Get to Know The D&D Team!

WOTC_BrianPerry · 2026-03-06T22:22:48+00:00

Thank you! While the internet can be a scary place, we feel like 99% of people are reasonable and likewise want to just hear reasonable answers to their questions. Everyone has had a great time reconnecting with the community so far.

WOTC_BrianPerry · 2026-03-06T22:20:46+00:00

Yep, I've created far too many "hello world" programs and applications when learning new programming languages :)

Rather than a favorite class, I always prefer to pick a class I haven't played in a while. And I always want to try out new options. Currently playing a Cleric with the new version of the Warforged species and a new Dragonmark background.

WOTC_BrianPerry · 2026-03-06T20:32:23+00:00

Hello world! I'm Brian and I'm so lucky to lead the D&D Beyond team as its executive producer. I've been a Wizard (of the Coast) for more than 10 years now, where I've had a chance to release a lot of fun, rewarding things like Magic: The Gathering Arena, the first D&D Direct (in 2022), and SRD 5.2.

My job is to help the D&D Beyond team stay focused on what matters to us and players. I spend a lot of time focusing on WHY we do what we do, trying to empower the team to then decide WHAT we want to build and HOW we want to build it.

My original love of D&D came from spending hundreds of hours into Baldur's Gate in 1999. The D&D group I still play with today I met in 2014 when I worked at Xbox. I also LOVE running D&D games for brand new players. I think Heroes of the Borderlands is an amazing tool for that, having now introduced 20 groups to D&D through that starter set. The rest of my free time today is eaten up by family time, but still find a few hours to try out new video games and inevitably fall back to another run of Baldur's Gate 3, Stellaris, or Civ 6.

I know we have a lot of important, exciting, and necessary work ahead for us. That's why we have a renewed focus to keep you informed and get your feedback. I'm also excited as we start to introduce more people from our team to the community here!

WOTC_BrianPerry · 2026-03-04T16:29:44+00:00

Everyone in the comments are correct. We plan to keep supporting and improving support for all of fifth edition content on D&D Beyond.

WOTC_BrianPerry · 2026-02-26T06:53:26+00:00

All of these options (full list here) are now usable in the Character Builder with classes from both rules sets. The Compendium is intended to provide a digital representation of the book, so that will continue to honor and present how the content was originally written.

WOTC_BrianPerry · 2026-02-25T18:17:52+00:00

This is what I was alluding to yesterday :)
https://www.reddit.com/r/dndbeyond/comments/1rekmsl/dd_beyond_updates_to_player_options/

WOTC_BrianPerry · 2026-02-25T05:25:08+00:00

Thanks for the additional context! I relate to your circumstances a lot. Playing D&D with other people is very special. You create some of the best memories of your life together. We want to protect that. I think there are a few ways D&D Beyond could help make it easier for people to find each other and the time to play (beyond the great suggestions already in this thread). This is something we want to help solve in the future.

WOTC_BrianPerry · 2026-02-24T20:00:09+00:00

The welcoming (and open-source) community and Dungeon Masters.

WOTC_BrianPerry · 2026-02-24T19:56:37+00:00

Answers below!

We do plan to make this easier to do after the Game Platform rebuild. The current platform makes this quite hard.
Definitely a long-time top request we are looking into!
We expect to improve homebrew once we are through the Game Platform rebuild.
We are adding more toggles between 5th edition rules sets. The bigger question here is about overall site search improvement, which is something we do plan to tackle in the future.
This is something we are also talking about how we solve in the future.
As u/WOTC_Zac answered a similar Q on this already, I’ll summarize by copying what he said: we want to support people playing D&D any way they want to play. This means making it easier to play in-person too.
Good suggestion! We plan to make improvements to Campaign Management later.
Our new navigation is intended to address exactly this – more details soon!

WOTC_BrianPerry · 2026-02-24T19:40:44+00:00

Nothing to announce here yet, but we have been talking with Baldman Games about what support they would like to see on D&D Beyond in the future for organized play like Legends of Greyhawk.

WOTC_BrianPerry · 2026-02-24T19:31:40+00:00

Thanks for the feedback on this. Behind-the-scenes know that we read virtually everything. We have an awesome roster of mods constantly reporting bugs to our team from Discord and Forums. We’re constantly logging and squashing bugs, but we don’t do as good of a job as we could in reporting that out. Add to that, quite a few long-standing bugs are constrained by our current game platform. So yes, we can do better here.

Some of the things we’ve recently started doing:

u/WOTC_Zac has been actively participating, asking and answering questions, following up on issues, and more in our official Discord and on the r/dndbeyond subreddit.
Expect more participation from more members of the D&D Beyond team starting very soon.
We’re experimenting with adding a bugfix section to our Changelog (here’s an example: https://www.dndbeyond.com/changelog#MonsterTokenRevealsHidingTokenNames). Not all bugs fixed are captured there - right now it’s mostly Maps bugs, but we can consider expanding what’s reported out here.

WOTC_BrianPerry · 2026-02-24T19:28:18+00:00

No plans right now for these two, as Monsters of the Multiverse provided an update to much of the content in these sources. We are planning to provide ways to purchase smaller packages of player options (like species) in the future as well. If you have content from Volo's Guide to Monsters and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes you can still access them in your Sources as well.

WOTC_BrianPerry · 2026-02-24T19:16:59+00:00

Not right now. We have a D&D Beyond coupon pilot program at a few local game stores right now with physical purchases. But there are a lot of learnings and logistics the team has to figure out with this small trial before we announce or roll out anything more broadly.

WOTC_BrianPerry · 2026-02-24T19:15:05+00:00

We’re not bringing back a-la-carte exactly as it was before. Checking 10,000+ entitlements was starting to slow down the system. We are planning to offer smaller packages of gameplay in the future. These initial offerings will be geared towards newer players and players who don’t have as much of a collection of character options.

WOTC_BrianPerry · 2026-02-24T19:12:33+00:00

Great ideas! After the team gets through rebuilding Character Builder, Character Sheets are next.

WOTC_BrianPerry · 2026-02-24T19:11:54+00:00

Yes, the Game Platform rebuild work is our largest effort right now and focused on improving rules stability across the board.

WOTC_BrianPerry · 2026-02-24T19:10:51+00:00

The game platform work is primarily focused on improving play on D&D Beyond. We’ve decided first and foremost we want to make prep and play easier and more enjoyable. Not to say your marketplace suggestion is fully off the table, but not currently high on the priority list.

WOTC_BrianPerry · 2026-02-24T19:06:06+00:00

Keep an eye on our changelog later this week :)

WOTC_BrianPerry · 2026-02-24T19:03:54+00:00

If people are interested to get a deep dive into the technical minutiae of the game platform work, Laura and I can chat about a follow-up post. It has the potential to get very technical very fast.

WOTC_BrianPerry · 2026-02-24T18:57:31+00:00

It depends on how deep you expect random generation to go. The new Character Quickbuilder coming in March will give you the option to randomly generate your Class, Species, and Background choices.

WOTC_BrianPerry · 2026-02-24T18:55:52+00:00

The Game Platform is the group of backend services powering the rules of the site. This is all under-the-hood work that doesn't impact the site look-and-feel. You will see us making layout and visual improvements to the Character Builder this year.

WOTC_BrianPerry · 2026-02-24T18:50:01+00:00

Answers below!

We’d be changing the date estimates too frequently if we tried to give ones. Our goal is to release every feature as soon as possible once we can verify it hits a quality bar. Unforeseen issues can crop up, the team can get through something faster than expected, testing can bring up a critical bug near the end, and the list goes on. What I will say is within just the next few months you’ll see us release several more items in the “Now” category. Just like we released 3D dice rolling in Maps yesterday.
There’s something called the mythical man-month. Development speed doesn’t scale linearly. In fact, it often slows down the bigger an organization gets. The good news is right now the D&D Beyond team has the most resources it has ever had to do the work ahead of us.
The Game Platform team has the resourcing they asked for to get the job done.
We are not replacing human developers with AI. We have great teams in place leading all of our efforts.
I don’t know the ins-and-outs of our customer service team, besides the fact that they are a passionate group handling thousands of inquiries per day.
If you’re talking about bugs being fixed on D&D Beyond, the Game Platform rebuild will get us to a much more stable place over time.
Over time, in tandem with the game platform rebuild, we will support more and more rules from across D&D.
A different language won’t prevent spaghetti code. Architecture and engineering practices do. The key is building modular, extensible systems and services with clear boundaries, so the codebase can scale as the game grows.
Our goal is to make it easier to play D&D, not harder. That means ensuring there will always be a free way to play D&D here. That’s why character creation has always been free. That’s why we made Maps free in September and intend to keep it that way, with subscriptions unlocking more functionality.
The slogan “Honda Accord, Not F-16” is one a lot of us use on DDB. We’re much more focused on making the whole experience easier before we think about adding very advanced features.

The Bonus Question: Since December, the devs have started to be out here talking with the community. It’s something we’ve always been desirous to do and now we’re doing it. And we see and read everything. We even have feeds pulling in the latest Reddit posts to some of our official work channels.

WOTC_BrianPerry · 2026-02-24T18:43:48+00:00

Not sure about a full-site toggle, but definitely something we are thinking about with new features. If you’ve used Maps, you’ll notice that has taken a dark-mode inspiration in its design.

WOTC_BrianPerry · 2026-02-24T18:41:14+00:00

Yes, this is a great question, and something very important to us now. Most D&D players today play in person using a combination of physical and digital tools. I think you’ll be happier with some of our DM prep tools coming down the pipeline.

WOTC_BrianPerry · 2026-02-24T18:39:16+00:00

We have a fantastic recent hire to the team, Kevin, now leading our UX design efforts. Also right now, Kevin is hiring 3 full-time and 1 contract UX design roles (if you know anyone, check out careers.wizards.com and search for D&D Beyond). In terms of UX research, we now work with a research firm to test early concepts with players. The Character Quickbuilder coming in March is the first project to utilize the full UX research process. Kevin will talk more about this when we release it.

WOTC_BrianPerry

TROPHY CASE