D&D Beyond - Beyond Dreadful & Dishonest

Anyone who knows me knows that out of every game I've played, my favourite is unsurprisingly Dungeons and Dragons. I've played it for many years and DM'd for almost as long. During COVID, a lot of my friends and myself migrated to digital platforms such as Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, D&D Beyond and more!

Personally, I've used D&D Beyond and Roll20, making large use of the Beyond20 Extension to parse dice rolls from D&D Beyond to Roll20. I've played around with alternatives but being blunt, it's the combination that feels like the best in my personal opinion! Roll20's Pro subscription honestly feels like a no-brainer; it provides access to dynamic lighting which lets me utilise the environment more as well as the increased cloud storage for maps which helps because some are BIG!

I use Plus Tiering since a lot of the maps I use can be pretty big, having no loadscreen ads and having an extra layer is REALLY cool! While I don't have any content on Roll20, the option to share it is at least nice on the free tier. I primarily only use Roll20 as a VTT (Virtual Tabletop) with all of my content either coming from D&D Beyond or maps amazing people like Czepeku with some PHENOMENAL maps that combined with dynamic lighting make for amazing reveals!

On the flipside of that though, is D&D Beyond's Paid Tiers which being blunt, I've always been indifferent on. D&D Beyond's pricing is strange. On the brightside, digital books are cheaper than physical books like you'd expect and the way they're easily integrated into a lot of things (especially for players) is fantastic! However, the downsides quickly stack up.

As much as I'd love to poke fun at their second or third attempt at making a Virtual Table Top so they stop losing money to Roll20, D&D Beyond have started to move towards a "weekly and monthly drops" like system. This would be fine if it was encompassing new content and books but from the sounds of it based on pricing and information displayed, it seems to be it's own entity. Credit to the Staff, they seemed to see the clear dismay caused and released a blogpost! However, it mainly confirmed suspicions.

I vehemently disagree with lack of availability for non-subscribers. As much as they can say that they will commit to releasing at least yearly D&D Beyond Drops, as someone who is shilling out £50~ a year for this service, this isn't something im interested in at all. The only reason I even pay it is so my players can use the material I've bought for campaigns.

Not only is this probably going to be half-checked but it also means that people are paying to beta test. This is embarassing. Not to mention running the risk of having Homebrew content available on D&D Beyond potentially get delisted because "they can't copy D&D Drops even though it was here before". Ludicruous would be an understatement, it's daylight robbery to shake extra money from you. Not only do I not own the content that I'm subscribing for, I could end up losing access to the drops just due to not having an active subscription.

Moving onto worse things, the fact that I as a DM who buys all the books, have to ALSO subscribe to a £50~ a year subscription just to be able to share my books that I've paid for with my players? To boot, I have to pay the most expensive tier? I understand why there is so limited character slots for free, I honestly agree on that. However it seems strange to have a subscription for early access to the material I bought? I understand pre-ordering something to get it early, fine. Having early-access for books locked behind TIERS, not one but TWO tiers, even though I've pre-ordered is nothing short of INSANE!

All in all, it's what can only be described as a shame. I've been using D&D Beyond for around 6 years or so, I definitely think the UI is streamlined and the player experience is pretty good: creating a character is seamless and snappy, adding items is pretty simple and managing core characteristics is pretty simple! The DM experience is positively dreadful experience akin to being shuckdown: being promised a VTT years ago only to be let down, not adding enough toggles for legacy content since not everyone is running 5.5E, showing all monsters in the beastiary including for books I don't have which feels like a slap in the face, I honestly could just keep going.