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D&D Beyond’s Staff Looks to the Future! (MD 281)

March 4, 2026 · 1 h 22 min

Show notes

Episode 281 of Mastering Dungeons!

Main topic: D&D Beyond’s Staff Looks to the Future!

Brian Perry (DDB Executive Producer) and Zac Cohn (MAPS Product Manager) join Teos and Shawn to share D&D Beyond’s bold future!

News: New D&D London Expo, MCDM Hires for the Future, Critical Role Hires from Hallmark, and more!

Contents
00:00 Weekend Wins
01:36 Why Don't NPCs Fix the World?
06:16 Campaign vs Adventure Design?
10:51 D&D Fan Expo London
14:08 MCDM's Future Includes Paul Hughes
16:25 IGDN Diversity Scholarships
17:25 Industry Sues for Tariff Refunds
19:42 Amber Glenn and Olympic Magic
21:12 Critical Role Hires from Hallmark
23:00 Renegade to Publish Exodus
24:48 BEASTS by Adrian Mejia
26:36 Dragon Rider's Primer
27:42 Fractus the Broken World
28:44 State and Future of D&D Beyond
29:16 Brian Perry and Zac Cohn
34:56 How Wizards and D&D are Organized
39:03 Deciding Priorities
44:03 Rebuilding D&D Beyond
47:23 Quickbuildear and New Players
52:07 DDB as a Honda Accord
55:19 More Features vs Simplicity
56:41 New Functionality
01:02:09 Fully Integrating 3rd Parties?
01:06:24 Use of AI?
01:08:59 Expand the API?
01:10:18 Building a Walled Garden?
01:11:26 Goal of Shifting Play to Digital?
01:13:50 Physical Versions of Digital Dice?
01:15:00 Find Brian and Zac
01:17:15 Shout-Outs
01:20:57 What Are We Gonna Do?

Thank you for listening! Get the full show notes with links on Patreon.

Show Search Engine: https://mdsearch.alphastream.org/

Our intro and outro music is Metropolis Fanfare, provided royalty-free by Tabletop Audio (https://tabletopaudio.com) under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

MP3 file metadata populated with Online MP3 Podcast Chapter Editor, built by Dominik Peters. https://mp3chapters.github.io/ and customized for Mastering Dungeons by Vladimir Prenner from Croatia.

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