D&D Beyond's slick new online character creator lets you make a hero in seconds

Despite being the gateway TTRPG of choice, one of the biggest hurdles in Dungeons & Dragons has always come right at the start: making your character. For someone unfamiliar with the system, that blank character sheet can seem like a maths exam they haven't revised for—and though recent editions have significantly streamlined the process, it can still be intimidating.

Online play aid D&D Beyond has long been a great solution to that problem, automating several elements of character creation—but now the site is taking it a step further, with a new and improved Quickbuilder that makes creating a character so easy you can do it in seconds.

The interface feels very inspired by videogames, with a slick and graphically pleasing menu of pretty simple options. You just need to pick your class, species, background, and portrait and you're done.

I like that it allows you to quite intuitively decide how much depth you want to get into. Click through to the class options, for example, and you get a brief overview of the strengths, weaknesses, and key features of each one, all on one page. If you want to learn more, you can select one to get a more detailed overview—and within that, it links out to full descriptions of how its class features work.

It's up to you whether you want to do your homework, or just pick something that looks cool, and you can even just randomise it all for a true no-thinking-required character.

Once you've made all the basic choices, the builder automatically fills in the finer details, such as your attribute scores, equipment, spells, and skill proficiencies with some well-chosen defaults—though you're free to go in and manually tweak anything you'd like to. From there, you can just start playing straight away, using D&D Beyond's lovely automated character sheet.

These days D&D is far from my preferred system for tabletop gaming, but the thing I am always impressed by is its online tools, and this seems like a great addition. Lord knows I've run campaigns in the past where being able to point a hesitant newbie to an interface as simple and intuitive as this would have made a big difference in selling them on the hobby.

This seems to be just the beginning, too—a design blog released alongside the new Quickbuilder lays out concepts for a more fully featured version of the tool to come. It looks like the plan is for it to eventually allow more direct control over things like attributes and skills within the interface itself, rather than having to get to the full character sheet before you can tweak the defaults. More slick animations and graphics may be on the way as well.