D&D Beyond???

[wookietek]

I've seen recommendations to use the char gen on D&D Beyond, but it seems way too incomplete unless you fork over again for the books you've already bought. Does anyone know of a workaround?

[Man_Over_Game]

I've seen recommendations to use the char gen on D&D Beyond, but it seems way too incomplete unless you fork over again for the books you've already bought. Does anyone know of a workaround?

That's kind of the point. 5e isn't necessarily a free resource, you're supposed to be buying the books in order to play the game. If you want to play for free, they released a few of the classes for everyone:
Champion Fighter
Thief Rogue
Life Cleric

The most fun of those probably being the Life Cleric. Thief is pretty niche and Champion just doesn't have that "powerhouse" kinda feel you want in melee combat.

[MilkmanDanimal]

Nope, no workaround. If you want access to all the options, you have to purchase them in digital format. The advantage to it is the character creator is phenomenally easy to use, plus having a full list of monsters/spells/items at hand while playing has really revolutionized how I run a game. But, yeah, there's an additional cost to it.

[MaxWilson]

I've seen recommendations to use the char gen on D&D Beyond, but it seems way too incomplete unless you fork over again for the books you've already bought. Does anyone know of a workaround?

Well, you could write your own. It's not like 5E chargen is complex. You're just picking a bunch of options from a bunch of lists and doing some simple arithmetic on top.

[DeadMech]

I've seen recommendations to use the char gen on D&D Beyond, but it seems way too incomplete unless you fork over again for the books you've already bought. Does anyone know of a workaround?

In my experience if my DM has access to some bit of content on beyond then I as a player has had access to it when I was creating a character linked to a campaign they were running. I'm not sure if that then works in reverse as well.

Though for digital character sheets I've been using myth-weavers.com (www.myth-weavers.com) for years. It's got some math autocomplete features but doesn't use the same sort of char-gen process as beyond so it's probably a bit less automated and less interactive but it always seemed to be perfectly suitable for me.

[Helldin87]

So it seems expensive and it is but at least *only* the DM really needs to buy stuff. I just stopped buying hard copies and slowly bought the few things I really wanted to have content-wise for my PC's. You do have the option to only purchase certain stuff out of a given book. Example is the DMG where you can buy the magic items and opt out of the classes given there. I don't encourage the blackguard so it works out well.

Ultimately it comes down to play style too. Since our group is all online dndbeyond is a really helpful tool. I spend a lot of time making characters and having the DM subscription makes that work with unlimited characters. All that makes it worth the DM fee and I like having the books available anywhere when I have that burning question about a spell mechanic that occurs to me while I'm at work.

You could maybe ask players to fork over a couple of $$$ to help defray costs but that's up to you.

I wish they would move to a subscription based model for content where I could pay one price a month and have access to everything as it comes out but that's probably a pipedream at this point.

[Ganymede]

There is a workaround, but it is tedious. You can use the site's homebrew tool to create private homebrew that essentially duplicates published material.

[Lunali]

Another workaround is befriending someone who has a lot of books on there and adding one of their characters to your campaign as a ghost character.

[DrowPiratRobrts]

There is a workaround, but it is tedious. You can use the site's homebrew tool to create private homebrew that essentially duplicates published material.

I realized this was my only option if I wanted to use D&D beyond without buying books twice...as much as it seems like a great product that just drove me away. I now use other character/world builders that arguably work just as well if not better. It would be great to have everything in one place though.

I wish they had a code or something inside the books you could type in to unlock the material for your account. As someone else said though, these sorts of things are probably just pipe dreams.

[SirGraystone]

I realized this was my only option if I wanted to use D&D beyond without buying books twice...as much as it seems like a great product that just drove me away. I now use other character/world builders that arguably work just as well if not better. It would be great to have everything in one place though.

It's the same reason I stay away from D&D Beyond, I bought all the book for use in Fantasy Grounds, I'm not buying them again no matter how good Beyond is. :smallsigh:

[MephitBlue]

I realized this was my only option if I wanted to use D&D beyond without buying books twice...as much as it seems like a great product that just drove me away. I now use other character/world builders that arguably work just as well if not better. It would be great to have everything in one place though.

I wish they had a code or something inside the books you could type in to unlock the material for your account. As someone else said though, these sorts of things are probably just pipe dreams.

Unfortunately this is unlikely the happen since Wizards of the Coast does not own D&D Beyond. It is owned by Curse, a separate company. Giving a code away for the content would likely break licensing agreements Wizards of the Coast has with Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds.

As a player, you can cherry pick what you buy from a book. Want to play a certain class and character that aren't free, just pay for those classes. You can also just pay for the spells that you want to use with your characters. If you do decide to buy the whole book later on, the amount you have spent on content from the book is deducted from the cost. I started buying piecemeal from D&D Beyond at first, and then moved to buying whole manuals for convenience.

[Particle_Man]

That's kind of the point. 5e isn't necessarily a free resource, you're supposed to be buying the books in order to play the game. If you want to play for free, they released a few of the classes for everyone:
Champion Fighter
Thief Rogue
Life Cleric

The most fun of those probably being the Life Cleric. Thief is pretty niche and Champion just doesn't have that "powerhouse" kinda feel you want in melee combat.

I am surprised they didn't release Evoker wizard too. That one is in the 5e SRD for crying out loud!

[DrowPiratRobrts]

It's the same reason I stay away from D&D Beyond, I bought all the book for use in Fantasy Grounds, I'm not buying them again no matter how good Beyond is. :smallsigh:

Sho nuff


Unfortunately this is unlikely the happen since Wizards of the Coast does not own D&D Beyond. It is owned by Curse, a separate company. Giving a code away for the content would likely break licensing agreements Wizards of the Coast has with Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds.



I didn't realize that, but it makes sense. Either way, I'm not going to hold my gooses before they hatch if you know what I mean. I have zero faith in anything awesome coming from WotC as far as the business side of things goes. I was absolutely flabbergasted at the recent sale of all the books on Amazon, but I'd venture to guess that was more of Amazon's doing than WotC anyway.

[MilkmanDanimal]

As someone who has bought the same album in LP, cassette, CD, and digital format, who also regularly re-buys favorite books on Kindle because I like the convenience factor of it, I've got no issue with buying books through the D&D Beyond marketplace. I'm absolutely paying extra for the convenience of having the books and content with me wherever I go, plus the availability in the online character creator. I used to have lots of movies and TV shows on physical media, and I could still do that. I'd rather have the convenience of paying for a monthly subscription to Netflix/Hulu and such.

I can still make characters the way I did back in AD&D, with books, pencil, and paper. Paying for the digital content of the 5e books isn't really any different to what I've done with music, books, or video games over the years, so, for me, it's worth it.

[DrowPiratRobrts]

As someone who has bought the same album in LP, cassette, CD, and digital format, who also regularly re-buys favorite books on Kindle because I like the convenience factor of it, I've got no issue with buying books through the D&D Beyond marketplace. I'm absolutely paying extra for the convenience of having the books and content with me wherever I go, plus the availability in the online character creator. I used to have lots of movies and TV shows on physical media, and I could still do that. I'd rather have the convenience of paying for a monthly subscription to Netflix/Hulu and such.

I can still make characters the way I did back in AD&D, with books, pencil, and paper. Paying for the digital content of the 5e books isn't really any different to what I've done with music, books, or video games over the years, so, for me, it's worth it.

And there are certainly people who agree with you. What's more there's nothing really wrong with that if it's how people want to spend their money. But a lot of people don't do this for music, movies, or D&D books, either because of the cost, the principle, or possibly both. I think the issue for a lot of us is that there is no subscription service for D&D Beyond and paying full price again is not worth the convenience of digital copies.

[LtPowers]

Keep in mind there is pretty much always one or more 25%-off codes available. And around Thanksgiving they had a 33%-off sale on the books, which stacked with the 25%. So I got the PHB, Xanathar's, and SCAG for just $45 total. Well worth it to have it available on my tablet; it meant I didn't need to lug my books to PAX Unplugged.


Powers &8^]

[Anonymouswizard]

As someone who has bought the same album in LP, cassette, CD, and digital format, who also regularly re-buys favorite books on Kindle because I like the convenience factor of it, I've got no issue with buying books through the D&D Beyond marketplace. I'm absolutely paying extra for the convenience of having the books and content with me wherever I go, plus the availability in the online character creator. I used to have lots of movies and TV shows on physical media, and I could still do that. I'd rather have the convenience of paying for a monthly subscription to Netflix/Hulu and such.

I can still make characters the way I did back in AD&D, with books, pencil, and paper. Paying for the digital content of the 5e books isn't really any different to what I've done with music, books, or video games over the years, so, for me, it's worth it.

You see, I refuse to due to the fact that they haven't put up a nice, searchable pdf on DriveThruRPG, despite doing it for every other edition. They can have my money when they allow me to own it in a format that I can carry on a USB stick alongside my collection of other pdfs.

[Sigreid]

As someone who has bought the same album in LP, cassette, CD, and digital format, who also regularly re-buys favorite books on Kindle because I like the convenience factor of it, I've got no issue with buying books through the D&D Beyond marketplace. I'm absolutely paying extra for the convenience of having the books and content with me wherever I go, plus the availability in the online character creator. I used to have lots of movies and TV shows on physical media, and I could still do that. I'd rather have the convenience of paying for a monthly subscription to Netflix/Hulu and such.

I can still make characters the way I did back in AD&D, with books, pencil, and paper. Paying for the digital content of the 5e books isn't really any different to what I've done with music, books, or video games over the years, so, for me, it's worth it.

I tend to buy the hard covers and the FG code. I do remember when I couldn't just shrug off a 30 to 50 dollar purchase though.

[Mordaedil]

It does kind of help that there aren't 100 books for $30 a piece like it was for third edition.