D&D Beyond

This app is a must have app for all DMs everywhere. I started a long-play campaign 4 years ago, before I had known about this. What this looked like: everyone was gathered around the table with their character sheets and notebooks, I had a 1.5” binder and a 3 subject spiral notebook. This was sort of impractical, as whenever I said something, my players had to write notes and respond in character at the same time. Then one of them brought their laptop, no notebook, no dice, just the laptop. We were like, “oh no, did something happen to your character sheet? Did you forget to bring dice?” When she turned her laptop around and clicked one of the buttons in those boxes that roll dice, we flipped out. It was the most fancy thing we had seen sense pdf character sheets. After that, we moved our campaign to dnd beyond, and it made more of a difference to me the DM then to the players. First off, they don’t need to take notes, I can just put the info into the campaign notes and there is nothing else we need to do. It also greatly improved my efficiency to create homebrew and run the campaign. We got through twice as much of my story in the second half when compared to the first half. It makes D&D easy and fun for beginners. We got a new player recently, and what usually takes months to learn, they understood in just a few sessions. So, in short, everyone. D&D players and GMs, get this app, use the website, do D&D better and easier with D&D beyond.

Been using the app for a homebrew campaign. Does the basics well…as long as you don’t need anything custom. Yeah, you can add custom gear…but you’ll still need paper and pencil to keep track of things. You basically only get a wall of text with no formatting. Even if you go onto the website. If the gear adds any buffs…it won’t apply to your stats. also, when you try to manually format…such as adding a space or moving a sentence to the next line (you know…basic things) it might save or it might not (most the time NOT). Hours could (and in my case…did) go to waste. For an app that REQUIRES you to buy hundreds of dollars of digital content…I expected a LOT more from the app. I regret buying all the books. Most nights I get frustrated and resort to paper and pencil. If I wanted to do all everything old school pencil and paper…I could have went online for free… It has a lot of potential. IF you only play straight from the book NON homebrew, I suppose it’s pretty good. But, once you start diverging…you see all the glaring deficiencies and move into nerd rage mode. I’m moving to just using it as a library of core stuff and maybe a tool to start building characters when in bored. Not really a good tool for campaigns.

If you’ve ever had the membership (since 2019), it’s always said that if you cancel, you’ll still have access to your characters but you wouldn’t be able to create new ones until you have the available slots. This is no longer the case, I finally stopped my subscription due to wanting to start my annual at a more convenient later date. I figured, I won’t need to creat any characters for a bit. I go to check a few characters that I have due to an Adventure League I’ve recently started (usually I’m a DM)…no access! As a matter of fact, I won’t have access to any characters until I DELETE characters to equal only 6 or resubscribe! Looks like no AL for me until I can resubscribe as I have too many characters that I’ve used to run games to delete. Just a big back handed slap in the face… Even through all the Hasbro issues, I support you all. Please revisit this issue and go back to how things were with allowing us access to those previously made characters. It was a bit embarrassing arriving to a game to have everything frozen. I understand you want people to subscribe but holding an account hostage is ridiculous. Sincerely, waiting for taxes to be able to go back to annually purchasing my subscription.