D&D 5E (2024) D&D Beyond's Development Roadmap Is A Complete Rebuild Of Platform

D&D Beyond has announced its roadmap for the future, including features in active development and those planned for later down the line. These include a full rebuild of the game platform's engine, a new character builder, tools for Dungeon Masters, and more.

Over the past few months, we’ve launched a new homepage, a revamped and more sortable content library, image reveals in the Maps VTT to help DMs immerse their players more easily, and several other quality-of-life improvements.

2026 is a year of refocusing and rebuilding D&D Beyond to make it easier to play D&D your way. Three major initiatives will drive most of our work:

• Rebuilding D&D Beyond’s Game Platform
• Improving Player Onboarding and Revamping the Character Builder Experience
• Launching a Suite of Dungeon Master Tools

 

[FitzTheRuke]

"Rules as Data" isn't magic, at some point the program needs the development to understand each system's idioms, and for a live service it would need upkeep and other maintenance --- be it feature expectations or making sure 5.5e changes didn't break the 3e rules engine or whatever. Maintaining legacy support in a living codebase can be one of the most obnoxious software problems because the future possibilities are held back by compatibility problems, no one goes back to the old files to port them to "Data v2", and so on. You can't just one and done anything that produces a functional output in a live service.

Yes, I understand that.

So look at it the other way, how many people would need to pay $X/mo to pay for Y developers' salaries to support a second, third, etc. system, and what is the $Z benefit to WotC to do that for a deadended (from their perspective) product? It just doesn't seem likely. Let some enthusiasts figure it out on their own, is likely WotC's internal opinion.

Indeed. S'why I said that they'd have to look at if they felt it was worth their while. I didn't say that I thought it was going to be, but I considered that it might be possible (for the first time in history). I don't expect it to happen.

 

[bsss]

Fair enough. It would be a huge surprise to me, even absent their strategy for D&D, to the point that I think it'd be a blunder, but I can't rule it out either.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I reluctantly concede that I have lost this battle. I will now sulk, and then (gasp) start calling it... ugh... 5.5.

I won't lol

Just because the company has given in and begun calling it by a false and misleading name, doesn't mean I will.

 

[Scribe]

I won't lol

Just because the company has given in and begun calling it by a false and misleading name, doesn't mean I will.

Its neither false, or misleading though, and everyone knows what it means.

Just like 3 and 3.5 before.

 

[DEFCON 1]

It at least makes a little more sense why the DDB folks would call it 5.5, even though the book developers never did... because decimal advancement is standard for computer programs with new builds. So for the computer folks programming DDB... the .5 is typical nomenclature for them and thus they probably aren't adverse to using it.

We still probably won't see Bilsland and Co. call it 5.5 in the design and development offices... but online inside DDB they very well might more often as time goes on.

 

[Distracted DM]

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE allow DMs to black and greylist material for use in the Character Builder at the campaign level.

Ridiculous that this has been asked for since its inception and still hasn't been implemented. I sometimes wonder if it's because of technical reasons, or business reasons.

 

[nevin]

It at least makes a little more sense why the DDB folks would call it 5.5, even though the book developers never did... because decimal advancement is standard for computer programs with new builds. So for the computer folks programming DDB... the .5 is typical nomenclature for them and thus they probably aren't adverse to using it.

We still probably won't see Bilsland and Co. call it 5.5 in the design and development offices... but online inside DDB they very well might more often as time goes on.

while this is true we still called Windows 2000 windows 2000, not the NT 5.0 that was buried in the code and a few registry entries. Marketing principles still trump nerd culture in selling things.

 

[nevin]

Ridiculous that this has been asked for since its inception and still hasn't been implemented. I sometimes wonder if it's because of technical reasons, or business reasons.

It would be very easy to tag anything in the database as good, not useable, or any where in between. Whatever reasons they fight this are not technical.

 

[Zaukrie]

Ridiculous that this has been asked for since its inception and still hasn't been implemented. I sometimes wonder if it's because of technical reasons, or business reasons.

It would be very hard to allow us to block every single piece of data. A book? Should be doable, but every single thing? Much harder if anything was hard coded. Like, nearly impossible.

 

[nevin]

It would be very hard to allow us to block every single piece of data. A book? Should be doable, but every single thing? Much harder if anything was hard coded. Like, nearly impossible.

depends on how they implement the digital version of the book on the website. Ideally each rule and option would just be implemented as a single thing in the database. Then they could allow the control to be as granular as they want it to be. With them moving towards a VTT push that would be the smart way to implement it. That being said it would also open the door for many unexpected things. For example If a DM unchecked turning then anything that uses a turning mechanic might be blocked even say a creature that could turn. But again it depends on how the database is built and how the relationships are planned. There is a reason top Tier Database designers get paid a lot of money. The initial planning of the database can be more important than any other part of the design. Objects in the database could be individual and also associated with at tags like "Elminster's Spells" or "Tasha's Handbook" .