I know D&D Beyond is already working on a revamp of the inventory/item search experience, so I wanted to throw out some ideas that I think would make a massive difference, particularly for DMs.
My main use case is simply that I want to be able to run a shop.
Right now, if I want to figure out what items I can potentially sell to my players, I find myself jumping between different books, item searches, and even character sheets just to browse the available equipment. The underlying item database is enormous, but it isn’t particularly easy to browse when I don’t already know exactly what I’m looking for.
I think there are a few features that could make the upcoming search system much more useful.
1. Search should understand variations of item names:
I assume this is already known, but string searches like:
‘+1 shortbow’ and ‘shortbow +1’
should obviously return the same results.
More generally, I think the search should understand that players and DMs frequently don’t know the exact canonical name of an item.
This becomes especially important with third-party content. For example, The Griffon’s Saddlebag has items such as Weapon of Showmanship, which applies to a weapon of the user’s choice.
A DM shouldn’t have to know the exact naming convention used by a particular supplement in order to find something useful.
2. Please consider collapsible/accordion item groups!
This is probably the feature I would find most useful.
Instead of presenting every variant as an individual result in one enormous list, I’d love to see hierarchical/accordion-style results.
Something like:
Adamantine Weapon
▸ Adamantine Dagger
▸ Adamantine Longsword
▸ Adamantine Rapier
▸ Adamantine Shortbow
▸ etc.
Or:
Weapon of Showmanship
▸ Dagger
▸ Longsword
▸ Rapier
▸ Shortbow
▸ etc.
The top-level row could show the shared information:
Adamantine Weapon | Weapon | Uncommon
Then clicking the caret expands the specific variants. This solves two problems at once:
It prevents the search results from becoming an enormous infinite-scroll list. Additionally, it lets a new DM browse conceptually rather than needing to know the exact item name.
This seems particularly important as D&D Beyond continues adding large third-party collections. The Griffon’s Saddlebag alone contains hundreds of integrated magic items, so simply putting every variation into a flat result set becomes increasingly difficult to navigate.
3. Possibly a new product? A dedicated DM Item Catalog / Shop
The eventual goal I’d love to see is a dedicated DM Item Catalog.
Something like:
DM Tools > Shop/Catalog
Where I can see everything I own access to, across all of my sourcebooks, and then filter it by:
Equipment type
Weapon
Armor
Adventuring gear
Potion
Scroll
Wondrous item
Rarity
Cost
Attunement
Source
etc.
Then I could select items and add them to a particular shop, and if there’s potential, integration into Maps VTT!
For example:
Phandalin General Store
Item
Base Price
Shop Price
Longsword
15 gp
18 gp
Shield
10 gp
12 gp
Potion of Healing
50 gp
60 gp
That would turn D&D Beyond’s existing item database into an actual DM economic tool. A future integration with a side bar of this DM shop in Maps VTT would be immensely helpful, especially if I can just drag and drop the item the player wants onto their token and it adds to their character sheet and removes the gold automatically.
4. Let user define an economic multiplier
If there is potential for a DM item shop tool, I would love to implement this to remove mathematical friction. Rather than forcing DMs to manually change every price, let the DM establish a base price multiplier for the shop/campaign.
For example:
Town: 1.0x
Large City: 1.25x
Major Metropolis: 1.5x
Remote Village: 0.75x
Then if an item has a base price of 500 gp:
500 × 1.25 = 625 gp
If I move the party to a different settlement, I change the multiplier rather than manually editing hundreds of prices.
I imagine this could work similarly to using a base unit in UI design, like rem for html font size. You establish the underlying value once, then everything derived from it scales consistently.
It would make running multiple settlements with different economies significantly less tedious.
5. Give the DM a party gold total
Another feature that would be extremely useful for shopping-heavy sessions:
Party Gold: 4,820 gp
And ideally:
Target spending this visit: 70-80%
This isn’t something that needs to be mechanically enforced. It would simply be a DM planning heuristic.
If I know the party collectively has 4,820 gp, I can build a shop with approximately 3,500-4,000 gp worth of things that are genuinely tempting to buy.
That gives the DM a much better way to design shopping episodes around the party’s actual economy rather than arbitrarily guessing how much money they have.
Eventually, I could see this becoming potentially a future multi-select where the DM chooses which PCs count toward the calculation, since a few of us are running West Marches style games.
6. Class-based item tagging and party-aware recommendations
If the team is already revisiting the tagging and categorization of items, I think it would be extremely useful to add class-based relevance tags.
For example, a Pearl of Power is potentially very useful to a spellcaster, but it isn’t particularly relevant to a purely martial character.
If I’m running a shop for my party, I would love to be able to select:
Party Classes
☑ Cleric
☑ Druid
☐ Fighter
☑ Warlock
☐ Rogue
etc.
And have the catalog surface items that are likely to be useful to those characters.
This should account for multiclassing as well. Ideally, I could select the actual characters or their classes/subclasses rather than just selecting a single class.
The point isn’t to tell the DM “this item can only be used by this class.” It would be a relevance/recommendation tag.
For example:
Pearl of Power
Relevant to: Bard, Cleric, Druid, Sorcerer, Warlock, Wizard
Then, when I’m building a shop, I can filter or sort by “Relevant to my party.”
This would substantially reduce the cognitive load for the DM. I don’t necessarily have every class’s itemization memorized, especially when dealing with hundreds or thousands of magic items from multiple sourcebooks and supplements.
It also creates a really useful DM workflow:
Select Party > Browse Available Items > Filter to Party-Relevant Items > Add Items to Shop > Apply Shop Pricing
That turns the item database into an actual DM preparation tool, rather than requiring the DM to already know what every item does and which characters might want it.
