What is Yonder?

After getting back into TTRPGs a few years ago and joining a D&D 5e campaign with some friends, I think it’s fair to say that I’ve developed a “healthy” interest in creating optimised character builds - I currently have 122 different builds sat on Beyond!

I’m pretty keen on plotting out the damage per round (DPR) of these builds and how they progress from levels one to twenty, so I have a pretty dense set of spreadsheets for about half of them.

It was the time invested in making those spreadsheets that motivated me to begin building a proper optimisation tool, instead of just using manual spreadsheets all the time. That tool became nicknamed Yonder¹.

Character builder

Although the main aim is to build a set of tools to aid character optimisation, that can’t work without a solid data model and character builder underneath. So the first step is to build a character creator that’s on par with Beyond.

If you’ve made use of the homebrewing features on Beyond, you will have likely rubbed up against some of the oddities of its representation of 5e’s rules and structures. My hope is that I can make a far more flexible system with much better support for homebrewing of content or future changes to the system.

There are a number of currently-known categories within 5e: from obvious things like feats and tools, to more niche ones like Arcane Archer’s arcane shot types or College of Spirit’s spirit tales. Homebrewing works nicely within these bounds, but if you want to add your own categories, such as a new pool of abilities for a custom subclass, things get a little messy. Sometimes they’re straight-up impossible. The tool is built with this kind of more complex homebrewing in mind from the start.

Built in to this approach, is the idea that Yonder will not only be easier to port to future D&D versions, but also to other systems that were built on top of ADnD such as DC20, Draw Steel or Pathfinder². It also makes it far easier to add in more unusual third-party content.

Optimisation tools

The heart of Yonder is the automatic calculation of DPR for characters at every level.

Since this is never an exact science, and there’s some pretty big variation between how tables play, the aim is to have easily-customisable assumptions with defaults included. This would allow the tool to be tuned to match things like your table’s average encounters per short or long rest, assumed average AC/saves at each level, and a lot more.

In addition to average DPR, the tool will also display a variety of cross-cuts on the data, such as variance from the average DPR, full-power versus resource-expended DPR, and how it compares to your other builds and common baselines.

I also intend to build similar tooling for other common metrics, such as crowd control efficiency, healing output, defences, and nova damage. That said, approaches to quantifying these parts of a build are far less well-trodden than DPR, so they’ll require some additional planning to create metrics that feel fitting.

Off the back of these core tools, it’s also possible to build some other useful things. I’m looking at the idea of a turn helper, which will allow you to register a number of possible turns you could take with a given character. Each turn will be greyed out if they aren’t possible with your current resources, and will show the expected DPR of any given turn should you take it. The optimisation tools can also be built back into the character creator, allowing for recommendations on level-up based on the attributes of the build you’re currently trying to maximize.

Campaign notes

One thing that I’ve felt Beyond has been sorely lacking is good note-taking tools. It occured to me once I’d started Yonder that it would be nice to have a tool with everything in one place, rather than having a spreadsheet for note taking, Beyond for character sheets, and a virtual tabletop like Roll20 to actually play the game.

Some properly structured note-taking tools would be nice, although they can be fairly generic. I’d like to have the ability to add timelines in, so you can track major events based on sessions or chronologically. This could apply to both your adventuring party and things going on in gaming the world that are outside of their control. This journal style of note taking often forms the backbone of what I find myself writing down in sessions, so it has to be free-form, quick to write and easy to search through.

I tend to break my notes down into a few categories³: player characters, NPCs, places and miscellaneous. I’d like to include a quick and easy way of adding and tracking the things in these categories. The NPCs and places sections are is self-explanatory. The player characters (PC) section is a detailed set of key facts about PCs, along with questions my PC may have about them (this could likely be blended into the NPCs section once it’s in a tool rather than the flat structure of a spreadsheet). The miscellaneous section will simply be a catch-all for any notes that don’t fit into other categories.

Finally, I find it very useful to have a snappy one-page summary which informs me of how my character is currently thinking - it’s a great way to help you get back into sessions after a small break. The page includes a few lines on my PC’s opinion of other PCs, the key things he wants to do in the next session, any quests that are ongoing, his personal long-term goals, and what he thinks other NPCs currently know about him. I’d see this page taking the form of a dashboard in Yonder, with customisable widgets that you could set up however you like.

One other thing I could see helping a lot with note taking and quick recall - and it pains me greatly to say this - is AI. Using the notes taken as RAG and then feeding questions into an LLM to obtain quick summaries on your notes would be a very cool addition for fast improv.

Virtual tabletop (VTT)

I mentioned the idea of everything in one place in the section above, so the natural extension for Yonder is to also create a VTT on top of the underlying tooling.

Given there are plenty of great VTTs out there, I’ll be the first to say that this is very much a stretch goal. However, based on past experience I actually think this is relatively simple compared to some of the other bits required to complete Yonder.

Having your character sheet in the same place as your VTT is obviously great for things like on-click rolling of dice or sharing descriptions of abilities to chat for easy reference. Having your notes in the same place opens up an easy way to link your notes with reference material provided by the Dungeon Master (DM).

There are also a number of nice-to-have features that I’ve found myself wanting as a DM which don’t seem to be in other VTTs.

Multi-story maps would be great. For multi-level dungeons I often find myself having all levels of the dungeons on one gigantic map, then dragging players between the levels as they cross thresholds. This could easily be done via “portals” which teleport a player token to another area on the map when clicked. This could even be extended to allow players to look “through” the portals into the areas they connect to, despite them being elsewhere on the actual map.

Token triggers would also be very nice to have. These would be areas of the map that trigger some kind of event when a player’s token steps onto them. These events could be any combination of things within the power of the DM. For instance: moving an image to the player-visible layers, triggering an animation, playing a sound, spawning NPC tokens, rolling dice, or moving tokens around.

A little luck and a lot of time

I hope this gives you a reasonable idea of what I have planned. I suspect these plans may change and shift over time, both in form and in priority. However, with a decent amount of time I’m hoping I can build something interesting, as well as learning a whole lot along the way.

Hopefully you’ll join me for the journey, and if you have ideas for ways it could be extended or improved, get in touch!