final copy goes to the printer. Part of how we know that DDB does indeed get pre-release info is some of the upcoming release spoilers are directly done because people interrogate the DDB API and find new stuff. For instance; shows how this method was used to discover the Name of Fizban's book.
Is that mechanics built in or just the articles? I wonder why they don't advertise that. Is that in their app? I couldn't find it on their website and a google search was rather futile.
 

lkj

Hero
Just a note that DDB have spent substantial effort in upgrading and re-working their back end over the last year and a half to make it more flexible for adding new features. There was some huge upgrade to the back end on the character sheet side some months ago, and they've regularly talked about development on their 'general features' system which is supposed to add additional flexibility. In other words, I don't think it's accurate to say that they're just building on a flimsy base and not addressing underlying structure. However, I do think it is fair to say that the retooling to add flexibility to that underlying structure has slowed down their feature development substantially. But it was almost certainly the right long term move. And it's not like they haven't been successful as a rules reference and character generation tool, even with the limitations (which, in my opinion, are pretty minor against the extreme ease of use).

I do wonder if the FG-DDB comparisons are apt. I've used both (though I'll admit it's been awhile for FG). FG is a better tool as a VT. Obviously. But I found DDB far better for character creation and rules reference. FG isn't trying to be DDB or vice versa.

Now, we'll see what happens when DDB moves further into their 'shared game space'. (They won't call it a VT, and I think they have their reasons for that-- they are positioning themselves as a suite of tools rather than as a tabletop) Right now that's just a die rolling log and some alpha an beta tools. They have a lot of work to do there. But I think they're in a good position, because a lot of people are already using DDB for game play. And FG tends to be a little more intimidating for folks who aren't a little technically savvy. What we may see are FG folks saying 'But FG already did that!' And they'll be right. But that's kind of how Apple did their thing-- do something others have done in a way that is just slick enough and just enough easier to use to bring in a bigger audience.

I know people will point out that FG isn't that hard to use. Or Roll20. They're not. But, as a person with gaming groups with non tech savvy players, I can tell you that the barrier to entry does not have to be that high to bounce quite a lot of people. There's a reason I'm not using Roll20 or FG much anymore. And it's not because I was having trouble using them. It's because adoption was much faster with DDB by the rest of my group.

AD
 


Campbell

Relaxed Intensity
Pathbuilder 2 is effective at keeping up with the vast amount of PF2 material not because of their engineering expertise (although that is definitely a factor), but because Pathfinder Second Edition has a remarkably consistent structure and set of interfaces for its material. One of the games lead designers was pursuing a PhD in Computer Science at MIT before they quit to join Paizo. Adding new content really is mostly a matter of database entries.

Expecting similar results from a game where every feature, race, class and subclass is structured differently would be insane. 5e material often defines entirely new structures into the game on a regular basis. Every supplement the D&D Beyond team needs to implement probably involves vast swathes of custom code because the underlying structure of the game is constantly shifting or being added to. There's a ton of passive effects to reflect on character sheets. The engineering challenge is just a lot more massive.

Please don't mistake this for a commentary on the individual games. Just one software engineer's take on the technical issues involved in the disparity between the two applications.
 

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