I suggest everyone who uses DND Beyond to get familiar with the homebrew section. You can copy existing spells/feats/races/etc and add to it or remove whatever you want with working check boxes and counters.
You won’t be able to make it public but at least it’s better than paying for a book you already own a physical copy of… is it somewhat time consuming though.
The leak during the OGL fiasco was that VP Chris Cao indeed wanted to ban homebrew from D&D Beyond for free users.
Part of WotC's damage control was denying that they ever intended to do this.
If they do end up gating the ability to homebrew behind paid subscriptions, [this tweet](https://twitter.com/DnDBeyond/status/1615879317157715968) will come back to haunt them.
The main thing to know, when looking back at old tweets or statements made by the D&D Beyond team, is that almost nobody who actually built D&D Beyond still works there.
I spent 5½ years, from pre-launch through to working at Wizards, building something that I am still immensely proud of. It's a real achievement and, to this day, I love when I talk to people who D&D Beyond has positively impacted, allowing them to play D&D with others.
The core principles of the site, of delivering value to the community, championing accessibility, and engaging with people ... I have no way of knowing how important those are now considered. I believe that actions speak louder than words though.
They don't care about a little more bad publicity, if their past behavior is any indication. They just do their best to spin it and move on, unless the fallout becomes too toxic. Then they backtrack...at least for a while.
WotC wants you to buy their stuff. Homebrew isn't their stuff (at least, not stuff they've been paid for). Therefore, as far as they're concerned, homebrew is BAD. I'm surprised they haven't shut it off entirely, and wouldn't be surprised if they did in the future.
If it’s anything like the OGL, they’ll delete the tweet roughly 6 months before they go back on this.
Just like they did when they took down the original FAQ for the OGL that plainly stated:
> …even if Wizards made a change you disagreed with, you could continue to use an earlier, acceptable version at your option. In other words, there's no reason for Wizards to ever make a change that the community of people using the Open Gaming License would object to, because the community would just ignore the change anyway.
…shortly before trying to tell everyone we couldn’t use the original version anymore.
>I suggest everyone who uses DND Beyond to get familiar with the homebrew section.
I strongly suggest looking for other open source solutions. I won't name names, because the mods are aware and would rightly ban me for suggesting piracy, but I will also state that there are ethical ways to use such tools and you should definitely not steal material you want to use just because it's easier.
Nah, I say just quit DnD behind altogether and move to using either gsheets or any other number of digital character sheet. Hasbro is more than happy to fuck with DNDBeyond’s utility and make the experience objectively worse because they’re banking on people being too lazy to switch.
Remember when it became vogue to post canceled D&D Beyond memberships? I think we're at a place where that's once again appropriate.
Jesus Wizards, you just can't stop taking Ls can you?
Man. what a joke.
I already own all the books already in their physical form, so I was just grabbing what I needed for characters I was playing. I'm not paying thousands to buy all the books again just for DNDB.
Well, I've been working on https://elderdragonstavern.com exactly for this reason. This is my personal take on a digital d&d character sheet and tracker. It's free, and you can create any content in it, no need to buy anything.
I'd heavily suggest looking into additional browser integrations. Chrome is my work browser, opera is my DND browser. Looking forward to seeing how the project grows, I do think that it would be extremely convenient if there was some way to transfer over sheets from Roll20 into this too, since my players already have their stuff on there.
this is one of the biggest issues, yeah - paying for something that's useful, fair enough. But paying for something that's already been purchased, just in digital format, at full price, _again_, is taking the piss a bit!
Frankly, the fact that they never prioritized aligning the books with the online product was always an indicator of the kind of attitude WOTC had to DNDBeyond. Honestly this is one of those times when you gotta quote Gabe Newell, "Piracy is an issue of service". Imagine if you could simply buy the books at a local store, scan a QR code and get all of the stuff on DNDBeyond built in. Imagine how many more people would be buying off DNDBeyond if the digital versions weren't t*he same price as the physical copies*.
This is sad. DnDBeyond has played a huge role getting me into DnD because of the ease of building a character, rolling dice and sifting through so that I familiarise myself with the mechanics. Everything there is so neat.
I keep reading people saying that ala carte was a bad value or that they just share the books, and the cost on Beyond. I help facilitate a large AL group ( 8 DMs and usually about 60 players) in Nashville, The number of times I have been able to sell people who are just putting their toes in the water with an ala carte option is more than I can count. When a new player has just spent money on dice and a mini and isn't sure about dropping another $60.00 on a book or two I show them that for $2.00 they can buy the class or subclass that they want to play. If they don't like it all that's lost is $2.00. If they like it well that money can go towards the purchase of that book.
By the simple fact that we are all on this subreddit we are all hardcore fans. We not only buy, but I assume preorder, the books when they come out. We hoard dice and minis. We are the niche. I can attest as having shepherded a lot of new players that the ala carte option is fantastic to bringing in new players and having them try out something a little deeper than the free SRD options.
Also while I have bought every D&D book the only full book I own digitally is the PHB simply because of the discount after buying so much of it. I don't like digital books, but the digital options are so convenient for creating characters. If I wanted to read the text from Bigby's I much prefer reading a physical copy. But if I wanted a class or feat I'd happily plunk down $2.00 to just grab that. Yeah maybe $2.00 is a lot for a feat but it's better than $60 when all I will use it for is a feat on my character sheet.
It’s not a surprising choice as it’s in line with WotC’s current business model.
Back in the day, they released books that were mostly 1 kind of content: there was a book of spells, a book of magic items, books with player options (classes, feats, etc), books of monsters.
Now, they put some of everything into each release so that everyone has to buy every book, instead of just buying the content that they are interested in.
Seems to make the site significantly less useful from that perspective.
As noted, other companies have made their player-facing options and a varying amount of DM-facing materials free for reference and this works quite well, with no reported issues regarding impact on sales. One of the sites I have a long history with is the Archives of Nethys that I've used as a player and DM going back to when it was not a recognized fan site for Pathfinder 1st. They thread the needle on what to post and what they encourage users to buy the materials (also helpful that Paizo provides a variety of options of how to purchase their materials).
Given that online vtts like Roll20 the books are available for sale to make use of pre-made VTT content (otherwise site users can input the materials manually), the utility of D&DB really just becomes to make third-party materials available (aka another webstore like DMsGuild) with the interoperability with the DDB vtt itself (so no different than Roll20 in that regard). And then of course the user message boards and the site acting as the official mouthpiece for the game.
Seems a bad move, they lose one advantage they have over competing D&D-supporting sites and against competitor's portfolio of online support for their TTRPGs.
Archives of Nethys has a very unique relationship with Paizo in that they act as the official system reference document for Pathfinder and Starfinder. So they post all the rules but little to none of the lore. And that’s where Paizo makes their money. If you want the lore then you buy the books. Same with all the adventure paths they release. And you have the people who want the physical rule books so Paizo makes money off those sales as well.
https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6sg93?Big-PathfinderStarfinder-Reference-Document-News
I addressed this. AoN did not always have that relationship, at least formally. And there was also almost as much info (for PF1e) info on the PFd20srd portal.
And the point still stands, Paizo, and others, have models that allow for different balance of monetization and competition and by removing this feature from DDB, Hasbro seems to be impeding their competitive advantage in ways that seem to have little upside. They seem to still believe their path forward is to be far more restrictive and protective of sales - which is a strategy that tends to prioritize retention, rather than growth. as its objective.
As it stands, if you use another VTT (other than the DDB VTT) the likely scenario is that to use material with a minimum of work on your part, you may need to buy their rulebook products twice (or 3 times, to include physical product).
I mean many will just do like me and buy it once (in any format) and then manually input information into our chosen VTT as necessary for our campaigns. But this is the sort of decision that has made me decide to invest in 5e alternatives and when they arrive, I'll be disconnecting from Hasbro at least for the rest of the 5e lifecycle.
Chris and others won't notice one less sale but from my pov having been around for almost a half-century, this sort of plan doesn't really end in success for the companies that do it.
So when do we all as a community just say “f this” and just outright refuse to buy their undercooked products? As someone who recently got into PF2e and am looking to hopefully join a Vampire: the Masquerade game or a Call of Cthulhu game, D&D is just getting progressively worse and worse. And it’s getting really depressing. Like a game that introduced me into tabletop, a setting filled with o much cool stuff.
Like I still enjoy some aspects of the game, but it’s very obvious WOTC/Hasbro does not care about the customers. They don’t care about quality. They don’t care about the game. It feels like at this point, the only hope is to look to homebrew creators.
Idk.. it’s just really sad to hear things getting worse and worse with no sight of improvement.
Thats fucking lame of them. A la carte was an amazing feature of DND Beyond I wish Roll20 had, and I use it kind of often to get stuff I want for a character without buying the whole book. I’m disappointed, but not surprised, by this.
Meanwhile over in Pathfinder land all the rules are free on Archives of Nethys.
Honestly I like 5e but if people keep putting up with this stuff then WOTC will keep doing it.
It used to be both were options, now only one is an option. This is a degraded product in the name of profit.
We now also can't be confident that will stick around as an option.
Don't forget you can still create those things through the site's homebrewing options for free. So it's more like you had three options and now it's only two.
GM can share, but there's a limit on shares you can have.
First one of the players needs to have a subscription. And then they can enable "Content sharing" for a campaign, where the DM can then decide which books are shared.
I have Master level subscription - the highest one - and I can offer content sharing in 5 separate campaigns. If I wanted to share my books in 6th, I'd need a different player who has a subscription to enable it there.
5 campaigns might seem a lot, but currently I play with 2 groups, and I have 2 campaigns for each group - one is a "regular" game we play on a weekly basis, another is for one shots, and "fun games" we do when we can't/don't want to do given week.
I can fiddle with turning sharing on and off, but it's annoying tbh.
I've done this but then the real DM can't do things like read over the full sheet, check where stats are coming from, or make modifications for someone.
Classic enshittif!cation (google: Cory Doctorow)
Saw this coming from a mile off.
They get you locked into their platform, and when you've committed all your time & effort they blast you with charges..
This and the end-game\* are why I never sink my time & efgort into anything like D&D Beyond...
(\*When a few years down the line they close the platform without warning because of "lack of profits")
I use:
\-Discord for comms, pic sharing & dice rolling
\- fillable pdfs for char sheets
\- google draw for battle maps
I'm definitely jumping off of the platform now.
I only use it *because* I could get bits and pieces of content as needed, since I don't make new characters frequently at all.
And I only play D&D because I use Beyond for the aforementioned reason...
So now it's like, why not just find a different game to play if I've lost the incentive to stick with DndBeyond?
Time for a change!
>And I only play D&D because I use Beyond for the aforementioned reason...
You only play dnd because you could buy stuff on dndbeyond? out of curiosity why? there's plenty of ways to play dnd without spending any money at all that are barely less effort then dnd beyond
I think he means because dnd beyond has such an easy to use character sheet and integration with content in the character builder.
Tbh I haven’t seen something like that for any other ttRPG, but if there is one I’d be very interested in knowing so I could try out new systems with my not very bookish friends
Demiplane is trying really hard (og dndbeyond folks making it while owning it so it can’t get sold out from under them again)
It has support for pf2e and a wide variety of other systems like the marvel system
Pathbuilder is so much insanely better than DND Beyond its absurd. And the sad thing is, if Beyond had stayed independent I’m sure it would be a lot closer.
Agree 100% pathbuilder is a god send. Its so much better for seeing which options are available to you on level up over the native foundry vtt system or even demiplane (which i still enjoy and use but for other reasons).
Pf2e’s system on foundry is god tier but the character builder in it leaves a lot to be desired. I second pathbuilder being one of the best and light weight character builders out there
*Lancer* has COMPCON, a free compendium and character builder. The game is sci-fi mech combat, not fantasy adventuring, but that site is one of the best game resources I’ve seen.
Demiplane is good, but yeah Pathbuilder is INSANELY good for pf2e, since it's a d20 system with direct origins to DND(3.5e, admittedly) it's less of a culture shock than you'd expect, and the paizo rules are free on Archives of Nethys for all 3 systems(Patfhinder 1e, starfinder 1e, and pathfinder 2e).
Yeah, shitty character builders are definitely a barrier of entry for other systems. D&D Beyond did a pretty good job, so it’s easy to just play dnd and keep playing dnd.
Reminder that anyone in a campaign can share books, no matter if they’re a players or the DMs. I have a campaign just for sharing materials with people.
You need to have master subscription to share cleanly, if you DM a campaign you can force things you own onto your players even if they dont have it but otherwise only homebrew stuff is shared within a campaign (behold the power of homebrew copies that hopefully wont be cracked down on soon.
For now.
This isn't about what value we still have, this is about WoTC degrading the product in the name of profits.
They took something from the community today. What they took was a low cost entry point into the hobby where you're not dependent on knowing a DM that owns the stuff, pays to be able to share the stuff, and is willing to/has room to have you in a campaign so you can also use the stuff.
It used to be "Here's $5! Can I please have this fun thing so I can go enjoy it on my character? THANKS!"
It’s only a matter of time before that goes away. This is just the beginning with the changes they are making. My friend has all the books and shares it with multiple campaigns my friend group has. I have bought a few monsters and it has been a great experience, but to WoTC this is loss revenue as I’m getting content through my friend.
You cut off the sharing and force people to buy the books themselves.
When that happens sadly we will just go back to pencil and paper. 
No, screw that. Screw that with all kinds of rusty screws.
I use Roll20 a lot, and sometimes I would buy stuff on DDB like the half-drow from SCAG just to justify inputting in on my roll20 sheet. Now I have no incentive to buy stuff on DDB. I'm out.
Pathfinder 2e & Pathbuilder.
I jumped ship at the start of the OGL debacle and haven't looked back since, well, aside from watching the dumpster fire burn that is...
That’s really annoying I have a few of the books physically and was basically just getting subclasses and races for my players convenience. I even bought the most expensive subscription, but if it’s gonna be this way going forward I’ll probably have to look into a new VTT
Not only did this take value from us, but it also took value from them, I hope they discover this. Before D&DBeyond was a way for beginners to get into the hobby, just buy the stuff that sparks their interest and hopefully they buy the full book once they’re hooked. Instead they’re just gonna pirate the whole book instead of paying for at least part of it.
My sunk cost on the platform is prohibitive to me leaving it, but I will as soon as I can.
I have entirely zero faith in WotC delivering quality products, things have been downhill for several years now.
I'm so confused...buying a la carte was literally the worst value of your money. 2 dollars for one whole item? I guess I could see the point if it were a whole subclass but I don't remember the cost for that. If it were 5 dollars I'd just say whatever spend another 10-15 and literally get the whole book!
If I wanted to make one thing for my character I'd just homebrew it.
Their a la carte model was actually great, because each bundle or sub-bundle had its price reduced by the amount you already spent on content in it. This way you'd never pay more for the book than the cost of the book if you decided to fill it out. I haven't used D&D Beyond much in the last 2 years, but that pricing model was the best of both worlds for consumers. Sad to see it go away.
Pretty good value if I’m only playing one campaign at a time and don’t want to figure out how to make homebrew (my time is worth something as well). I’ve probably spent about $20 a la carte over 3 years, with content from at least three different books. Books I already own, I’ll add.
More like another $20-$25.
If the spores druid is $5, and the $30 ravnica book is otherwise dead content for you, you saved $25.
At the pre-tasha time, it was buy the book, buy the subclass, or hack it in through homebrew tools.
There's such an immense difference between 'value for your money' and 'price', like literally everything you buy would be cheaper if you bought 10x-100x as much of it.
I don't see how it's confusing. I don't need to spend $30 for the entire "Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants" book when the **only** thing I want from it is the barbarian subclass for $3.99.
Then it if turns out 2 years down the line I did actually want to buy the book, the book will likely be cheaper because it's an older book ($20 instead of $30) and it'll be on offer since I already own one item, so it's $19.00 instead of the full $20.
Now? If I want one thing from a book, I'm just not going to buy the book, like you said, I'd just homebrew it.
I think the use case was more that you own a hardcopy of Xanathar’s but want to make a gloom stalker in D&D Beyond for your next campaign. So, you pay $2 for Gloom Stalker, and you get your digital character sheet rather than needing to buy the whole book a second time.
Actually they deducted the value of the a la carte items you purchased from the book value if you later bought the book.
If you purchased 4 races from a $30 book, at about $2 per race, then went to buy the book itself later you would get an $8 discount.
Still sucks that they're removing the function but they did take existing ownership under consideration.
A good work around is inputting or finding it in dnd beyond homebrew. Can’t publish them but you can have all the same details the items or feats have without the cost
Was just curious so I checked, I don't see the cost of prior a la cart purchase showing when I select the whole sourcebook to buy. So they didn't even implement that the way they claim. What a joke.
well gj for promoting homebrewing of own content and potentially reducing ddb playerbase, i guess they will try to push some other "improvement" no one asked for, to compensate from potential profit loss caused by own decisions
hope my 1220 entries homebrew collection will remain in safety but with how ddb is managed.. i not sure
Until they realize theyre making less profit because the people who were going for a few little things may not be able to swing the full library to get what they needed
"Now I have to buy an entire book if I want to use any of the stuff on my character sheets. I have to buy an entire book, just to be able to add a piece of gear that my DM awarded me during an adventure."
Did they take away the ability for the DM to share the books they own via a campaign?
Both options used to exist. The more accessible option of the two was removed. The product has been degraded.
We can no longer be confident the other option will also stick around.
Oh I'm aware of the a la carte option, and removing that is dumb. Just wondering if they already 100% destroyed the use by also removing the sharing of book content. I'm not currently playing so let my subscription lapse.
Gonna be honest I don't understand why people use DND beyond at all. There are plenty of options out there that are free and do just as good if not a better job then DND beyond. There are also paid options like foundry VTT which is leagues better in every way.
D&DBeyond was amazing? Seriously?
It's laughable that you even had to pay for content at all - in most other RPGs, it's common practice for player-facing content to be freely available, and for prewritten adventures/modules/campaigns to be the monetizable part. Lancer's Comp/Con, Pathfinder's Nethys, the list goes on.
D&DBeyond was always really aggressively monetized, and I for one have always steered clear.
> in most other RPGs, it's common practice for player-facing content to be freely available
That's very, _very_ variable - there's a lot of games where that's totally not true, there's just the book (or maybe two or three) and that's it, there's no "adventures", no "free player thingie" or anything. Or there's the pure, barebones, basic system, with none of the powers and abilities, which is so bleached of everything as to be useless - a lot of PbtAs are like this, where, sure, the basic concept of "8+: hit, 10+: hit+" is free, but all the actual playbooks are in a paid product. Or _Spire_, where the resistance system is free... but that's not going to let you play _Spire_, which has a load of specialist classes, powers, setting and fluff. Saying that's true for "most" RPGs is pretty much not true - it's a distinct minority that even have a "player book", most are just a product that's everything to play, and that's it, with _maybe_ some supplements, but often not.
That's not entirely true for Lancer. The CORE stuff is available for free, but everything in the expansion books requires buying (or pirating if you don't care about the developers) the books lcp file from itch.io.
Don't get me wrong, I still love comp/con and fuck around on it all the time, but there IS a monetization aspect to it. (Which is fair, game devs gotta eat too!)
Are you sure? I'm almost positive the [itch.io](http://itch.io) pages for the LCP files are free for player-facing content, and the GM stuff is on the paid PDF. It's been a while since I imported them all, but I know I went through the Comp/Con website itself, and they were free.
Ya know what, I double checked and you're 100% right. My mistake. The comp/con stuff is free, but since the NPCs and stuff aren't in comp/con it's just the DM that has to actually buy stuff. Good catch, and really, just one more reason to love Massif Press!
This has never been true of Dungeons and Dragons across any edition, though. The change to eliminate a la carte purchasing stinks, but “pay for the player’s handbook” has been A Thing for decades.
Pathfinder and others offering comprehensive resources gratis online can make sense for them as smaller fish in the pond; it’s a business model that lowers barriers to entry. It’s by no means universal among non-d&d systems, though.
That's fair, D&D has never done it this way - but I feel my point still stands about D&DBeyond always having been a poor platform, especially in terms of having to buy a physical and digital book. I understand it was independent of WotC for some time, but it was a conscious decision to not start including codes in books after they acquired it.
Yeah, I’ve never been a fan of it either. Being able to get digital copies for $10 now if you buy physical through D&D Beyond is progress, but still lame. If I’m going to pay full price for a physical book I want to do it at my game shop. I’ll be curious to see if they stick with it or have to come up with another approach in a year because no one wants to just send them $70 directly.
>It's laughable that you even had to pay for content at all
Or, putting it more bluntly "if you are a game developer, you should die of starvation, it's laughable to ask money for your work".
>in most other RPGs, it's common practice for player-facing content to be freely available, and for prewritten adventures/modules/campaigns to be the monetizable part. Lancer's Comp/Con, Pathfinder's Nethys, the list goes on.
Or, putting it more bluntly "if you want to make a quality product focused on players, you should die of starvation: most other companies provide that content for free, so you should go fk yourself and work for free because that's how *they* do it, and so should you".
What? Everything I listed is coming from a smaller developer than Hasbro - companies that succeed on creating beloved RPGs that respect their players time and money.
I'm not sure if saying Hasbro is greedy equates to "I think game developers should starve".
I know of a really solid free but uh, not exactly "official" option that's worked spectacularly for me in the past and has addons for chrome to use for at least Roll20.
Alternatively, granted it isn't for 5e, but hey.. Demiplane is really promising lol
I'm confused because literally no other platform offers this either.
I have the books and I share them with everyone in my campaigns and it works great. I haven't had a single player even use ala carte.
I'm in a fantasy grounds campaign I play in and our DM does the same there with the books he's purchased.
Feels almost like a niche portion of the player base used it this way?
Giving the argument of "well, that is who it can work for now and you dunno what can happen in the future" is completely silly. You can make the same argument by saying "well, virtual table top might not even exist in the future and you'll lose everything" and sound just as silly.
This is the "In a bubble perspective".
In essence you're saying "This doesn't affect me or my group, why does anyone else care about it?"
It's short sighted and it's dismissive of the very real value the ease of use the system offered others who aren't as fortunate to have a DM with all the stuff that's spending money to share it with them.
With the la carte buying option, individuals had agency over their content.
Now they're at the mercy of knowing someone that's willing/able to share with them or buy entire books.
The barrier to entry got higher, and more difficult.
This whole thread has been people saying this garbage, using paragraphs of texts just to say "this doesn't affect me or my group so it shouldn't affect you" it's hilarious. Or "no other platform offered this" I bet they are the same ones that would get upset if their favorite item was removed from a menu. No other restaurants offered that so why are you upset?
I much prefer my stance I've had since the introduction of D&D Beyond.
You own *nothing* digitally. It can be taken away without notice or compensation.
Physical books are the only way you will actually own it.
It really doesn’t. I could have gotten all the spells, feats, and races for only about $100.
Buying all the books would have been $500+.
What the fuck are you talking about that it would cost more?
Buying all of a books content 1 piece at at a time, is clearly more expensive than buying the book. That is what I am talking about. If all you want is a single feat, why buy it at all? Just enter it.
Bruh. You aren’t buying every single feat one by one. They offered all feats / spells from a single book for like $5. People aren’t buying single spells or single feats that are complaining about this. They are buying just the spells from Xanathars or just the subclasses from Tasha’s.
You don’t even comprehend how it works lol.
They will sometimes buy the adventure books for me, so I can run them for the group. So it is a win win really. I can't imagine paying for a single feat, when you could just enter it yourself for free if that is all you want.
It was such a fucking ripoff. They wanted people to buy individual spells and creatures and whatnot for like half a euro. Which sounds like very little until you realize you are getting what amounts to a macro, and adding it all up the cost of like half a sourcebook becomes fucking insane.
I’m glad it’s gone just so people won’t overpay.
Who was buying half a sourcebook like that? Literally no one. 🤣
Also, you're ignoring the important fact that the cost of the stuff you purchased separately was subtracted from the overall cost of the book. Stop defending Wizards and their bad business practices.
I'm not defending their bad business practices, i'm saying they were doing bad business practices. Even if nobody pays it, it shouldn't be an option to pay a ridiculous amount for individual stuff. We don't have to allow fucking microtransactions for this.
I wouldn't recommend using dndbeyond whatsoever because it sucks, but i'm still happy if they don't try to rip people off as hard.
What ship are you jumping to?
Roll20 doesn't offer alacarte. Neither does fantasy grounds, etc.
DNDbeyond with a la carte had a unique agreement with WotC, WotC likely could have killed it at any point if they chose to.
Mind you a la carte pricing wasn't really that much of a savings. My memory is fuzzy but a la carte pricing was almost never significantly cheaper than buying the whole thing. Infact there's this post that talks about it that seems to line up with my memory
[https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/d-d-beyond-feedback/65453-so-i-just-realized-something-is-kinda-off-about](https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/d-d-beyond-feedback/65453-so-i-just-realized-something-is-kinda-off-about)
To me I never got the value of the a la carte. I thought about doing it even though I was an early adopter of Dndbeyond (don't recall when but it was pre-tashas for sure) and when looking at either compendium pricing or character building options, I just opted to go legendary bundle and it makes it even cheaper. Now I probably wouldn't just take the jump into legendary as it's about twice the price of when I got it.
I think still the best way to do Dndbeyond is the same as roll20, fantasy grounds, etc. is to have your play group contribute to it as a group as much as possible. For example if you have a group of 4 I person subscribes to DM tier, the rest to player, and split legendary your costs are kind of OK as your annual costs would be either 30 or 55 (I think) Upfront you're spending a ton, 300ish per person. But future costs are much lower. Assuming they stick at around 30 an adventure or sourcebook and if they release 3 a year your yearly cost if you want everything is about 75. Of course the Legendary bundle is a terrible deal now unless you really want all the monster, magic item, etc. options from adventures. Otherwise looking at core rulebooks your upfront per person would be around 120 per person and that includes all the various monster compendiums and Tome of Beasts 1.
> a la carte pricing wasn't really that much of a savings.
For people who don't want/need all the stuff from the book, it is a savings when I have no intention of buying the rest of it.
Spending 60% of the books cost, for 40% of it's content is still a 40% savings if I don't value the other 60% of the product.
Did I pay more proportionally? That can be debated with both sides having merit.
Did I save money for my needs and situation? Yes.
I guess it comes back to what you need. And what I mean by that is if you need say subclasses you could buy those and spells you could buy those but who's to say you won't need magic items later? Or monsters, etc. Again, it's all subjective. I just never saw value and use D&Dbeyond as a means for character creation for my entire group, so the cost is diluted multiple ways. And I don't buy content I don't want so if a player wants something they'll usually buy the book.
I mean… paying for DnD beyond just to have an automated character is a bit stupid as there other way cheaper or free alternatives (albeit not necessarily as pretty but still…). Even before this their business model was not great!
That is absolutely not true. It has helped a lot of new players figure out how to make characters. That is always helpful.
Its also a good tool for DMs.
I didn't say it did 0 good. I said it did more harm than it did good.
It's helped bring a lot of people into the hobby. It's also blurred the lines between content, warped player expectations about what campaigns are like, and really obfuscated source content. It's also started the very slippery slope towards DnD as a subscription, which we know is coming.
I'm glad it did good for you. I'd still love to see it die because I can see where it's going and I worry about what it will do to the hobby.
I think you have an incomplete perspective on this one.
It's easy for seasoned gamers, it's easy for some even non-seasoned gamers and new players.
It's also not simple, or easy for some.
When you make statements like this, you're being dismissive of them and being condescending to them for it not coming easily to them.
Not everyone is capable of learning new things easily, sometimes it's specific to certain types of things. Sometimes it's a more general thing like developmental challenges or a learning disability.
Those people matter to the community. They're welcome here and should be equally as celebrated as anyone else in the community.
Most legitimate sources have been discussed at this point. Thread is locked due to the proliferation of comments violating Rule 2.
I suggest everyone who uses DND Beyond to get familiar with the homebrew section. You can copy existing spells/feats/races/etc and add to it or remove whatever you want with working check boxes and counters. You won’t be able to make it public but at least it’s better than paying for a book you already own a physical copy of… is it somewhat time consuming though.
They are going to paywall Homebrew next.
The leak during the OGL fiasco was that VP Chris Cao indeed wanted to ban homebrew from D&D Beyond for free users. Part of WotC's damage control was denying that they ever intended to do this. If they do end up gating the ability to homebrew behind paid subscriptions, [this tweet](https://twitter.com/DnDBeyond/status/1615879317157715968) will come back to haunt them.
The main thing to know, when looking back at old tweets or statements made by the D&D Beyond team, is that almost nobody who actually built D&D Beyond still works there. I spent 5½ years, from pre-launch through to working at Wizards, building something that I am still immensely proud of. It's a real achievement and, to this day, I love when I talk to people who D&D Beyond has positively impacted, allowing them to play D&D with others. The core principles of the site, of delivering value to the community, championing accessibility, and engaging with people ... I have no way of knowing how important those are now considered. I believe that actions speak louder than words though.
Thank you for everything you've contributed to the community. You made something great.
They don't care about a little more bad publicity, if their past behavior is any indication. They just do their best to spin it and move on, unless the fallout becomes too toxic. Then they backtrack...at least for a while. WotC wants you to buy their stuff. Homebrew isn't their stuff (at least, not stuff they've been paid for). Therefore, as far as they're concerned, homebrew is BAD. I'm surprised they haven't shut it off entirely, and wouldn't be surprised if they did in the future.
They'll find a way to salvage this, at least in their mind. Always bet on the short-term memory of the collective internet.
If it’s anything like the OGL, they’ll delete the tweet roughly 6 months before they go back on this. Just like they did when they took down the original FAQ for the OGL that plainly stated: > …even if Wizards made a change you disagreed with, you could continue to use an earlier, acceptable version at your option. In other words, there's no reason for Wizards to ever make a change that the community of people using the Open Gaming License would object to, because the community would just ignore the change anyway. …shortly before trying to tell everyone we couldn’t use the original version anymore.
Nah, they'll add some special "feature" to it that'll break functionality. This, pushing you to use official sources.
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>I suggest everyone who uses DND Beyond to get familiar with the homebrew section. I strongly suggest looking for other open source solutions. I won't name names, because the mods are aware and would rightly ban me for suggesting piracy, but I will also state that there are ethical ways to use such tools and you should definitely not steal material you want to use just because it's easier.
Nah, I say just quit DnD behind altogether and move to using either gsheets or any other number of digital character sheet. Hasbro is more than happy to fuck with DNDBeyond’s utility and make the experience objectively worse because they’re banking on people being too lazy to switch.
Remember when it became vogue to post canceled D&D Beyond memberships? I think we're at a place where that's once again appropriate. Jesus Wizards, you just can't stop taking Ls can you?
Man. what a joke. I already own all the books already in their physical form, so I was just grabbing what I needed for characters I was playing. I'm not paying thousands to buy all the books again just for DNDB.
Well, I've been working on https://elderdragonstavern.com exactly for this reason. This is my personal take on a digital d&d character sheet and tracker. It's free, and you can create any content in it, no need to buy anything.
Support for foundry VTT will be great !
Not to mention a Firefox extension.
Looks good immediate playtest thoughts add the current size limits to containers eg backpack is 30 lbs
Front page looks promising, Ill look into it if when I get more time
This is awesome! Thank you so much for sharing it
This is incredible! Bookmarked for next time I play.
I'd heavily suggest looking into additional browser integrations. Chrome is my work browser, opera is my DND browser. Looking forward to seeing how the project grows, I do think that it would be extremely convenient if there was some way to transfer over sheets from Roll20 into this too, since my players already have their stuff on there.
this is one of the biggest issues, yeah - paying for something that's useful, fair enough. But paying for something that's already been purchased, just in digital format, at full price, _again_, is taking the piss a bit!
Same.
I fucking hate this so much.
Frankly, the fact that they never prioritized aligning the books with the online product was always an indicator of the kind of attitude WOTC had to DNDBeyond. Honestly this is one of those times when you gotta quote Gabe Newell, "Piracy is an issue of service". Imagine if you could simply buy the books at a local store, scan a QR code and get all of the stuff on DNDBeyond built in. Imagine how many more people would be buying off DNDBeyond if the digital versions weren't t*he same price as the physical copies*.
This is sad. DnDBeyond has played a huge role getting me into DnD because of the ease of building a character, rolling dice and sifting through so that I familiarise myself with the mechanics. Everything there is so neat.
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I keep reading people saying that ala carte was a bad value or that they just share the books, and the cost on Beyond. I help facilitate a large AL group ( 8 DMs and usually about 60 players) in Nashville, The number of times I have been able to sell people who are just putting their toes in the water with an ala carte option is more than I can count. When a new player has just spent money on dice and a mini and isn't sure about dropping another $60.00 on a book or two I show them that for $2.00 they can buy the class or subclass that they want to play. If they don't like it all that's lost is $2.00. If they like it well that money can go towards the purchase of that book. By the simple fact that we are all on this subreddit we are all hardcore fans. We not only buy, but I assume preorder, the books when they come out. We hoard dice and minis. We are the niche. I can attest as having shepherded a lot of new players that the ala carte option is fantastic to bringing in new players and having them try out something a little deeper than the free SRD options. Also while I have bought every D&D book the only full book I own digitally is the PHB simply because of the discount after buying so much of it. I don't like digital books, but the digital options are so convenient for creating characters. If I wanted to read the text from Bigby's I much prefer reading a physical copy. But if I wanted a class or feat I'd happily plunk down $2.00 to just grab that. Yeah maybe $2.00 is a lot for a feat but it's better than $60 when all I will use it for is a feat on my character sheet.
This is a prime example of what the community is losing, and the future customers WoTC is sacrificing in this move. Thank you for sharing this.
It’s not a surprising choice as it’s in line with WotC’s current business model. Back in the day, they released books that were mostly 1 kind of content: there was a book of spells, a book of magic items, books with player options (classes, feats, etc), books of monsters. Now, they put some of everything into each release so that everyone has to buy every book, instead of just buying the content that they are interested in.
Seems to make the site significantly less useful from that perspective. As noted, other companies have made their player-facing options and a varying amount of DM-facing materials free for reference and this works quite well, with no reported issues regarding impact on sales. One of the sites I have a long history with is the Archives of Nethys that I've used as a player and DM going back to when it was not a recognized fan site for Pathfinder 1st. They thread the needle on what to post and what they encourage users to buy the materials (also helpful that Paizo provides a variety of options of how to purchase their materials). Given that online vtts like Roll20 the books are available for sale to make use of pre-made VTT content (otherwise site users can input the materials manually), the utility of D&DB really just becomes to make third-party materials available (aka another webstore like DMsGuild) with the interoperability with the DDB vtt itself (so no different than Roll20 in that regard). And then of course the user message boards and the site acting as the official mouthpiece for the game. Seems a bad move, they lose one advantage they have over competing D&D-supporting sites and against competitor's portfolio of online support for their TTRPGs.
Archives of Nethys has a very unique relationship with Paizo in that they act as the official system reference document for Pathfinder and Starfinder. So they post all the rules but little to none of the lore. And that’s where Paizo makes their money. If you want the lore then you buy the books. Same with all the adventure paths they release. And you have the people who want the physical rule books so Paizo makes money off those sales as well. https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6sg93?Big-PathfinderStarfinder-Reference-Document-News
I addressed this. AoN did not always have that relationship, at least formally. And there was also almost as much info (for PF1e) info on the PFd20srd portal. And the point still stands, Paizo, and others, have models that allow for different balance of monetization and competition and by removing this feature from DDB, Hasbro seems to be impeding their competitive advantage in ways that seem to have little upside. They seem to still believe their path forward is to be far more restrictive and protective of sales - which is a strategy that tends to prioritize retention, rather than growth. as its objective. As it stands, if you use another VTT (other than the DDB VTT) the likely scenario is that to use material with a minimum of work on your part, you may need to buy their rulebook products twice (or 3 times, to include physical product). I mean many will just do like me and buy it once (in any format) and then manually input information into our chosen VTT as necessary for our campaigns. But this is the sort of decision that has made me decide to invest in 5e alternatives and when they arrive, I'll be disconnecting from Hasbro at least for the rest of the 5e lifecycle. Chris and others won't notice one less sale but from my pov having been around for almost a half-century, this sort of plan doesn't really end in success for the companies that do it.
So when do we all as a community just say “f this” and just outright refuse to buy their undercooked products? As someone who recently got into PF2e and am looking to hopefully join a Vampire: the Masquerade game or a Call of Cthulhu game, D&D is just getting progressively worse and worse. And it’s getting really depressing. Like a game that introduced me into tabletop, a setting filled with o much cool stuff. Like I still enjoy some aspects of the game, but it’s very obvious WOTC/Hasbro does not care about the customers. They don’t care about quality. They don’t care about the game. It feels like at this point, the only hope is to look to homebrew creators. Idk.. it’s just really sad to hear things getting worse and worse with no sight of improvement.
I’ve already resolved to never give WOTC another dollar
Enshitification is all the rage these days.
Thats fucking lame of them. A la carte was an amazing feature of DND Beyond I wish Roll20 had, and I use it kind of often to get stuff I want for a character without buying the whole book. I’m disappointed, but not surprised, by this.
Meanwhile over in Pathfinder land all the rules are free on Archives of Nethys. Honestly I like 5e but if people keep putting up with this stuff then WOTC will keep doing it.
Can’t your GM share books with you, like in roll20?
It used to be both were options, now only one is an option. This is a degraded product in the name of profit. We now also can't be confident that will stick around as an option.
Don't forget you can still create those things through the site's homebrewing options for free. So it's more like you had three options and now it's only two.
GM can share, but there's a limit on shares you can have. First one of the players needs to have a subscription. And then they can enable "Content sharing" for a campaign, where the DM can then decide which books are shared. I have Master level subscription - the highest one - and I can offer content sharing in 5 separate campaigns. If I wanted to share my books in 6th, I'd need a different player who has a subscription to enable it there. 5 campaigns might seem a lot, but currently I play with 2 groups, and I have 2 campaigns for each group - one is a "regular" game we play on a weekly basis, another is for one shots, and "fun games" we do when we can't/don't want to do given week. I can fiddle with turning sharing on and off, but it's annoying tbh.
How much is that and does it have a VtT?
Only if DM has paid subscription.
I *think* anyone in the campaign with a paid DM sub can activate a campaign for sharing even if it isn’t their own campaign.
I've done this but then the real DM can't do things like read over the full sheet, check where stats are coming from, or make modifications for someone.
I'm curious about something... Are they even trying to make an excuse for it? Or is just "we removed a feature because we love money"?
[Enshittification](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification)
This is the risk of purchasing access to digital items that you don't own. DNDBeyond has always been a ticking time bomb.
Classic enshittif!cation (google: Cory Doctorow) Saw this coming from a mile off. They get you locked into their platform, and when you've committed all your time & effort they blast you with charges.. This and the end-game\* are why I never sink my time & efgort into anything like D&D Beyond... (\*When a few years down the line they close the platform without warning because of "lack of profits") I use: \-Discord for comms, pic sharing & dice rolling \- fillable pdfs for char sheets \- google draw for battle maps
I'm definitely jumping off of the platform now. I only use it *because* I could get bits and pieces of content as needed, since I don't make new characters frequently at all. And I only play D&D because I use Beyond for the aforementioned reason... So now it's like, why not just find a different game to play if I've lost the incentive to stick with DndBeyond? Time for a change!
>And I only play D&D because I use Beyond for the aforementioned reason... You only play dnd because you could buy stuff on dndbeyond? out of curiosity why? there's plenty of ways to play dnd without spending any money at all that are barely less effort then dnd beyond
I think he means because dnd beyond has such an easy to use character sheet and integration with content in the character builder. Tbh I haven’t seen something like that for any other ttRPG, but if there is one I’d be very interested in knowing so I could try out new systems with my not very bookish friends
Demiplane is trying really hard (og dndbeyond folks making it while owning it so it can’t get sold out from under them again) It has support for pf2e and a wide variety of other systems like the marvel system
Demiplane is pretty good! It’s for basically all major-ish TTRPGs except for D&D.
pathbuilder feels incredibly easy to use as my group tries to learn pf2
Pathbuilder is so much insanely better than DND Beyond its absurd. And the sad thing is, if Beyond had stayed independent I’m sure it would be a lot closer.
Agree 100% pathbuilder is a god send. Its so much better for seeing which options are available to you on level up over the native foundry vtt system or even demiplane (which i still enjoy and use but for other reasons).
Pf2e’s system on foundry is god tier but the character builder in it leaves a lot to be desired. I second pathbuilder being one of the best and light weight character builders out there
I just wish importing to Foundry worked better.
For what vtt? For Foundry using Pathmuncher from Pathbuidrer PCs has worked fine for me.
*Lancer* has COMPCON, a free compendium and character builder. The game is sci-fi mech combat, not fantasy adventuring, but that site is one of the best game resources I’ve seen.
Demiplane is good, but yeah Pathbuilder is INSANELY good for pf2e, since it's a d20 system with direct origins to DND(3.5e, admittedly) it's less of a culture shock than you'd expect, and the paizo rules are free on Archives of Nethys for all 3 systems(Patfhinder 1e, starfinder 1e, and pathfinder 2e).
Yeah, shitty character builders are definitely a barrier of entry for other systems. D&D Beyond did a pretty good job, so it’s easy to just play dnd and keep playing dnd.
May you find your path.
Reminder that anyone in a campaign can share books, no matter if they’re a players or the DMs. I have a campaign just for sharing materials with people.
You need to have master subscription to share cleanly, if you DM a campaign you can force things you own onto your players even if they dont have it but otherwise only homebrew stuff is shared within a campaign (behold the power of homebrew copies that hopefully wont be cracked down on soon.
Only the person sharing has to have the master subscription though, and they can share it with unlimited people
Not unlimited, only in 5 campaigns at a time I believe.
Only once person has to set the campaign as sharing enabled then the DM can allow any book owned by anyone in the campaign to be shared
Don't you need a DM subscription to share?
For now. This isn't about what value we still have, this is about WoTC degrading the product in the name of profits. They took something from the community today. What they took was a low cost entry point into the hobby where you're not dependent on knowing a DM that owns the stuff, pays to be able to share the stuff, and is willing to/has room to have you in a campaign so you can also use the stuff. It used to be "Here's $5! Can I please have this fun thing so I can go enjoy it on my character? THANKS!"
This is the big thing. DNDBeyond would be such a good product if Hasbro was smart enough to make it worthwhile.
It’s only a matter of time before that goes away. This is just the beginning with the changes they are making. My friend has all the books and shares it with multiple campaigns my friend group has. I have bought a few monsters and it has been a great experience, but to WoTC this is loss revenue as I’m getting content through my friend. You cut off the sharing and force people to buy the books themselves. When that happens sadly we will just go back to pencil and paper. 
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No, screw that. Screw that with all kinds of rusty screws. I use Roll20 a lot, and sometimes I would buy stuff on DDB like the half-drow from SCAG just to justify inputting in on my roll20 sheet. Now I have no incentive to buy stuff on DDB. I'm out.
Check out https://www.dungeonmastersvault.com/ if own the books you can custom add everything and save it for later use.
Pathfinder 2e & Pathbuilder. I jumped ship at the start of the OGL debacle and haven't looked back since, well, aside from watching the dumpster fire burn that is...
It's interesting because I would have never started buying from it were it not for this, so it seems like it will be less money for them in many cases
That’s really annoying I have a few of the books physically and was basically just getting subclasses and races for my players convenience. I even bought the most expensive subscription, but if it’s gonna be this way going forward I’ll probably have to look into a new VTT
Not only did this take value from us, but it also took value from them, I hope they discover this. Before D&DBeyond was a way for beginners to get into the hobby, just buy the stuff that sparks their interest and hopefully they buy the full book once they’re hooked. Instead they’re just gonna pirate the whole book instead of paying for at least part of it.
My sunk cost on the platform is prohibitive to me leaving it, but I will as soon as I can. I have entirely zero faith in WotC delivering quality products, things have been downhill for several years now.
I'm so confused...buying a la carte was literally the worst value of your money. 2 dollars for one whole item? I guess I could see the point if it were a whole subclass but I don't remember the cost for that. If it were 5 dollars I'd just say whatever spend another 10-15 and literally get the whole book! If I wanted to make one thing for my character I'd just homebrew it.
The amount you spent was deducted from the total price, if you wanted to buy the rest later.
Their a la carte model was actually great, because each bundle or sub-bundle had its price reduced by the amount you already spent on content in it. This way you'd never pay more for the book than the cost of the book if you decided to fill it out. I haven't used D&D Beyond much in the last 2 years, but that pricing model was the best of both worlds for consumers. Sad to see it go away.
Pretty good value if I’m only playing one campaign at a time and don’t want to figure out how to make homebrew (my time is worth something as well). I’ve probably spent about $20 a la carte over 3 years, with content from at least three different books. Books I already own, I’ll add.
More like another $20-$25. If the spores druid is $5, and the $30 ravnica book is otherwise dead content for you, you saved $25. At the pre-tasha time, it was buy the book, buy the subclass, or hack it in through homebrew tools.
There's such an immense difference between 'value for your money' and 'price', like literally everything you buy would be cheaper if you bought 10x-100x as much of it.
I don't see how it's confusing. I don't need to spend $30 for the entire "Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants" book when the **only** thing I want from it is the barbarian subclass for $3.99. Then it if turns out 2 years down the line I did actually want to buy the book, the book will likely be cheaper because it's an older book ($20 instead of $30) and it'll be on offer since I already own one item, so it's $19.00 instead of the full $20. Now? If I want one thing from a book, I'm just not going to buy the book, like you said, I'd just homebrew it.
I think the use case was more that you own a hardcopy of Xanathar’s but want to make a gloom stalker in D&D Beyond for your next campaign. So, you pay $2 for Gloom Stalker, and you get your digital character sheet rather than needing to buy the whole book a second time.
Not to mention if you bought all the items individually, you’d be spending a lot more than if you had just bought the book outright.
That’s not true. Buying the bit subtracted from the total cost of the book
Actually they deducted the value of the a la carte items you purchased from the book value if you later bought the book. If you purchased 4 races from a $30 book, at about $2 per race, then went to buy the book itself later you would get an $8 discount. Still sucks that they're removing the function but they did take existing ownership under consideration.
Was it really 1 to 1? I remember a lot of them having content that costed more all together than the book’s price. Did it become free at one point?
Why would someone ever do that instead of buying the whole book lmao
A good work around is inputting or finding it in dnd beyond homebrew. Can’t publish them but you can have all the same details the items or feats have without the cost
Let’s hope that’s not next on the chopping block
Was just curious so I checked, I don't see the cost of prior a la cart purchase showing when I select the whole sourcebook to buy. So they didn't even implement that the way they claim. What a joke.
That is a shame. I was thinking about going back to old school paper sheets for my next campaign anyway, so that's just sealed the deal.
Yeah I’m just gonna switch to a different ttrpg for good once my current campaign is over
well gj for promoting homebrewing of own content and potentially reducing ddb playerbase, i guess they will try to push some other "improvement" no one asked for, to compensate from potential profit loss caused by own decisions hope my 1220 entries homebrew collection will remain in safety but with how ddb is managed.. i not sure
"Always forward, never backwards. MORE PROFIT!" :(
Until they realize theyre making less profit because the people who were going for a few little things may not be able to swing the full library to get what they needed
"Now I have to buy an entire book if I want to use any of the stuff on my character sheets. I have to buy an entire book, just to be able to add a piece of gear that my DM awarded me during an adventure." Did they take away the ability for the DM to share the books they own via a campaign?
Both options used to exist. The more accessible option of the two was removed. The product has been degraded. We can no longer be confident the other option will also stick around.
Oh I'm aware of the a la carte option, and removing that is dumb. Just wondering if they already 100% destroyed the use by also removing the sharing of book content. I'm not currently playing so let my subscription lapse.
It is not yet 100% dead. You can still share stuff, for the time being.
Gonna be honest I don't understand why people use DND beyond at all. There are plenty of options out there that are free and do just as good if not a better job then DND beyond. There are also paid options like foundry VTT which is leagues better in every way.
Just yesterday i was eyeing the lineages from ravenloft and some of the fighter subclasses I always wanted to try. Dang.
Glad I never used it
Plug to go to lfg and hook up with irl people so wotc can't monetize your fun
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That's great! But not really relevant to this discussion?
Thank you for bringing this issue to light. I do not use DnD Beyond but I was on the fence about getting it. Looks like no
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Wizards. Just accept DnD as a net loss and let magic the gathering carry the load.
Imo the a la carte just promotes nickle and dining style dlc. If you have to buy the book that's just the book.
r/boneappletea
You guys buy from DnD Beyond??
D&DBeyond was amazing? Seriously? It's laughable that you even had to pay for content at all - in most other RPGs, it's common practice for player-facing content to be freely available, and for prewritten adventures/modules/campaigns to be the monetizable part. Lancer's Comp/Con, Pathfinder's Nethys, the list goes on. D&DBeyond was always really aggressively monetized, and I for one have always steered clear.
> in most other RPGs, it's common practice for player-facing content to be freely available That's very, _very_ variable - there's a lot of games where that's totally not true, there's just the book (or maybe two or three) and that's it, there's no "adventures", no "free player thingie" or anything. Or there's the pure, barebones, basic system, with none of the powers and abilities, which is so bleached of everything as to be useless - a lot of PbtAs are like this, where, sure, the basic concept of "8+: hit, 10+: hit+" is free, but all the actual playbooks are in a paid product. Or _Spire_, where the resistance system is free... but that's not going to let you play _Spire_, which has a load of specialist classes, powers, setting and fluff. Saying that's true for "most" RPGs is pretty much not true - it's a distinct minority that even have a "player book", most are just a product that's everything to play, and that's it, with _maybe_ some supplements, but often not.
That's not entirely true for Lancer. The CORE stuff is available for free, but everything in the expansion books requires buying (or pirating if you don't care about the developers) the books lcp file from itch.io. Don't get me wrong, I still love comp/con and fuck around on it all the time, but there IS a monetization aspect to it. (Which is fair, game devs gotta eat too!)
Are you sure? I'm almost positive the [itch.io](http://itch.io) pages for the LCP files are free for player-facing content, and the GM stuff is on the paid PDF. It's been a while since I imported them all, but I know I went through the Comp/Con website itself, and they were free.
Ya know what, I double checked and you're 100% right. My mistake. The comp/con stuff is free, but since the NPCs and stuff aren't in comp/con it's just the DM that has to actually buy stuff. Good catch, and really, just one more reason to love Massif Press!
100%! Massif are so awesome, and the community around Lancer itself is wonderful - I still need to find the time to properly play.
This has never been true of Dungeons and Dragons across any edition, though. The change to eliminate a la carte purchasing stinks, but “pay for the player’s handbook” has been A Thing for decades. Pathfinder and others offering comprehensive resources gratis online can make sense for them as smaller fish in the pond; it’s a business model that lowers barriers to entry. It’s by no means universal among non-d&d systems, though.
That's fair, D&D has never done it this way - but I feel my point still stands about D&DBeyond always having been a poor platform, especially in terms of having to buy a physical and digital book. I understand it was independent of WotC for some time, but it was a conscious decision to not start including codes in books after they acquired it.
Yeah, I’ve never been a fan of it either. Being able to get digital copies for $10 now if you buy physical through D&D Beyond is progress, but still lame. If I’m going to pay full price for a physical book I want to do it at my game shop. I’ll be curious to see if they stick with it or have to come up with another approach in a year because no one wants to just send them $70 directly.
Right? It's always been a rip-off and it was always going to go this way. I'm just surprised it took them this long.
>It's laughable that you even had to pay for content at all Or, putting it more bluntly "if you are a game developer, you should die of starvation, it's laughable to ask money for your work". >in most other RPGs, it's common practice for player-facing content to be freely available, and for prewritten adventures/modules/campaigns to be the monetizable part. Lancer's Comp/Con, Pathfinder's Nethys, the list goes on. Or, putting it more bluntly "if you want to make a quality product focused on players, you should die of starvation: most other companies provide that content for free, so you should go fk yourself and work for free because that's how *they* do it, and so should you".
What? Everything I listed is coming from a smaller developer than Hasbro - companies that succeed on creating beloved RPGs that respect their players time and money. I'm not sure if saying Hasbro is greedy equates to "I think game developers should starve".
I remember lots of complaints about that feature with it being described as making classes DLC and calling having the a la carte be a cash grab.
I know of a really solid free but uh, not exactly "official" option that's worked spectacularly for me in the past and has addons for chrome to use for at least Roll20. Alternatively, granted it isn't for 5e, but hey.. Demiplane is really promising lol
paper charicter sheets
I'm confused because literally no other platform offers this either. I have the books and I share them with everyone in my campaigns and it works great. I haven't had a single player even use ala carte. I'm in a fantasy grounds campaign I play in and our DM does the same there with the books he's purchased. Feels almost like a niche portion of the player base used it this way? Giving the argument of "well, that is who it can work for now and you dunno what can happen in the future" is completely silly. You can make the same argument by saying "well, virtual table top might not even exist in the future and you'll lose everything" and sound just as silly.
This is the "In a bubble perspective". In essence you're saying "This doesn't affect me or my group, why does anyone else care about it?" It's short sighted and it's dismissive of the very real value the ease of use the system offered others who aren't as fortunate to have a DM with all the stuff that's spending money to share it with them. With the la carte buying option, individuals had agency over their content. Now they're at the mercy of knowing someone that's willing/able to share with them or buy entire books. The barrier to entry got higher, and more difficult.
This whole thread has been people saying this garbage, using paragraphs of texts just to say "this doesn't affect me or my group so it shouldn't affect you" it's hilarious. Or "no other platform offered this" I bet they are the same ones that would get upset if their favorite item was removed from a menu. No other restaurants offered that so why are you upset?
I much prefer my stance I've had since the introduction of D&D Beyond. You own *nothing* digitally. It can be taken away without notice or compensation. Physical books are the only way you will actually own it.
I buy the books so I can share them with my players. It costs way more to purchase book content a la carte.
It really doesn’t. I could have gotten all the spells, feats, and races for only about $100. Buying all the books would have been $500+. What the fuck are you talking about that it would cost more?
Buying all of a books content 1 piece at at a time, is clearly more expensive than buying the book. That is what I am talking about. If all you want is a single feat, why buy it at all? Just enter it.
Bruh. You aren’t buying every single feat one by one. They offered all feats / spells from a single book for like $5. People aren’t buying single spells or single feats that are complaining about this. They are buying just the spells from Xanathars or just the subclasses from Tasha’s. You don’t even comprehend how it works lol.
That's great for you, and your group. Not all players are so fortunate to have someone in your position able to share stuff.
They will sometimes buy the adventure books for me, so I can run them for the group. So it is a win win really. I can't imagine paying for a single feat, when you could just enter it yourself for free if that is all you want.
It was such a fucking ripoff. They wanted people to buy individual spells and creatures and whatnot for like half a euro. Which sounds like very little until you realize you are getting what amounts to a macro, and adding it all up the cost of like half a sourcebook becomes fucking insane. I’m glad it’s gone just so people won’t overpay.
Who was buying half a sourcebook like that? Literally no one. 🤣 Also, you're ignoring the important fact that the cost of the stuff you purchased separately was subtracted from the overall cost of the book. Stop defending Wizards and their bad business practices.
I'm not defending their bad business practices, i'm saying they were doing bad business practices. Even if nobody pays it, it shouldn't be an option to pay a ridiculous amount for individual stuff. We don't have to allow fucking microtransactions for this. I wouldn't recommend using dndbeyond whatsoever because it sucks, but i'm still happy if they don't try to rip people off as hard.
What ship are you jumping to? Roll20 doesn't offer alacarte. Neither does fantasy grounds, etc. DNDbeyond with a la carte had a unique agreement with WotC, WotC likely could have killed it at any point if they chose to. Mind you a la carte pricing wasn't really that much of a savings. My memory is fuzzy but a la carte pricing was almost never significantly cheaper than buying the whole thing. Infact there's this post that talks about it that seems to line up with my memory [https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/d-d-beyond-feedback/65453-so-i-just-realized-something-is-kinda-off-about](https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/d-d-beyond-feedback/65453-so-i-just-realized-something-is-kinda-off-about) To me I never got the value of the a la carte. I thought about doing it even though I was an early adopter of Dndbeyond (don't recall when but it was pre-tashas for sure) and when looking at either compendium pricing or character building options, I just opted to go legendary bundle and it makes it even cheaper. Now I probably wouldn't just take the jump into legendary as it's about twice the price of when I got it. I think still the best way to do Dndbeyond is the same as roll20, fantasy grounds, etc. is to have your play group contribute to it as a group as much as possible. For example if you have a group of 4 I person subscribes to DM tier, the rest to player, and split legendary your costs are kind of OK as your annual costs would be either 30 or 55 (I think) Upfront you're spending a ton, 300ish per person. But future costs are much lower. Assuming they stick at around 30 an adventure or sourcebook and if they release 3 a year your yearly cost if you want everything is about 75. Of course the Legendary bundle is a terrible deal now unless you really want all the monster, magic item, etc. options from adventures. Otherwise looking at core rulebooks your upfront per person would be around 120 per person and that includes all the various monster compendiums and Tome of Beasts 1.
> a la carte pricing wasn't really that much of a savings. For people who don't want/need all the stuff from the book, it is a savings when I have no intention of buying the rest of it. Spending 60% of the books cost, for 40% of it's content is still a 40% savings if I don't value the other 60% of the product. Did I pay more proportionally? That can be debated with both sides having merit. Did I save money for my needs and situation? Yes.
I guess it comes back to what you need. And what I mean by that is if you need say subclasses you could buy those and spells you could buy those but who's to say you won't need magic items later? Or monsters, etc. Again, it's all subjective. I just never saw value and use D&Dbeyond as a means for character creation for my entire group, so the cost is diluted multiple ways. And I don't buy content I don't want so if a player wants something they'll usually buy the book.
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That's always been true
I mean… paying for DnD beyond just to have an automated character is a bit stupid as there other way cheaper or free alternatives (albeit not necessarily as pretty but still…). Even before this their business model was not great!
Fine by me. Please, WotC, push your customers to the supreme alternative that is Pathfinder.
Oh no! Anyway... Seriously. DDB has always been hot garbage that has hurt the game more than it helped imo. The sooner people abandon it, the better.
That is absolutely not true. It has helped a lot of new players figure out how to make characters. That is always helpful. Its also a good tool for DMs.
I didn't say it did 0 good. I said it did more harm than it did good. It's helped bring a lot of people into the hobby. It's also blurred the lines between content, warped player expectations about what campaigns are like, and really obfuscated source content. It's also started the very slippery slope towards DnD as a subscription, which we know is coming. I'm glad it did good for you. I'd still love to see it die because I can see where it's going and I worry about what it will do to the hobby.
I mean… making a character is one of the most easy thing in the game! PHB on hands is almost trivial… you don’t need DnD beyond for that!
I think you have an incomplete perspective on this one. It's easy for seasoned gamers, it's easy for some even non-seasoned gamers and new players. It's also not simple, or easy for some. When you make statements like this, you're being dismissive of them and being condescending to them for it not coming easily to them. Not everyone is capable of learning new things easily, sometimes it's specific to certain types of things. Sometimes it's a more general thing like developmental challenges or a learning disability. Those people matter to the community. They're welcome here and should be equally as celebrated as anyone else in the community.
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