Only share part of my purchased content
Planned
Hi,
I have the legendary bundle. As a DM, I want to share the player features of this with my players - players handbook, parts of Volo and Xanathar, parts of the DMG - but I definitely don't want to share the adventures or the monsters.
At the moment the sharing seems to be all or nothing.
Ideally the optims for what I share would be similar to the options for purchasing content - whole publications, sections and specific items - that way I could decide (say) I want to allow Tabaxi characters but not Kenku, or I could make details of a magic item available once they have worked them out.
Please can you add partial sharing.
Thanks,
Ian
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Official comment
Content management development is in progress as of early 2019 - keep an eye on updates!
Comment actions -
Thanks for the update, Badeye! Key to this request is "partial sharing," which I am sure you know, but I wanted to emphasize.
Also, sharing should be per campaign, in case that's not yet on your list. In one campaign, I might want to share, or rather, allow, certain classes, certain races, force certain options (coin encumbrance ftw!), etc.
Which brings up another request, for which I'll make an actual post, but I'd like to let DDB accounts in to a campaign *before* they have a character sheet. Right now, people have to make a stupid "empty" character to then join the campaign. If we're limiting what they can see/share, they can't make a proper character until they have joined the campaign and are under it's sharing restrictions.
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Glad you're starting on this!
All I request from the first release is that the granularity of control for me as a DM starts on the level of 'Purchase Options in the D&D Beyond store'.
Like, if I can buy the Wand of Entanglement from the Yawning Portal separately, I should be able to configure it's visibility separately, even if I own the Yawning Portal as a full package.
I'm imagining a gloriously long page of 'hide/show' lists and checkboxes, and I'm salivating at the prospect already.
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Something that I found it which is important is that not only what books but chapters in the books need to be turned on and off due to the fact that there are some chapters in an adventure book that are good for the players to read while none of the other parts of the adventure book should be read by the players.
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I couldn't agree more, Dmwagner71. It's baffling to me why this hasn't been done yet, because I can't think of a single DM who wants their players reading THE ACTUAL ADVENTURE. I can turn available resources on and off in Fantasy Grounds for goodness' sake - why can't I do that here?
D&D Beyond is very useful for making sure my players are creating their characters correctly and it makes things easier when I'm running the game, but the lack of filtering means that I can't share ANYTHING with them because I don't want them to read Dragon Heist. So, in essence, the sharing feature is totally useless to me. In fact, one member of my group bought a subscription but is purposely NOT buying any adventure content on the site due to this very reason.This is the sole issue keeping me from buying a subscription because, like a fool, I bought Dragon Heist before I figured out it I can't keep it from being shared along with all of the other books. I'll bet I'm not alone by a long shot.
Please do your best to fix this asap. This is "early 2019". It's time.Thank you.
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tl;dr: There's lots of unknowns we as clients have here. This more than likely isn't an easy fix. No amount of us complaining is going to make this happen faster.
I really wanted to not respond to this, but well, here I am. Apologies in advance to anyone already understands what I'm talking about here.
I too want this feature and have been eagerly waiting for it, however, I understand how this kind of stuff works. We don't know some key information to guess how long this will take. For starters, we don't know the size of the team working on this. Maybe it's one person, maybe it's 10, we have no idea. That plays a pretty big part into how soon things can be done.
Next, we have no idea what kind of technical debt this feature needs to overcome. For those not familiar, technical debt is basically the added complexity of choices you made in the past when developing a system that make it more difficult to make changes in the future. There could be enormous amounts of technical debt because of choices they made all the way back at the start of ddb which they simply have to work around, patch, hack, etc. There is always technical debt. Wish (https://www.dndbeyond.com/spells/wish) isn't something we have in real life so we don't know what our decisions today will mean for tomorrow's feature request. There's also the speed factor for doing something like this. How many times do you think there's a call to check for permission to use something on the site? I'd wager it's a lot. Hopefully they've implemented it in such a way where this is quick and only happens a few times. Or maybe it simply caches things for use later. I have no idea, and neither do any of us, unless you work for Curse.
Moving on, do any of us know what this will look like? Is it a button, is it a list, is it something else? How does that work on tablets, on desktops/laptops, on phones? How much space do we need? Is it properly accessible for people with disabilities? All of those (and more) ideas need to go into a proper User Experience (UX) and design. This is the sort of stuff that Adam is talking about when he says we have mock-ups. That all needs to be figured out before anything we as clients can see can be done.
Lastly, there is the priority of things. Sure, it's scheduled and being worked on. So are a number of other things. Does this take higher priority over something like the Artificer, mega menus, stuff from the acquisition, something WotC is pushing for, or a host of other things? I don't know. I'm not the PM, and that sort of information isn't going to be shared with the larger public.
To summarize, please be patient. The team is working on stuff as quickly (and correctly) as they can. Software and website development takes time and there's nothing worse than getting it wrong and having to do it multiple times. We'll get the feature eventually.
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@Dmwagner71, also fair. I wasn't part of the DDB community back in 2017, so I can't comment on what was said a year and a half ago. I also watch each week, and I'm very happy with what Adam has shared and in general, the teams willingness to be open about the process and roadmap. Sure, I wish they'd change some things up and move priorities as well, but generally I'm happy with the progress being made.
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@Dmwagner71
It's always frustrating when "your #1 thing" doesn't get prioritized over something that is not your most important thing.
The truth of the matter is, if we did not scramble to get the artificer playtest content integrated as quickly as we could, we would have far more complaints, unrest, and general dissatisfaction than the few complaints about lowering the prioritization with content management that we see here in this thread (and a few other places). We operate to serve the community first, and we always aim to do our best at that by doing what we see as the best for the most fans. We're not always going to do that perfectly, but I would make the call to prioritize the artificer over content management again if I had to make a similar decision tomorrow.
This is not to mention a variety of other factors that go on behind the scenes that I won't talk much about in a dev update (because most folks would fall asleep with it), such as the fact that during our work on content management, we realized that we need a better authentication/entitlements architecture to ensure that not only content management, but also the encounter builder (which is priority #1 for us, as well as voters here), would work optimally. So, the team is working on laying that groundwork in order to deliver content management.
In that sense, content management is still a focus, but some prerequisites to make it happen are the currently-more-narrow focus. This is the way agile development works, and we see the benefits of it in both the immediate day-to-day and over time.
You are correct that expressing your feelings of disappointment is not unfair, and we value all the feedback we receive. In this instance, the feedback is not going to change too much, but I do appreciate you sharing it. Thanks!
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@Badeye
I'm sure you know this, but as your company makes future choices on directions to go keep in mind that us DM's (i.e. those who would value something like this) are vastly outnumbered by players, a lot of the time 6 to 1. But even though we're outnumbered, we move groups of people onto the services that fit our roles best. I have personally brought in around 10-12 players onto your service, and will keep them here as long as it suits my needs.
I know that you're working on this specific task and it helps to have a progress update, but in general you shouldn't be afraid to prioritize tasks with lower "popularity" if it has high relevance for DMs, even if it's just occasionally. What I'm trying to say is that I hope your prioritization method accounts for the fact that keeping DMs happy will keep players coming in.
Cheers,
Colin -
@Colin Mccurdy
You start by saying "I'm sure you know this," and confirming your suspicion is the most efficient way for me to reply to your message. We have in-depth knowledge of the DM/Player breakdown and specific strategies employed for each kind of customer. Our focus is fans and we spend a great deal of time understanding them. Again, not saying we know everything, but I can assure you prioritization takes all those things into consideration.
@Dmwagner71
No worries - you were nowhere near petulance. Thanks!
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I don't know if this belongs in its own thread or not; however, similar to this feature, the idea of players being able to share their D&DB Digital content with the rest of the campaign. Reason for this: I am in a campaign where the DM is new to D&DB; however, I have the entire legendary bundle and a subscription where we could all join the same campaign. I am not the DM, but currently, unless I've missed something, the only content shared is that which belongs to the DM of the campaign as created on D&DB. As a player in said campaign, I'd like to share my legendary bundle content with the rest of the players AND the DM as well. I'm sorry if this is in the wrong area or if I missed a similar thread somewhere else.
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While we're on the topic: I'm looking through the FAQ and not seeing an answer. Is it possible to change one of the people registered as a player into the DM of an already existing Campaign? Or do we need to have him create a new version (copy) of the campaign in order for him to be the DM, me to be the player, and me to share my content with the campaign?
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From reading these posts it is obvious that this can be a complex topic as many people want different options on sharing. However I would be very happy with a simple first step. I see that the content is already separated into 2 groups. If I could have a checkbox for each campaign that could hide or show the Adventure content I would be very happy. I want to share my Sourcebooks with the players but I don't want them to see the module we are playing. I don't feel I am getting the most out of my subscription and content purchases. And I don't want to invite more people to DNDB simply because I don't want to share with the way things work now.
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Please know how much I want this feature. It's basically the one thing that puts me on the fence WRT subscribing.
I heavily home brew, and this includes turning off some races/classes/feats as they don't fit the setting. So many times someone misses the overall campaign write up section about a particular race/class not being standard or even existing, and then we have to have an awkward conversation about it. I'd rather just be able to turn something off if it's been replaced by something we homebrewed for the campaign.
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Have a missed an update 6 months later?
also about Adams mention of the artificer UA content, quick search of the votes have it no where on the board unless my search for artificer on this was poor. Did we assume it was the highest priority based on something else or was it easier to implement compared to other requests?
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It's as I've feared. Only blocking specific books and not giving the ability to block parts of books so that if there are new spells, races, or classes in a book that should be allowed for characters--there is no way to give access to them.
I really don't consider this feature "live" until it is more robust. What we have now is a sledge hammer when what we need is a scalpel.
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Hello @Will Grams - I sympathize with you about the sledge hammer versus scalpel, but sometimes a sledge hammer is the right tool for the job. :)
The primary feedback and use case we have seen requested involved preventing players from reading ahead in adventures. This initial pass helps prevent that, so we went with the sledge hammer first.
We see that some players want finer control, and we'll add that as soon as we're able to do so.
Thanks!
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@BadEye Thanks for your input! I am excited that this is finally here as it is currently with plans for future refinement. I apologize for any unkindness that came from my posts as it was a knee-jerk reaction which I am not fond of, but we're all guilty of it at times I guess.
It was good seeing you at GenCon this year even though we didn't get a chance to talk (you seemed busy with the Beadle and Grimms guys). Maybe at another convention.
Again, based on what you've said, this is definitely a good start and I look forward to more!
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