[UPDATED!] D&D Beyond: An Official D&D Digital Toolset & Character Builder

D&D Beyond has just been announced! Coming this summer, and billed as "Your digital D&D source", it has a compendium of official content, character builder and manager, the ability to use home-brew content, D&D forums, and is usable on any device. A 1-minute announcement trailer can be seen below. D&D Beyond is produced by a company called Curse Inc, owned by Twitch. Right now, there's a signup for the Beta version. More info as/when it becomes available! [UPDATES: The D&D Beyond folks have offered some more info, which I have included below; I will be chatting with them later this week, with luck!]

"We are excited to announce development of D&D Beyond, an official digital toolset for use with the Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition rules. We have partnered with Curse to take D&D players beyond pen and paper, providing a rules compendium, character builder, digital character sheets, and more—all populated with official D&D content. D&D Beyond aims to make game management easier for both players and Dungeon Masters by providing high-quality tools available on any device, empowering beginners and veterans alike!" goes the official description.

"D&D Beyond speaks to the way gamers are able to blend digital tools with the fun of storytelling around the table with your friends,” said Nathan Stewart, Senior Director of Dungeons & Dragons. "These tools represent a way forward for D&D, and we’re excited to get them into the hands of players soon!"

The company, Curse Inc., is owned by Twitch, and is based in San Francisco, with offices in various countries. They produce tools and communities for gamers - up until now, mainly video games. They started as a way to organise the founder's World of Warcraft add-ons about 10 years ago, and grew into a multinational company from there. The company makes a desktop app called the Curse Client, along with community driven wikis, tools, guides, and databases for games like Minecraft, Diablo, Countersrike, Overwatch, and more. In 2016, it was announced that Twitch would acquire Curse.

Features, from the website, include:

• D&D Compendium with Official Content
• Create, Browse, & Use Homebrew Content
• Manage Characters - Build, Progress, & Play
• D&D News, Articles, Forums, & More
• Access Anywhere, Anytime, on Any Device

That last item makes it sound like it'll work offline, which will be a popular move. And the home-brew content mention is also important, especially because WotC supports DMs Guild.

UPDATES: I checked with WotC's Greg Tito who confirmed "D&D Beyond will work without an internet connection. That's a big deal for the devs!"

Adam over at D&D Beyond confirmed a little about the pricing model:

"At launch, players will be able to access SRD content and build and view a small number of characters with a free D&D Beyond account.

We don’t have exact pricing nailed down, but you will also be able to buy official digital D&D content for all fifth edition products with flexible purchase options. You can pay only for the D&D content you need. If you only play fighters, for example, you’ll be able to just pick up the stuff you need to track swinging that giant two-handed sword.

A small monthly subscription will be needed to manage more than a handful of characters and to enable more advanced features, like homebrew content integration. At this time, we don’t know exactly how much the subscription will cost."

He also confirmed that the pricing structure is not about microtransactions: "I'm about to get on a plane so I've got to be brief, but I wanted to check in and make it clear that "microtransactions" were not mentioned and are not what the model is about."

And also that D&D Beyond is definitely not a Virtual Game Table (VTT): "D&D Beyond is intended to enhance gameplay around a table (virtual or otherwise) - we intend this to be completely complementary and have no intention of creating a VTT."

[video=youtube;Dn8Kpmm_aJA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn8Kpmm_aJA[/video]

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[epithet]

Lol which takes me back to this:

Why would you need another application to create and manage characters?
Why would you need another application to manage combat?
Why would you need another application to look up information?

I'm absolutely interested. I run a channel dedicated to testing various DM tools so this is a point of curiosity for me. If you are VTT player what is it you need from an application like this? From all my research the VTT tools do everything this is offering and more and has a reliance on you doing all this inside the VTT tool to enable the automation.

There are two areas where I would find this useful, as someone who already uses Fantasy Grounds as a VTT.

First, I would enjoy a character creator/manager with a slick UI and the option to seamlessly integrate the Unearthed Arcana options. Yes, FG has a character creator, but it has its limitations, including the inability to undo your changes without going in and manually changing everything the automated tools just did, which offers a lot of opportunity to screw something up (speaking from experience.) Yes, the ForgedAnvil character tool is awesome and free, but it doesn't accommodate Unearthed Arcana options or gracefully incorporate homebrewed content. There is definitely a niche yet to be filled for a user friendly, feature rich character creation and management tool. That said, if it won't export characters in a format (xml) that Fantasy Grounds can import, the tool will be of limited utility for me personally. I get very annoyed when digital tools do not work together.

The second and more exciting possibility for me as a DM would be a monster/npc generator. I want to be able to drag and drop weapons, armor, traits, and spells and have the tool auto-calculate a reasonably accurate challenge rating. I know that's a heavy lift, but this is the one area where there is (to the best of my knowledge) no existing tool that comes close.

That said, I have some very real skepticism about the pricing model. I get that there is no real way to check for someone's purchase of the hardcover books, but that does not apply to the purchase of content from the Fantasy Grounds store, or from Steam, or from Roll 20. I think WotC has an ethical obligation to unlock within D&DB whatever content we've already purchased on another digital platform. They have, so far, been entirely too eager to encourage us to buy their products several times over. I get that they're motivated by profit like any other company, but the simple truth is that the only thing protecting their intellectual property is the good will of their customers. All of their products are easily obtained for free, so the phenomenal success of this edition is the direct result of our desire to pay them for the product and the guilt we would feel over ripping them off. In other words, they depend very heavily on the good will of their customer base. I hope that they do the right thing and maintain that good will, because I personally want to see them continue to enjoy great success and fund development of products for this edition of D&D.

 

[daplunk]

There are two areas where I would find this useful, as someone who already uses Fantasy Grounds as a VTT.

First, I would enjoy a character creator/manager with a slick UI and the option to seamlessly integrate the Unearthed Arcana options. Yes, FG has a character creator, but it has its limitations, including the inability to undo your changes without going in and manually changing everything the automated tools just did, which offers a lot of opportunity to screw something up (speaking from experience.) Yes, the ForgedAnvil character tool is awesome and free, but it doesn't accommodate Unearthed Arcana options or gracefully incorporate homebrewed content. There is definitely a niche yet to be filled for a user friendly, feature rich character creation and management tool. That said, if it won't export characters in a format (xml) that Fantasy Grounds can import, the tool will be of limited utility for me personally. I get very annoyed when digital tools do not work together.

The second and more exciting possibility for me as a DM would be a monster/npc generator. I want to be able to drag and drop weapons, armor, traits, and spells and have the tool auto-calculate a reasonably accurate challenge rating. I know that's a heavy lift, but this is the one area where there is (to the best of my knowledge) no existing tool that comes close.

Sounds like you want Hero Lab. The 5e Community Pack already has 90% of the Unearthed Arcana. Just the mechanics but it's functional. You can reverse changes simply by undoing what ever you just did. I've heard FG has a way to import from HL also.

Hero Lab 5e also has a custom monster race where you can set the CR rating and apply all your spells, armor, weapons, etc and it gives you a calculation on whether the damage needs to decrease or increase to match the desired CR. The hole thing auto-calculates everything.

The down-side to this is it's not user friendly to enter content. But we have a community team of volunteers who fill that void and share their work.

 

[daplunk]

That said, I have some very real skepticism about the pricing model. I get that there is no real way to check for someone's purchase of the hardcover books, but that does not apply to the purchase of content from the Fantasy Grounds store, or from Steam, or from Roll 20. I think WotC has an ethical obligation to unlock within D&DB whatever content we've already purchased on another digital platform. They have, so far, been entirely too eager to encourage us to buy their products several times over. I get that they're motivated by profit like any other company, but the simple truth is that the only thing protecting their intellectual property is the good will of their customers. All of their products are easily obtained for free, so the phenomenal success of this edition is the direct result of our desire to pay them for the product and the guilt we would feel over ripping them off. In other words, they depend very heavily on the good will of their customer base. I hope that they do the right thing and maintain that good will, because I personally want to see them continue to enjoy great success and fund development of products for this edition of D&D.

It's not a matter of checking for the purchase. The profit from the books never benefited Fantasy Grounds, Roll20, Curse in anyway. They are separate companies offering software tools via a licensed model. They have to pay for that license AND they have to cover their costs of building and maintaining the tool, improving the tool and entering the data.

Unless WOTC start build their own application we will never see free content. Why would the 3rd party companies do all this work for free?

 

[Nylanfs]

Well we do.

 

[shamurai7]

Sure.....kinda like how you pay for cable or satellite tv even though it's not their content.
It is called a 'service'......
ha-derp a derp....derpy derp derp

Haters gunna hate I guess.
I did have my spell catalog on DM's Guild and charged 20 dollars a pop for it.....After making nearly 1000 dollars in a week I was personally contacted by WOTC and they asked me to please take it down even though it was in their TOS because it was more successful than they anticipated and a 3rd party they contracted with was butt-hurt about it. (Gale Force Nine)

 

[Morrus]

I did have my spell catalog on DM's Guild and charged 20 dollars a pop for it.....After making nearly 1000 dollars in a week I was personally contacted by WOTC and they asked me to please take it down even though it was in their TOS because it was more successful than they anticipated and a 3rd party they contracted with was butt-hurt about it. (Gale Force Nine)

Could you share the actual email? Sounds newsworthy.

 

[shamurai7]

Could you share the actual email? Sounds newsworthy.

Could you share the actual email? Sounds newsworthy.

They specifically revised the TOS for DM's guild because of my product a week after they asked me to take it down. Really doubt I could track down the email. This was from July-Aug of last year.
I got to keep all my profits though!
The biggest loser was the community because the cards are amazeballs. You can keep them digital for reference, or print the ones you need. Full errata, full sourcebook coverage.
Considering it took me 3 months to make the ~11, 12 hundo was honestly chump change but over the course of a few more months of sales it could have been very nice.

The GF9 cards are ugly, full of errors, illegible with small type fonts, missing supplement book spells and WAY overpriced. So dropping 20 for my product was a great option for folks.

Their original TOS was far more lenient allowing you to publish anything including any content that was in their books. Whereas third parties were constrained by the (very) limited SRD for physical products DM's guild releases were not bound by SRD. This gave me free reign. It only applied to DM's guild though and not the sister sites.

 

[Morrus]

They specifically revised the TOS for DM's guild because of my product a week after they asked me to take it down. Really doubt I could track down the email. This was from July-Aug of last year.
I got to keep all my profits though!
The biggest loser was the community because the cards are amazeballs. You can keep them digital for reference, or print the ones you need. Full errata, full sourcebook coverage.
Considering it took me 3 months to make the ~11, 12 hundo was honestly chump change but over the course of a few more months of sales it could have been very nice.

The GF9 cards are ugly, full of errors, illegible with small type fonts, missing supplement book spells and WAY overpriced. So dropping 20 for my product was a great option for folks.

Their original TOS was far more lenient allowing you to publish anything including any content that was in their books. Whereas third parties were constrained by the (very) limited SRD for physical products DM's guild releases were not bound by SRD. This gave me free reign. It only applied to DM's guild though and not the sister sites.

What change did they make to the TOS in response to your product?

 

[Corpsetaker]

I did have my spell catalog on DM's Guild and charged 20 dollars a pop for it.....After making nearly 1000 dollars in a week I was personally contacted by WOTC and they asked me to please take it down even though it was in their TOS because it was more successful than they anticipated and a 3rd party they contracted with was butt-hurt about it. (Gale Force Nine)

So basically you have to be careful how good a product you make because Wizards could be afraid someone on the internet makes some good money, to normal people, while their company makes millions?

Thanks Wizards!!!! Your true colours really do shine through.

 

[shamurai7]

So basically you have to be careful how good a product you make because Wizards could be afraid someone on the internet makes some good money, to normal people, while their company makes millions?

Thanks Wizards!!!! Your true colours really do shine through.

Well it did stand out....if you hop over to DM's Guild you will notice most user content is free, or under 2 dollars. They might be lucky to make 30 or 40 dollars profit in a year.
I charged 20 dollars and was in the most popular files spot pushing aside Matt Mercers file before they asked me to take it down.
They are just shady and noticed a clear demand for a certain digital product. Of course a few months later they announce their own digital toolset (not as nice as mine lolz) and want a monthly access fee.
I had intended to further create more compendiums in a sortable, printable format but lost motivation considering the time it takes me to transcribe all the data.
I still maintain and update all the spells and 'spell-like' abilities in a file as well as a monster compendium file.