- Hello everyone, I'm Adam Bradford,
head ArchMage of D&D Beyond
and we are here for another
exciting edition of
Development Update Community Q&A Session.
I've been gone for a little while,
I'm so happy to be back.
Alright so today's lineup:
Latest updates, I've got a
special treat for everyone.
A little teaser for the encounter tracker,
we'll talk about what's upcoming,
we have the AMA section
and we're also going to do
some POP Talk! today.
So if you have a POP Talk!
Topic, that is where
you come up with anything,
this could be anything
that you want this to be,
and I will do my best to talk to,
to talk about it for 3-5 minutes,
and I will even do my
best to tie it back into
role playing and Dungeons
& Dragons the best that I
absolutely can.
Sometimes that's hard
we'll see what I can do.
So if you have any topic
that you would like for me
to wax poetical for about 3-5 minutes then
paste that into the chat with the pop
at the beginning of that
just like you see on the screen here.
So let it say pop in front of it and then
Lauren Urban, our community manager,
is going to collect those for me
and I will run through those when
we get to the AMA section.
If you have questions
going to do my best today
to get through those.
I never do but I'm gonna do my best.
So ask those prefaced with
the word question and those
will get collected
magically in our little,
I don't even know what it is,
our magical combine and
then it's gonna spit
those out when the question time comes.
So let's jump in here.
Latest Updates:
We did just complete a convention,
one of the best of the year PAX Unplugged,
I love PAX Unplugged because
I'm not trying to say
anything negative about the
video gaming communities
out there, but I sure do love
a PAX where it's not about
the video games.
I love a PAX that is about table top games
and table top games only so
this is the third year they've
had the convention and I
definitely think that this is
turning into one of the best.
And so, uh, yeah PAX is you
know unplugged is a really
great time.
Philly is a great city.
I appreciate everyone
that stopped to say hello,
uh, I appreciate uh, you
know, there's nothing quite
like being yelled at across
a busy street you know,
Bad-eye Adam, and just having to wave
because there's no way I
can possibly talk to you.
But I do appreciate everyone saying hello,
and it was great to see fans, it always is
great to see other role players out there.
We really have, we're
living in great times
for role playing.
And so, lots and lots of fun to engage
with other players out there,
and see what's going on in your games,
and to talk about what we're
up to here at D&D Beyond.
So, we're working on the
player focused mobile app,
I think we're going to have
some things to show you,
for too much longer on that one for sure.
Encounter tracking as I told you,
we are going to tease a
little bit of this today,
and then digital dice rolling.
This is certainly work in progress,
and it is coming on strong,
and I can't wait for people
to be able to start using that.
There's just something,
again, I love physical dice,
I'm trying to find some right now,
and I was just going to
roll one impulsively.
But, I love physical dice, but
there's something about these
digital dice, that come
across as very satisfying.
So definitely looking forward to folks
being able to get their hands on that.
So let's look in, let's
go ahead and look into
the encounter builder teaser
now, so we got a video
where, and this is really just because
I had trouble getting
it on my machine today.
So it was better that
we just capture a video.
So we're going to play
through the videon now,
and see how this goes.
Alright.
So hopefully you're seeing this,
you can look at your encounter itself.
You can obviously look at the creatures
that are going to be in your
encounter, just like always.
And then you can run the encounter.
And as this is happening, see that
the sidebar changes a bit.
You're able to add in
your player characters
from a campaign.
So then you've got all of
those player characters ready.
Collecting initiative scores.
And then you can automatically
roll the monster initiative
whatever once you start combat.
Everything orders itself appropriately.
You can apply damage and healing as needed
to any other creatures that
are involved in the combat
at that point in time.
You're able to, yeah,
so I think we're gonna,
you know, start over here.
You will be able to
track status conditions
at any point in time, as
you're running the encounter.
Another thing that will not
be in the very first version
of this as it comes out,
but something we will
be working towards is the
ability for, you know,
once we have the player
characters added in here,
like the screen you're seeing now.
I'm not sure how the delays working here,
so hopefully it's lining up decently.
But you will have a button
as a dungeon master,
that will say essentially
roll for initiative.
And dungeon master will
be able to hit that button
and then anyone using
D&D Beyond at the table
will be prompted on their character sheet
to then either digitally
roll for your initiative,
and then that would automatically come in,
or you can physically
roll and input the number,
and then that number will
automatically come in
and everything will sort
itself auto-magically.
And that's really, really important
because as many years as I've played,
it always is something that
just grinds the table to a halt.
When we say "Roll for initiative."
And then all of a sudden, that,
always that very eager person
that you know obviously rolled
really well, you know
it's whoever has advantage
on initiative and they
want to impress everybody,
they're like, "I got a 23, I got a 23."
You know if people start
yelling things that you as a DM,
and you're like, "Hold
on, hold your horses."
You know, I need to
record this in some way
or I've started getting someone
else to record it for me.
And then you go around
with the question of,
"Anybody over 20, anybody
over 15, anybody over 10."
You know, all those questions.
It always bogs down combat.
What's going to be great
about this as we get this out
and going, is we're
going to be able to say,
"Prompt, roll for initiative."
propmts everybody, notifies
them on the screen,
lets them roll it right there.
Everything comes in, you
should be ready to play
the first turn within,
you know, 20 seconds.
And it really is going
to be a magical thing
and then being able to
see important information
about your player
characters and the creatures
they are encountering at a
glance is going to be important.
Obviously you can dig
down, into any of these
and see full statistics as needed.
You know you're able to to
move them around as needed.
This is also the starting point, again,
this will not be there from the beginning.
But now that we are going
to start tracking time
and durations, this is
where we're going to be able
to start layering in temporary
effects, such as rage,
and so on, so it will
track how long you have,
you know, been enraged
and, and all of that.
So, very excited.
This is starting to, you know,
materialize into a real concept
and really something
that we're working on.
All right, we can go
ahead and pull that away.
Digital dice rolling, I think
I've shown you this before,
but, since it's the holidays,
I think I'm going to just
do it again because I can't get enough.
♪ Can't get enough of your dice, baby ♪
All right, here we go.
So we are loading a character,
it is a really really amazing character.
Named Briv Steelmarrow.
So, for Briv here, I guess I could zoom in
a little bit here, it's going to mess with
some of the styling because
it's a little temporary.
But I do love that you
know I'm able to come in
and roll here, seeing a lot of (laughs),
is that looking as choppy?
Should I refresh or
something over here, Will?
Mr. Producer, Will.
Okay, maybe just because
it's being sent, well,
I can tell you that, you know,
on my screen, this is looking wonderful.
But you're going to be
able to roll all these dice
anytime you have damage,
you're going to be able
to do that too.
Oh, it's looking like
we're in some kind of like
weird zone warp zone on the
stream, which is incredible.
So yeah, I don't know
what's happening there.
I'm gonna, is there a way that I can,
I don't know, refresh that?
Or would I have to get all the way out?
Yep.
Okay, all right, well, either way,
I think we've shown this
before, and the connections
been a little bit stronger, but yeah,
very very excited about the dice too,
and I hope that we have something
that we can share on that
before too much longer as well.
All right, let's kill Briv, gone.
Moving forward into upcoming.
So we are still working
on class feature variants
for Unearthed Arcana.
This is a priority for us,
we know that this is something that folks
are asking for out there.
So we are working on it, and
we will provide an update
as soon as we have a clear timetable
for when when that's going to be out.
But we are working hard on it.
Easy button book release,
that is something
that we've talked about before.
As we looked at this, 2019,
one of the reasons that
we haven't been able
to jump into as many new
features as we would like to,
is Wizards of the Coasts keeps
changing a whole lot of stuff
in every book that they release,
which is a great thing for the game,
but it definitely ties up our developers
in a variety of ways, and we
were seeing that, you know,
over half our development hours
were being spent on reacting
to changes for books
from Wizards of the Coast and so,
we are trying to automate
the parts of the process
that we can automate that we maybe
didn't have to automate
before, but we're seeing again
that as we get more and more products,
more and more things coming to DDB,
and as they are making more
and more changes to the rules,
this becomes something
that we don't want to
spend that much time on.
And so we're working kind of
during our December period here
before our holiday break on
trying to make some changes
there to make that better.
And then, the aforementioned
holiday break,
this is the time to
recharge the batteries.
This is one of, if not my
favorite times of the year,
it never fails, if I
try to take a vacation
any other time of the
year, doesn't even matter,
I still get messages
from all over the place,
variety of sources us needing something
or needing you know, having
to have a question answered,
or whatever else.
I do my best to protect that time
when I'm on vacation during the year.
But the best time, best part
about this holiday break
is everybody is off.
And so, I pretty much can just
put my phone in the toilet
if I wanted to, and I am going to get
a solid two or three weeks off there.
And so it is, it's an
incredible time for us
to recharge our batteries
and it is that required
and needful time for our developers
and their friends and family.
And for us to be able
to come back in January
hitting the ground
running and ready to go.
So, that is going to start happening.
So pretty much as of the 20th of December,
you're going to see things start just
winding down to a standstill.
The website won't be updated,
we will certainly be
monitoring and making sure
that as you're playing during the holidays
that everything is working.
So all of that of course
will happen, and if
some kind of catastrophe happens with AWS,
or you know whoever, who
knows what happens out there,
we will be on top of that,
but we just won't be releasing
any new things from you know,
at any point after December the 20th,
all the way until the new year.
So we will have a dev update next week,
so I'll talk about all
the holiday greetings
and everything then, but we're
looking forward to that break
upcoming for sure.
