It's been no secret that I don't like dndbeyond, even before Hasbro bought it.

I'll start with something that initially sounds petty, but isn't. This website charges for access to things. This means that I need to buy everything or have their uber-subscription. The cost here is not really a big deal here; these products come out infrequently enough and I obviously spend enough time here that this is worth it, hobby-wise. There is the matter of me hating them and whatnot, but I can make exceptions there. I hate Blizzard and sometimes I pay for their crap, right? It would be the same logic.

But lets go into the three REAL reasons that charging for stuff sucks.

1- Players need to have things "shared" with them, or own them themselves. This creates a technical burden for the players, who have to go through certain effort to access whatever the things are. As a result, players tend to use things that they own, or that are part of some free stuff. This unfairly privileges Open Hand Monk, Evoker Wizard, Champion Fighter, Hunter Ranger, Life Cleric- basically anything that shows up in the free rules (each class has exactly one subclass available for free). It did not escape my notice that all of these have appeared at our table; they are the easiest to make work with this tool and do not require a purchase.

2- If you create something that is too similar to an existing thing, it will flag it as such and harass you. This is to prevent you from creating, say, the Oath of Glory paladin for yourself or your player without anyone buying Mythic Odysseys of Theros or Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. This is definitely annoying if you are trying to create a very slightly different version of one of these, requiring some other editing options. This weird thing is yet one more technical hurdle placed between being able to just edit a subclass or class directly.

3- Once you accept that this is a service trying to sell product, you start seeing it everywhere. The choice to label 5.0 content as "Legacy" instead of tagging all content with its version number, for instance, is in part because they want to sell the idea that there's one 5th edition, and the 2024 player's handbook, DMG, and monster manual have just replaced the older stuff. That's because these things are new products to sell, so they have a financial motivation to do this. A neutral party framing this would be motivated to make everything as clear as possible, not to push you towards gaming a certain way. If you look up the basic rules (now called the "basic 2014 rules") you'll find the long sword:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dnd/b ... nt#Weapons
But if you google it directly you'll get the updated one:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/equipment/4-longsword
Obviously you can simply ignore the "sap" property, which only turns on if you have a class feature from a 5.5 class. But why is it there? My take is, it's an advertisement. Either way, it's not the ideal presentation.


Moving away from the consequences of servers costing money and this being a for-profit business, there's other things.

The minor; dndbeyond is a technical project with technical glitches. There was one weird line that appeared on I think the ranger's player sheet, and it was taken from some totally unrelated magic item that no one had ever had nor seen. No one online had that exact problem, but I could find some older posts from people who had had something similar at the time (lines from spells appearing in some random place was the closest I remember). Is this a common issue? Probably not. Random crap on charater sheets is a time-honored tradition, but a computer presenting it causes much more confusion, because what are the odds that the computer just hallucinated a weird thing? I mean, it's happened to us, so like, not zero. There was also the month long time period where all the 5.0 stuff just became the 5.5 things overnight, resulting in absolute furor and the overhaul of the system to get to the current version, which does in fact support both rulesets; something that they had never even anticipated the need for.


But of course my main complaint here is the fact that it adds a technical project, and this has problems. Above I mentioned how the free options encourage players to pick them. That I could fix buy just buying and sharing correctly. But how am I to add the ninja and dark knight classes? My chosen media is a PDF file, with ODT available upon request. The fact that some company has a website that doesn't understand this makes me face a choice for these two and also other things- either try to implement everything as some also-ran lesser-than thing, some option to create and import and tweak and get right and finally share with interested players.... or accept that players will avoid these choices because the website not supporting them will make them more difficult.

This is enough of a problem that I've considered editing essentially everything just so that there is no default choice- force my game to be completely incompatible with any and all automated implementations, remove the burden of these spiteful defaults. I haven't done this of course- it would be madness- but the fact that I even had this thought tells me that, I'm real mad at dndbeyond. I don't want to see it, I'm not interested in debugging it, it is not an anchor around my neck and it will not let it become one.

The fact that it will happily create a character sheet for a battlemaster fighter (with maybe a couple minor notes) but doesn't even know what a ninja even is? Unsatisfactory. My intention is that a nalthic weave school ninja is just as standard an option as a battlemaster archetype fighter.

I don't think any of this is news to anyone here though.

Am I the only one that doesn't use dndbeyond? I use that Excel spreadsheet, which has been just fine the last few campaigns.

I'm unsure what exactly everyone has used, but I've definitely remembered there being tech support about it on a lot of occasions. I wasn't DM so it wasn't really my problem, but I definitely didn't like having no idea how to help, and wouldn't want to run a game under that pressure.
Any game is gonna have "hey what should I write here" and "did everyone remember to update their skills because your proficiency went up" and "be sure to update your to-hit with your longbow, melee-favoring character", but that's a far cry from "this value isn't adding correctly", where you are reverse engineering whatever bad dream some database you can't access had.

Similarly, character sheets are supported by all the big VTTs, roll20 included. That might be something I look into in a few months, but we sure don't want to start with that. We'll want to start with either something like what you're doing (fully digital, in a spreadsheet, text file, PDF, or word processor), or a paper version thereof (and of course physical character sheets are trivial to back up- portrait mode picture on phone of every side you have anything written on, email to yourself, done).

I’m going back to paper… which kinda sucks but whatever.

Consider a hybrid method as well, where you put some things into one of the fillable PDFs, then print it. Things like attributes don't change very often, after all.

Anyway, paper is great, even just straight up blank page. Just remember to take a picture of each page at the end of every session and email the pictures to yourself. You do that, you have three copies- the real one, the phone, and the server.

For this sort of thing I use google sheets. Easy to share.

To do it properly takes a lot of work, but the benefit is that I can track everything myself. There's no question over whether something was done automatically. And, of course, I can adapt to "We're doing 5th ed except for all the rules."

The other thing I do with it is avoid having to do math. I keep a running tally of damage and healing.

Sheets is great. Well, I assume- it's a highly functional spreadsheet and it's pretty easy to share. You can back it up to excel locally as well I think.



If 5th edition was good, it would already have all my rules.

The big problem is the huge anchor it throws around the neck of anyone trying to add anything custom at all, and this includes anyone trying to fix a lot of their conceptually strong but mechanically crappy subclasses. That makes it really easy to sell you upgrades, really puts a giant block on those train tracks. And of course, systems without a ninja need that added to be a minimum viable product.

I want to point out that I have no problem doing tech support for things that are fundamentally technological, such as magically having all our shit appear on multiple displays at once. I have also always had to do this for roll20, which has never been a stress-free experience even at the small amount of its functionality we have used.

There's plenty of difference between that and a character sheet!