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.

I am a pretty veteran dnd player and had a lot of doubts about using dnd beyond, mostly because of having to by the source books again from them. After agreeing to dm a campaign with 8 people I knew my usual all paper setup wouldn’t work as I would have no clue of what my players character sheets had on then to balance encounters and such. I needed an online source to hold all their sheets. Roll20 would have worked but I would have had to insert everything about every characters sheets into their roll20 sheets as they did not know how to. After figuring out you can use unpublished homebrew in your own campaigns with a master teir subscription, I decided to try it out for a month and after some success with setting up some characters I ended up also buying a couple source books on their. I have to say it was a wonderful decision.For vets. It’s a great way to keep track of everything and make sure even if players lose their paper sheet they’ll be able to play. And for new players, everything lays itself out to you and I wouldn’t get right out of the get go trying to make homebrew, but telling people what dice to roll and all the modifiers it gets right there is so helpful.

D&D Beyond doesn’t exceed or go “Beyond” what one would expect from the official online platform for source materials. It does a decent job of providing resources, but as I write this review while it is still early morning and I’m trying to catch my breath on the stair master I can think of 2 things I wish it did. First, I wish when editing my character I could see the feats, spells, races, etc. for the content I have bought. The content could be greyed out, hyperlinked, or a combination of the two but it could withhold the description as well as prohibit me from using it in the character builder, however this would allow me to know what I’m missing and would actually prompt to purchase the content versus not knowing what I don’t know. Second, every now and then there are options to “update” the digital content I have purchased. You aren’t required to update the content but it would be great if there was a log list or description of what the updates are? Many of us have encountered digital upgrades in many forms, such as phones, games, tv software, the list goes on but sometimes those upgrades are later regretted do to losing functionality or content. DnDB knows the changes the update will make, just let the user have a small window into why we should update.