(musical sting)
- Hello, everyone, I am Adam,
and thank you for joining
me for another D&D Beyond
Development update and
community Q&A session.
We're gonna jump right in,
where I can leave as much time
for questions as possible.
As always, we're gonna go
through the latest updates,
upcoming work that we are doing
across all the D&D Beyond teams,
and then getting to the
aforementioned questions.
If you have a question, ask that in chat,
prefacing it with the word: question.
I think that makes sense,
so do that in the chat,
and we will be collecting
those and I will get to
as many as I can at the end of the stream.
So the latest updates, complete.
We have released D&D Beyond
entitlements into Avrae.
That means that anything
that you have purchased
and unlocked on D&D Beyond
is now available to use
within our Avrae Discord bot,
and we're gonna look at some of that here
in just a little while; you've
got to link your account
to make it happen, and
then you do some linking
inside of Avrae itself, but
you can pull in your character,
and again, you can look
up things that are non-SRD
at this point in time, so this
was released for everyone.
It was released to subscribers
last time I gave you
the update, but this is a
really, really big step,
and something that we've
been excited to do with Avrae
for some time; it is the world's
most popular Discord bot,
and it really is very powerful.
And so if you're playing
online, remotely right now,
during all of what's
going on in the world,
Avrae is a great tool
for you to check into,
and it would be a great
skill for you to pick up
in the middle of some of
this sheltering in place.
We also released the Unearthed
Arcana play-test content
for the Phantom Rogue, the Genie Warlock,
and the Order of Scribes Wizard this week,
so check those out.
Those are, that's been
a very popular batch
of Unearthed Arcana, so I think that, ah,
we're seeing a lot of characters already
being created with those three subclasses.
So, you check that out as well.
And then I wanted to provide an update,
about some of the Wizards
of the coast content
that is on the site.
So we received some communication
from Wizards this week,
regarding some of the Extra
Life and Adventurer's League
type content that we have on D&D Beyond,
and ultimately, I think the
quickest way to explain this
is that there are products
that are gonna go through
the full-blown, robust design process
that is going to typically
culminate in a hardcover,
and then there are some
products that don't go through
as rigorous of a process as that,
and so on D&D Beyond, we are
going to be differentiating
between those two types of content,
and leaving something,
we have something called
source categories; you might
not always know about this,
because these are the categories
that you check at the very
first screen of character creation,
where we have options like
Critical Role content,
Magic the Gathering content,
Rick and Morty content,
and so on, so with all of those options,
there is a source category
that is called Core D&D
that you never see about, because Core D&D
is always enabled, no
matter what, by default.
And so we've got Core D&D,
and we are going to be
moving those Extra Life products
and then some of the
Adventurer's League content
that we have out there, an
example of this is Rachma,
that was associated with
Morgan King and Sum of Foes.
But those bits of content
are going to be moved
into a category called: Noncore D&D.
I want to emphasize that
for everyone out there,
this content is still
perfectly accessible,
it is still going to be on your accounts
if you've unlocked them,
nothing is going to change
with that, nothing's going
to change with, you know,
your ability to access
them with characters
or anything like that.
This is just a clarifying
step that Wizards of the Coast
has asked us to take to
make sure that new players
are maybe not confused
by any of those options.
So for instance, I believe there's a spell
that is in the Lost
Laboratory of Kwalish called:
Flock of Familiars.
I may be getting the source there wrong,
but Flock of Familiars is
still going to be available
on your account for D&D
Beyond, and everything else,
it's just simply as a new
player is coming into the game,
and creating their character
for the first time,
that Noncore D&D source
category will, by default,
be turned off so those kind of spells
will not appear for the general
new player who is coming in
and just trying to get
started quickly into the game.
But, if you want that
content in your game,
you're perfectly able to do so by toggling
the source category on as
you're creating a character,
and then all of those options
are fully available to you.
So, hopefully that was not too boring,
but I wanted to give a
little bit of a head's up
on that process that's
gonna be happening here,
very, very soon.
We will have some additional messaging
about that when it comes out.
The main thing to emphasize,
there really is very little impact to you
and any characters that
are using this content.
The main thing is you're
gonna have to possibly toggle
that on in order to have
those options available to you
to pick when you're managing
your spells or whatever else.
So that is one update that I
wanted to share with you today,
and then class feature variants,
we are working on this.
The team's been having execution meetings
and talking about a lot of
the minutia that we're gonna
have to get into with this entire system,
but we're really excited to
start coding on this effort,
and we're gonna provide more
updates as soon as we have
a little more clarity on when
this is going to be available
for all of you.
I wanna talk about
Avrae just a little bit.
So we're going to look at Avrae here, too.
We'll go over to Discord here, and so,
I'm on the Development
Discord for Avrae right now,
and I've got a special channel
set up that all of this
is going to be happening
in, but I wanted to show you
a few things with Avrae, so
let's go back to D&D Beyond,
actually, that's where
I really want to be.
So I'm not going to show
you my account right now,
because I can't remember
what's on that screen,
and I don't want my phone
number being revealed,
and then everyone calling
me during the dev update,
but you can go into your account settings
and link your Avrae,
or your Discord account
with your D&D Beyond account,
and once that step is in place,
you can go to your characters,
we will grab Briv Steelmarrow here.
And just so I can show
another bit of this,
I'll go to the shareable link here.
So this is something that
will get you a shareable link,
give you a nice, open graph
image when you post that
on social and everything else,
but then you can go into Avrae,
and I hope that I remember this right,
beyond, and then paste that character URL,
so that's all it takes:
exclamation point, beyond,
paste the character URL.
And Avrae will actually
load that character into,
into this.
So, let's see, yes, I already loaded this.
Oh, we're gonna pause for just a, okay,
we're good now, I guess.
So since I had already
linked Briv in this channel,
it was asking me whether
I wanted to update or not,
and I had to type Yes in there.
But you're going to see
now that Briv Steelmarrow
and all of his magical metal glory
is here in Avrae, you've
got all of, you know,
kind of a stat block
for your character here.
So, really, really handy.
And then from here, you
can do a variety of things.
So I can do exclamation point attack,
and then I know that Briv
has a weapon called Arsenal,
and so if I do that, it's
going to actually roll
an attack roll for me,
and then roll damage
at the same time, and
then it's going to talk
about the weapon that I did that with.
So, really, really handy.
You can do exclamation
point check, and let's see,
Briv is good at athletics.
So that's what we're gonna try here.
So we've got, I've got
an 18 on that, not bad.
About average for Briv, anyway.
And you can also, let's
see, Briv casts some spells,
so we will cast, let's
see, exclamation point,
cast, let me think of one that he actually
has prepared right now.
So, let's say: Guiding Bolt.
So he's going to cast Guiding Bolt.
So you'll see that it rolls the to hit,
it rolls the damage,
it reminds you of the effect of the spell.
It also shows you how many spell slots
you still have left available.
So with that, I actually
had not taken a long rest
from playing last night,
I've used up three of my four
first-level spell slots.
If I wanted to just reset all of that,
I can long-rest; I forget
how, what that command is.
Oh, I think I did it right.
So that's going to reset
all of my spell slots there.
So ultimately, really,
really handy, really easy.
I can also just randomly
look up things that I need to
while I'm in the game, so
exclamation point spell
is going to, if I do, let's do,
I think Branding Smite is a non-SRB spell.
So we can look up Branding
Smite very easily there, too.
So yeah, really fun to be able to find
all of that quickly and easily.
We will say item, alchemy, jug.
I don't know why anybody would
want to use an alchemy jug,
since it produces mayonnaise,
but there is an alchemy jug here.
So again, really handy to
have even if you're not
playing remotely, this is
something that you can have
pulled up on Discord, and
you can look up these things
very quickly and easily.
It puts it out in a
very digestible format.
Let's say monster.
What kind of monster do I want to do here?
We'll go with an oldie but a goodie.
So here is our Beholder.
And as you can see, pulls in the image,
pulls in the, you know,
statistics and all of this.
Now I'm not gonna get into it today,
but you can also run an
initiative order here.
You can track combat, you
can go through a turn order,
and all sorts of things in Avrae.
So hopefully, we can get our moderators
to share some of those links to Avrae.IO.
You can add that to your server,
there are also some quick start,
just jumping right into things,
guides out there that
hopefully we can share in chat.
Yes, very fun stuff
that has come to Avrae,
especially now that your
unlocked D&D Beyond content
is available in our Discord bot.
Check it out.
Also a reminder, the
time is getting shorter
and shorter, we're here
at the 21st of May,
and so we are getting
closer to the June second
digital release of Mythic
Odysseys of Theros,
still the best-named D&D
Fifth Edition supplement
at this point, in my humble opinion.
But if you find a Wizards
Play Network store out there,
one of your local game stores,
there are 3,000-plus of
these in North America.
If my numbers are right
there; I think they are.
And the first 20 people who
pre-order at their local store
are going to receive a code;
the codes have already started
going out, so if you've pre-ordered,
you should hopefully be
getting your codes out there,
but it will get you 50
percent off on the D&D Beyond
version of this book, and
that's the lowest price
that any supplement's
been, except for the other
50 percent off bundling we were able to do
in the essentials kit for
the Player's Handbook.
It's a really, really big deal,
and go take advantage of this
to support your local stores,
and to get a great deal on
the digital version here,
on D&D Beyond.
Upcoming, so we are working towards
our initial public release
of the Player Mobile App.
So to this point, we have
been in alpha testing.
This has been with a set group of people
that are participating
through Test Flight,
and I can't remember
what the Android version
of that is called, but it
has not been officially
in the app stores, but
we are getting very close
to that being the case,
and we are looking forward
to everyone being able to get their hands
on this app that's going to
let you play your characters
on the character sheet in a
native mobile application,
and very importantly, let's you play
those characters offline,
so really exciting.
And it is coming very soon.
And then Digital Dice public
beta is also coming very soon.
So I wanted to give a
little bit of an update.
We have received a ton of
feedback within the alpha,
hundreds of thousands of people
are rolling dice out there,
which is really interesting
to look at all of the data
going on there; I might
do a data update here
in the coming weeks on just, you know
what some of the distribution
of all the rolling has been.
But anyway, we'll see what we can round up
with all of that, but with Digital Dice,
we are going to be focusing
on three really primary
elements here, for the alpha into beta.
So as we're continuing our testing here,
the major elements that
we're gonna be focusing on,
is we have heard the pain
points with the styling
that the dice provide; again,
we wanted to start here
because we wanted you all
to understand where you
needed to click in order to
make dice rolling happen.
And so we're trying to
tweak some of the onboarding
and shepherding there, but ultimately,
we will get a way for you
to disable some of the,
you know, boxes around
the elements and the blue
and that kind of thing, and
make it much more streamlined,
and make it to where
you don't have to scroll
in your skills section,
and make it to where
the look and feel of the
sheet that I know is,
you know, something that
people really, really like
and enjoy out there, where
it is minimally impacted,
in order to let you
continue to roll the dice.
So that's one thing that
we're gonna be doing.
For some reason I am completely
forgetting the second major,
oh, advantage and disadvantage,
that was the second major thing here.
So advantage and
disadvantage are something
that we are actually going
to also be working on adding.
You know, having a toggle
over on the dice icon,
and allowing you to roll that there,
within that interface, but
then we are gonna be trying
to get some of the advantage
and disadvantage icons
that are already on the
character sheet to allow you
to roll by interfacing with
those elements as well.
So advantage and disadvantage,
the starting point
of those things, anyway,
is gonna be coming.
Over time with advantage and disadvantage,
we're going to be trying to
add in more and more logic
to do this as intelligently as we can,
depending on feats you have, you know,
all of those kind of elements,
but we're gonna start
by letting you toggle and
letting you hopefully quickly
grab those and use those from the places
on the character sheet that are already
calling those conditions out.
And then the third thing
is we know that it takes
approximately eight or
nine seconds right now
for a die roll to resolve itself.
And so we are gonna be speeding that up.
So we will get to a point
at some point in the future,
where the animation and
everything else is removed,
and if all you want is number generation,
you'll be able to do that.
But the first step here is to
tighten up some of the timings
and we're exploring a variety of ways
to speed up the dice rolling.
And so those are kind of
the three focus points
that we're working through right now.
In addition to a lot of other things
that have been in progress for some time,
to give you some exciting new options,
when it comes to the kinds of dice
that you're able to use within D&D Beyond.
So we're gonna share more
about that very soon.
Combat Tracker, we are parsing
through feedback there,
determining what is going
to get us into a public beta
release of that, as well,
so we'll keep you posted.
And then I wanted to call
out Roll in the Family:
The Slumbering Forest.
Tonight at, or this afternoon,
depending on where you are
in the world, or I guess it's evening,
or afternoon, or morning, or dusk or dawn,
or midday, or wherever
you are in the world,
at three PM Pacific time today,
we are going to have the finale
of The Slumbering Forest.
We're gonna find out more
about the Dusk Queen.
This has been a blast playing with my son,
Kelly Knox and Bide
Walters and their kids.
It truly has been a
really special experience,
and it is great family entertainment,
and families playing D&D together,
and I love the feedback that
I've been seeing out there.
People are really saying that it channels
The Princess Bride, and that is perfect.
Because that is exactly what our pitch was
when we were going into this,
and so it's been a ton of fun
and the finale is tonight.
If you haven't seen that show,
if you have children who
want to learn to play D&D,
and who want to just kind of get the feel
of what that means and
what that would look like,
this is a great thing
for you to go out there
and find the VOD, catch up,
this is the sixth and final episode,
so it's something that is digestible,
you know, two hour sessions, six times.
It's something that
you can enjoy together.
So definitely check that out.
Really excited about, I'm excited to see
how it's gonna urn out tonight.
I have no idea, and my character Barnaby,
who is a fawn warlock, has,
he's in between patrons right now,
so he's only got like a day or two left
before his magic goes away forever.
So I hope that he's able to find somebody
that will accept him.
