Going Beyond DND

There are too many spells in D&D.


Too many awesome, diverse, powerful and interesting spells. I said on the podcast once that spells are the best and worst part of D&D. Stopping the game to flop open the Player's Handbook, or heaven forbid, any other official book that contains spells, can stop the game completely. Even having a 3-ring binder with every spell printed and sorted by level and class isn't enough to make it happen quickly.
DND Beyond has changed all that for me.
Having the complete text of every book, cross-referenced, hot-linked and tool-tipped, has changed the way I interact with this game. It's also revealed to me some of my own shortcomings. Namely, laziness.

Now, I'm a big fan of books. I like touching them, reading ink on the page, smelling them, you get it. But as you reach the higher levels in D&D (and in my case "higher levels" means 10th level, ugh), the amount of information required to run the game increases exponentially. Even at level 7, the players are warping reality with their core class features. Between class features, spells, feats and magic items, it can be a lot to keep track of, especially if the rules for these things are spread across multiple pages in multiple books.

As the DM, it's a lot to wrap your head around. My solution was to use very simple "passive" magic items and spells for my NPCs and encounters.

The problem is, in order to really challenge players, you need to be using spells, or lots of creatures, or at the very least, creatures with diverse and interesting abilities. All of this assumes you're running a game with the amount of combat that 5E expects (about 1/3rd of a given campaign). To do this effectively, you need to either memorize (and I mean memorize) a large number of spells and their interactions, or open a book every time you need a spell, or magic item, or magic item that has the features of a spell.

Enter DND Beyond.

Now, I can open the entry on a creature with spells. I can mouse over a spell entry, and the spell just pops up. Right there. I didn't have to open a book. Now I can actually use monsters with spells, because I lose practically zero time at the table, other than flicking my eyeballs over a few lines of text. Bangarang.

Or maybe I'm prepping for an adventure. I need a certain CR of monster for a certain environment. The Monster Finder has every monster carefully cataloged, including those from other sources such as Volo's or Mordenkainen's, or any of the many official adventures you may own. You can pull up their stats right there without leaving your current page! Use Donjon's encounter generator and baby, you've got a stew going. In just a few clicks, you've got everything you need for a night of gaming, and it took SECONDS instead of hours.

This is the future.

I have entire adventures, sorted by chapter and section, with tool-tipped creatures, condition callouts, stats and whatever you want right there. Instead of being annoyed that a book didn't reprint a certain stat block or whatever, I can be glad that I have the world at my fingertips. Instead of a stack of books behind my screen, I have a laptop and a handful of Chrome tabs.

Beautiful.

One interesting side effect of DND Beyond is that it's gotten me to READ my core books like never before. Honestly I have never sat down and read the DMG from cover to cover. But there's some SERIOUSLY impressive stuff in there. Stuff like monster encounter tables, with stats and damage based on CR. Optional rules you can try out for just about every aspect of the game. Random tables on top of random tables, so you can generate practically everything you'd ever need in your game.

I'm a big fan of random tables.

Furthermore, I now have every book WOTC has ever produced in my pocket, or on any internet-accessible device. Waiting in the car for my wife? I can take a few minutes to peruse the fantastic Monster Manual and learn the lore of a creature I've never heard of. Or I can brush up on bizarre variant rules in the DMG. Or I can look at all available class features for the Cleric, including those from sources outside the PHB. Oh yes, and all of those once-annoying spells the Cleric gets? Now they're as easy to look up as tapping a link.

My game has changed.

I'm not sponsored by DND beyond. I'm just a huge fan.