Since the lockdown began, I’ve been looking at some of the online RPG platforms – DnDBeyond, Dungeons & Dragons Online, Fantasy Ground, and a few others.

The thing that aggravates me the most about all of these sites, is that you essentially need to repurchase all of the books you will be using, for each and every site. Unless you an convince those you are playing with to all migrate to one site, that’s an incredible expense.

And while there may be a method to download your books/content, and then migrate them to another site, I haven’t found it yet. Admittedly, I’ve only been looking at this a few months, but my Google-fu is generally pretty good on finding things like that.

You would think that maybe Wizards would come up with a licensing thing where you buy a license from them, and then use it on the sites you are on. But that isn’t how Corporate America wants to work.

A few days ago, I asked my daughter assist me in generating a character, on the Beyond D&D platform, as after an absence of nearly 30 years, I’m playing D&D again. Although with the changes from when I last played (3rd edition was just being released), and the current, 5th edition, it may as well be the first time.)

We got the character roughed out, female Drow Warlock, True Neutral, and sent the draft off to the DM. The DM, of course, is on a different platform, Fantasy Grounds, so the character will need to be uploaded/input there once everything is approved. I’m going with Pact of the Chain and have a Sprite for a familiar (because I’m joining an existing party, the DM is letting me come in as a level 3.

I do have to say that character creation has changed drastically since the days of the original edition; it didn’t used to be quite this involved.

Which brings me to tonight, which is my first D&D around session since somewhere around 1988. (Been busy with GURPS and Dragonquest a lot, okay?)

Wish me luck, I’m going to need it!