Limit Character Building Options to Specific Content
I play as a Sorcerer in a campaign where only the PHB and SCAG are allowed to be used for character development (no Xanathar's, Volo's, etc).
Every time I level up I have to filter out all my other content so that I can pick the spells available in that campaign. As you can imagine, it's a bit of a pain.
Fortunately, I have saved a bookmark of the filter I use for this. However, that filter isn't in my character spells management section and so it makes selecting kinda difficult.
Would be nice if I could restrict which content is available to each character based on source. Kinda like how homebrew, Critical Role, and Eberron content is toggle-able, although applied to book sources like Xanathar's, Volo's, etc.
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I go back and forth on if full on source filtering is necessary, but sources need to be made far more clear when looking at content.
The Feats section does it well, by listing Source immediately beneath each Feat name. If this pattern were adopted everywhere within the character builder as well, full on source toggles/filters might be unnecessary (though still welcome).
I'd love to see both. My DM allows all sources, but requires individual approval for things chosen from certain of them.
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To piggy back off of this request, you should be able to set a filter on sources on a Campaign level, and it shouldn't only be based on official sources, but also on specific homebrew content.
For instance, let's say I'm running a campaign with some homebrewed sub-races, sub-classes, and magic items. I should be able to put those into a "bucket" that is part of the filter on the campaign. This also includes the ability to filter out content from sources that wouldn't be applicable to the campaign.
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Related:
https://dndbeyond.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360034541813-Character-Creation-More-switches
Here's what I've come up with for how this could work:
I think that in general, there needs to be a way for the DM to add character creation restrictions - allowing certain options while disallowing others. Then maybe characters would be prevented from choosing them in the character builder when making a new character in that campaign, or a warning/error message could be displayed below a character that violates those restrictions. That would also cover things like "AL character validation" that's on the short-term roadmap - https://ddb.ac/feature-roadmap - in addition to your idea of allowing certain homebrew but disallowing others.
Though making a clean interface to manage all the options might be tricky, in terms of avoiding clutter. Perhaps there could be an interface for managing restrictions that only actually lists the restricted/disallowed options (unlike the compendium content sharing management options, which currently show every single book with a slider to enable or disable sharing), though the interface for choosing specific content to restrict would allow any official option or any homebrew option that the group has access to to be chosen as disallowed. And similarly, the interface could allow the DM to broadly "ban" all content from a specific book, or all homebrew, or all Eberron/Crit Role/Ravnica content, etc. (This could also account for things like encumbrance rules, requiring a certain ability score generation method, etc.)
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Definitely this! I feel like the fact that this is two years later means that it must either be more complicated than it seems (as they've already got the eberron, critical role, UA etc toggles...) or it's very low priority.
I can't imagine they'd actually release a VTT without doing this first... right?
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https://trello.com/b/vIKxuEs8/dd-beyond-feature-roadmap It seems they feel the logbook is more important than this feature. I'm not sure how they get that. I mean there is already a good AL logbook site out there. This isn't something that is making D&D Beyond difficult to use.
Not being able to limit the books IS making D&D Beyond very difficult to use, however.
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The suffocation rules in 5e are extremely generous, but don't hold your breath.
I was beyond excited when the Content Management Update was released back in August of 2019. I thought it would finally be possible to limit players from seeing purchased content you were sharing that you didn't want to allow. The following was such a MASSIVE oversight:
"However, elements from the source are still currently available in the character builder, character sheet, and encounter builder. Restricting access in those tools will be coming in a future iteration."
I kept clinging to the hope offered in the second sentence from the above quote... then watched in despair as phase two of their content management plans kept dropping in priority on their roadmap. It seemed to always be next.
Now, it doesn't even appear. Their plans to incorporate AL validation is gone, too. At this point, I'm resigned to the fact that it may never happen. Or at least, not any time soon (and by "soon," I literally mean years).
I own every product they sell (including the pre-order of Candlekeep Mysteries):
And switched from the monthly Master Tier subscription to the annual plan in April of 2018.
It truly saddens me that I am almost certainly going to be canceling my subscription before it renews in a few months simply because that is the only way I can truly limit what appears as options for my players in the character builder. So disappointing.
I still love D&D Beyond as a tool, and will continue to support it by purchasing new sourcebooks and adventures they publish, but the only reason I subscribed to the Master Tier in the first place was to be able to share my purchased content -- it really is depressing that I'll be unsubscribing for the very same reason. -
I don't understand what makes this a difficult enough request to be ignored for three years.
Make a campaign-level Character Creation Preferences and Content rule set that overrides other preferences once a character is added to that campaign. Any character that's added to a campaign that has features that don't jive with the preferences/content shared show an error message of: "Some major features belonging to this character (listed below) do not adhere to this campaign's Character Creation Preferences. Do you wish to proceed?" Select a yes or no option and if it's yes, remove/default those features and have the player/DM redo them.
If it's done this way, the shared content screens won't need to be changed. Those would be for handbook or adventure based removal of content. Those functionalities would just need to extend to these rule sets.
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