Being surrounded by stacks of rulebooks and reams of character sheets while you play has been part and parcel of the Dungeons & Dragons experience from the very beginning. And while many players have begun using phones and tablets to make their tabletop lives easier, Wizards of the Coast is finally offering their own solution.
Over the weekend the company officially announced D&D Beyond, a new app made in partnership with Curse media that will let players look up rules, check inventories or manage their character’s stats all from the convenience of a unified interface from their phone or tablet. Designed to work with the current fifth edition of D&D, Beyond is meant to give you more space and time to actually play games,instead of leafing through pages of adventure guides because you forgot the bonus to persuasion roles an Ancient Brass Dragon has. Here’s a hilariously over-dramatic teaser trailer for the app that shows a little bit more of how it works:
There’s been plenty of virtual tabletop and third party tools like Beyond for quite some time at this point—to the point Wizards has even sold official D&D content through them—so it remains to be seen what Beyond will bring to the table outside of the official branding. And there are questions about just how much it will all cost, too: is there going to be a future where buying the physical copy of a D&D adventure or rulebook comes with codes to access it on Beyond? Or will fans who still want physical editions and the convenience of an app like this have to fork out twice?
For now, we have to wait and see. If you’re interested in trying Beyond, you can sign up for a beta ahead of its rollout this summer at the link below.