I’ve been running two weekly campaigns on demiplane for well over a year now and I am gearing up for my third and fourth campaigns soon. I will continue using demiplane as the GM and many of my players will also continue using demiplane for their character sheets, but everyone is not thrilled with the experience and some will be using other options for future campaigns. While I appreciate so much of the work you’ve done so far here are some items that I feel should be given higher priority at the risk of losing people for their next campaigns:
- constantly being logged out and being prompted for newsletters every time. I personally haven’t found this to be a problem for me but I wonder if this differs depending on whether you are a subscriber or what login option you use, but every single session more than half my players have to login again, and every time they mention having to opt out again as an extra step. It’s a real turn off and maybe devs and employees aren’t facing it but my players at the start of each session mention it.
- loading times for character sheets… is it a little possible to optimize loading? At the start of every session, after complaining about logging in again 10-15s and then opting out 10s, there’s another couple minutes of character engine and other updates… every time. It sucks to start a session with roll for initiative hype and then take 5 minutes before we actually know who goes first… it’s really long. I’m exaggerating but it really hurts when the barrier to play and first impression each time the site is used is something done in moments by the competition (pathbuilder, etc.) like if you could server side cache perception and basic strike or something and load in features afterwards it would go a long way to speeding up the experience … like what if the character engine updates loading screen showed a perception roll result for example… or even better even just the modifiers for perception and skills statically so our exploration can also move forward without a minute or two wondering what play-by-phone got for stealth.
- slowness for required features. Remaster (player core and GM core) were released in November of 2023. We are 18 months out and don’t have proper spacious pouches.
- lack of shared rolling. This is pretty big actually. I mean it’s nice that many players have gone back to physical dice for the tactile feel and for important rolls we use owlbear rodeo dice from time to time, but since a shared roll log isn’t a feature of demiplane, basically there’s no lock in to ensure all my players are using the sheets here. Everyone self reports by voice anyway so it doesn’t matter if they use other options for character sheet and for the next campaign I’ve had players tell me they’ll use pathbuilder or even pen and paper over the experience they’re getting here to avoid the issues above.
- no new themes: given that the competition is lackluster in the design side, at least the advantage you have here could really be built on. I think hiring one person to do character sheet art/design and releasing one a month or even one a quarter (based on AP/other book releases) would go a long way to helping players make their sheets feel unique and engage a lot of players. It certainly was a big part of why I enjoyed dndbeyond… theming out my sheet, the character frame, the dice, etc., to really enhance the feel of my character.
- complex class simplifiers: of course our least invested in learning the rules through reading players chose investigator. On sheets with a complicated core mechanic to the class it would really be nice for there to be something to indicate the final modifier … there are probably other classes that could use this help. I think our thaumaturge has maybe kinda finally figured out personal antithesis and mortal whatever at level 12… but there are a few classes with core mechanics that would love to have a little more TLC in their presentation on the sheet.
Conclusion: Okay, so basically, I’m still here. As a GM there’s a lot of value for me. Especially if I get rollable monster sheets like dagger heart has. I’m locked in and loyal. My experience is pretty good. I’d still like to pin my current APs to the library menu and have a campaign view that gives me a one stop place to look at all the character stats of my players so I can better make secret rolls… that is, when it comes to GM tools I have a wishlist. But I think a more fundamental issue for demiplane moving forwards is to be adding value to the character builder for players loyal to pf2e. The issues I gave above are taking all my players out of demiplane for our next year of adventures here… they’ve already filled seven character slots and don’t want to delete their precious friends. And the experience to date doesn’t inspire confidence that they wouldn’t be more satisfied with other tools for the next ones. The pace of change has been too slow and primary frustrations are not being addressed. I’m saying tough critical stuff because I love you and want you to be better. Sincerely thanking you for your hard work.