At long last, Wizards of the Coast has announced that the pen and paper universe will finally be making its way into the digital space in the form of an official app. Get ready to take your dungeon-diving sessions "Beyond."
According to a recent announcement on the official Dungeons & Dragons website, D&D Beyond is just about everything both players and dungeon masters could have hoped for out of a digital app. If you boot up your Android or Apple device and search for "Dungeons & Dragons," you'll find all kinds of fan-made apps meant to help people create characters, manage their spells, look up stats and rules, etc. Now that WotC is partnering with Curse, you'll finally be able to get your hands on all of that information from an official, updated source.
Plenty of folks still love playing D&D with pen and paper, but sometimes it's easier to keep track of things on a digital device, be it a smartphone or tablet. The cool thing about the Beyond app is that it will let you go as "digital" as you want. Don't have your player's handbook on hand? You can use the app to look up vital information on the fly. Keep forgetting your character sheet at home? You could keep track of all of those details through the app instead. Whether you're using it as a tool or to completely convert your campaign to the digital space, it looks like the Beyond app for D&D will have a little something for everyone.
They even made a trailer to announce the app, complete with an epic soundtrack.
As stated in the official trailer, the D&D Beyond app is set to launch this summer, though you can sign up for a beta by visiting the sourced news post. When it finally arrives, players are being invited to go "beyond" pen and paper to enjoy an app that uses the official Fifth Edition rule set. We'd be interested in seeing if they eventually add older rule sets for players who still like rocking the classics.
The in-game compendium will include in-depth information of all sorts of beasties, gear, and rules, while players will likely adore the interactive character sheets that keep track of effects, experience and the like.
In the announcement, D&D Senior Director Nathan Stewart said the team sees this as a "way forward" for the game. We imagine many of you are shaking in fear at the idea of an all-digital D&D, but we seriously doubt anyone's plan is to stop printing all those wonderful books and storylines. Instead, by making a move to digital as well as physical, we see this as WotC making the classic game more readily available to all types of players.
