Limiting Content from Campaign Manager
Dear D&D Beyond Developers,
As a Dungeon Master using your software I have come across the following feature request that could potential aid a lot of fellow DM's run their campaigns in a more effective manner. As you know, D&D has a plethora of options to chose from when making new character sheets. This is based on the content owned by the Dungeon Master and/or the player. But because this is the only limiting factor a DM who owns SCAG for example would open this content to all the players in his shared campaign even though he may not want to. I understand that as a player one has the option to follow the DM's guidelines but not all players are proficient in navigating through all the books and their content. This leads to headaches as DM's will have to filter, explain, deny and delay the character creation process because the player is unaware of the sources he is choosing from. I propose the following:
Purpose:
To let Dungeon Master's control the content available in their campaigns through global restrictions placed on their campaign managers.
How:
My Content < Campaigns < Create a Campaign
Enable a check box enable system of content allowed for that campaign.
My Content < Campaigns < View Campaign < Edit Campaign
Enable a check box enable system of content allowed for that campaign and a warning box to let the DM know their existing characters may have unassigned features due to changing this feature and proceed with caution.
This functionality is best left for Campaign Management only since players may accidentally restrict themselves and blame the software as a result. This feature could be an enhancement for Master Tier subscribers as potential revenue incentive for developing this.
Regards,
Michael Martinez
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You may wish to up-vote this, which has about 40+ votes currently:
And you may be happy to know that this is on the road map, shown on the DDB Trello board. In the last dev update of 2018 they even shown a graphic mock-up of source management.
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OP's talking about the character creator options, not compendium content sharing management options (the latter is what has been implemented already).
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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Excellent response, Vis S. I understand their primary objective was to allow DMs to block their players from reading adventures, but it's more than a little frustrating that they only considered compendium content and not the character builder. Honestly, what's the point of being able to disable a source but still have all the character options from that source available?
When you create a campaign with content management enabled, and disable everything except the Player's Handbook, it's quite frustrating that nothing stops invited players from selecting "Bugbear" as a race (from the disabled Volo's Guide to Monsters) or the Waterdhavian Noble background (from the disabled Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide), for example. Yes, you can filter the source for race, but there's no such control on backgrounds. I had a new player unknowingly select options from FOUR sources when only the PHB should have been allowed.
Some day.
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