Public Development API
Planned
As a developer it would be great to have the possibility of linking to the D&D Beyond content using an API.
Personally I think the most useful would be to have an API to get a listing of monsters, items, spells, etc. and with the name and URL.
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I think that an API would be a powerful tool to increase usage for Beyond. I am very interested in building tools using content purchased in Beyond, and OGL licensed content. If my tool's users could authenticate with their Beyond account and include their OGL, purchased, and homebrew content, I think that we both could benefit.
I know you have higher priorities, but I appreciate you listening to your community, and hope that an API is prioritized at some point in the future.
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@Simon and @Matt
Although I wouldn't count this as an API, you can get the JSON output of your characters by going to the character view page and adding "/json" to the end of the URL.
Example: https://www.dndbeyond.com/profile/YourName/characters/#######/json
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@Zaphodgame
I am fully aware of that having worked on D&D Beyond Importers for various virtual table tops including Roll20 and a new one currently in alpha. However, there are various reasons for using API keys for data authorization.
The biggest reason is that an API key is a way of ensuring someone has authorization to fetch the data. For example, allowing other types of API requests for purchased content, which D&D Beyond could restrict to a certain number of requests in a period of time to ensure it's not being granted access to publicly. And then if a person was doing so, they could trace the requests to an account that is abusing the API and either ban the account or remove its API privileges.
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Another vote for an API.
With a community API, DDB can concentrate on what they do best, provide a great tool, at an affordable price for D&D books and player characters. Add in some campaign features for the DM and perfect all that. As they say, do one thing, and do it well.Anything past that, let the community build it. If there is an API, Roll 20 and Fantasy Grounds can just pull from DDB. If they choose not too, an new up and coming vtt will. But DDB is not a VTT company, sure they could be, but why? Let someone else do that work and DDB still gets the book sales, along with sharing subs.
All these sites that keep getting shutdown because of copyright, along with others such as Kobold Fight Club, and DonJon can all do what they do, provide better services, and send their users to DDB to buy content. It's a win for all involved.
So in my personal opinion, this should be the # 1 priority. It opens up the most potential for the community, third party sites, and DDB's bottom line.
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Honestly, it wouldn't be hard to set API access similar to how they handle content sharing for premium, etc.
Basically just set up a sort of "premium check" at the API handshake, that confirms the DM is on a premium account.
That is to say that if a DM has a premium (or whatever potential thing they might want to call it instead), then their campaigns, etc could be accessed via the API.
Conversely, if they are NOT a premium account, the server just refuses to supply additional data via the API.Really, you'd only need to have the API connection occurring through one client -ultimately it makes the most sense for a sole client device to connect via API, and if individual players want to access that custom app experience (whatever app that might be), the DAM/master device can handle hosting duties for the rest of the group from there. This mitigates pretty much any concern over excessive bandwidth usage for DNDBeyond/Curse. Shoot, this method would actually utilize far less of their bandwidth than having a bunch of individual players refreshing pages and making changes to their characters all at once while playing -all of the write commands would be coming from one single device, and player data could be grabbed all at once but the host device at the beginning of the session.
Hopefully they'll do something like this soon, because honestly, I'd be happy to write the API interface myself. Being able to customize my own app layout in a way that makes more sense for me as a DM would be worth all the trouble.
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if you know json, you may want to look at this till an api comes available.
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Would absolutely, 100% use this. It would increase the value of the product to developers and the eagerness with which it would be likely to be consumed, would propagate a vast community-supported expansion of the dndbeyond ecosystem, that would fundamentally rely on a Wizards sanctioned product that is not free, so everyone (that doesn't just want valuable things for free) would win in this situation.
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As a developer working on the D&D online tools as well I would love to see possibility for my users to connect their D&D Beyond accounts via OAuth2 and pull the content they already own to their benefit. Otherwise they have to copy-paste stuff which I think can be annoying for them on both sides: D&D Beyond and my app.
We totally need it!
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The lack of an API after all this time is depressing. There are so many solo developers and content creators that would love to be able to develop toolkits and systems that leverage the content that DND beyond has. I mean I'm trying to develop AI based systems for DND and have been waiting for an API for as long as beyond has existed. The wasted effort is insane. Instead of building your own toolkits the team at beyond should have first focused on providing a robust and supported API so that the community could have done the groundwork for them. The community would have exploded in size. But instead they use what little resources they seem to have to drip feed us features we might not even want.
Instead of letting us use the content we are subscribed to in our own custom systems. -
As a bit of an update for people, as of last year, I know from a reliable source that the lack of API (as well as third party content) is actually a matter of legality and licensing with WOTC. DNDBeyond do want to release one, but they need to go through all the legal hoops to "expose" all of WOTCs IP.
Hopefully they can get all the permissions, as you can see from the character jsons that there is data available to pull already for things like the twitch extension.
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