D&D Beyond added a new party inventory feature (plus a few other things); now the whole party can keep track of those clutch magic items.
If you’ve played D&D with a DM who’s even just a little bit challenging at times, you know how important magic items can be. It’s both a rite of passage that almost everyone goes through. The party is on the ropes. People are dead or dying. It looks like you’re staring a TPK in the face, just when the campaign finally started getting good, too. And then suddenly, someone remembers, the perfect random magic item. Be it a wand of healing word or a cube of force or a whistle that summons a pack of surprisingly aggressive wolves, there’s always something.
And it would feel like the DM was pulling punches, except you got that five sessions ago. Or back at the beginning of the campaign and no one ever used it. It got tucked away in someone’s inventory and mouldered there. If you play D&D online, using D&D Beyond mostly, you probably already know how difficult it is to keep track of random things. But just this week, they’ve added a new feature. Group inventory. Here’s what we know.
D&D Beyond – Party Inventory
Party inventory, as it exists on D&D Beyond, will let you create a “shared space on your D&D Beyond digital character sheets.” Basically you can keep track of what’s in the party bag of holding, instead of relying on one person to keep track of what all you’ve been sticking in there.
That way, you can all look at the shared inventory space and realize, “oh no, we stuck that goblin in there 3 in-game days (and 3 real life months) ago.” And then it’s time to either cast resurrection or animate dead, whichever way your party leans.
It’s a much-welcomed improvement for D&D Beyond. And it works pretty straightforward (at least as straightforward as any of D&D Beyond’s inventory systems work—more on this in a bit):
“Add items directly to your pary’s stash from the Add Items section or just move things over from your personal inventory. Want to check out what treasure your party has collected? No problem! You can see all the details of every item in your shared inventory. Found something useful? Go ahead and equip it! Everyone will see which character is currently using which item, so no more confusion about who has what.
This last little innovation seems like a clutch feature for parties with a lot of shared items. Though it does highlight one of the more tricky things about D&D Beyond±—inventory management in general. If you have touched on D&D Beyond in more than just a surface level/one-shot capacity, you know how difficult it is to do things like create a custom magic item. Or just adding random stuff to your inventory. You have to find the thing—and the inventory search function really only works if you know what you’re getting in the first place—and then add it. If you’re purchasing something as a group, heaven help you.
Though I should mention there’s also a group Currency sectionas well. You can manage the shared wealth of the party with a single tab. And this isn’t a D&D Beyond exclusive feature, either. A lot of VTTs have the shared party inventory thing going one way or another. Foundry VTT does it best. Roll20 you have to create a separate thing to give everyon access to. But, it’s good to see that WotC is tackling this issue too. The more improvements, the more user-friendly all our VTTs will be. At least in theory!
Now where did I leave that extra bag of holding!
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