Dungeons & Dragons is a game that is held dear by geeks all over the world. Through it, we’ve explored mystical lands, fought fearsome beasts and, more often than not, failed at charming the local bartender. Rolling your critical fails and successes, keeping a track of the ever-expanding campaign and trying to figure out what accent you’ve adopted can sometimes be hard to keep a track off. Come this Summer, you won’t have to carry around an encyclopaedia worth of notes thanks to a new app in development.
Wizards of the Coast, the publishers behind the famous board game, gave a few details regarding the app, which will be available in beta form this Summer. Called Dungeons & Dragons Beyond, the app will be available on all platforms and will feature a rules compendium, character builder, digital character sheets, and more—all populated with official D&D content, based on fifth edition rules. The app is meant to augment the gaming session by providing high-quality tools that are available on any device, empowering both player characters and dungeon masters.
The Dungeons & Dragons Beyond app is a result of a collaboration between Wizards of the Coast and Curse, the community-focused communications platform. Adam Branford, the Dungeons & Dragons Beyond Product Lead for Curse clarified some pointers about the question on Reddit, which is transcribed below.
“D&D Beyond is a responsive web application that can work on any device – definitely not a desktop client or mobile app only available for iOS or Android. We care a great deal about offline capability, and you’ll be able to access your characters, etc. just fine on the terrible WIFI at those conventions. The DDB toolset is being developed by Curse Media and is not a directly tied to the former Curse App that was recently shared has become the Twitch App.”
Furthermore, Branford also expanded on the business model of the app. At launch, players will be able to access SRD content and build and view a small number of characters with a free D&D Beyond account. Furthermore, those players can also buy official digital D&D content for all fifth edition products with flexible purchase options. Users can pay only for the D&D content they need to track their hero.
Ultimately, a small monthly subscription will be needed to manage more than a handful of characters and to enable more advanced features, like homebrew content integration. Details on the pricing and exact launch date are still unknown.
This isn’t the first D&D app, with the last app, D&D Insider, having been launched alongside the fourth edition of D&D in 2007. Unfortunately, it was built on Microsoft’s Silverlight platform and failed to make the transition to mobile platforms like Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.
Source: DnD
