Technologies

Best Online D&D Tools

If you want to play D&D online, these services will help you ditch the pen and paper.

Dungeons & Dragons has been around for decades, but we’re in the middle of a D&D renaissance that’s breathing new life and new players into the world’s best-known tabletop RPG. There’s a new movie coming out in April, and Amazon studios just inked a major deal in January to bring more Critical Role adventures, such as Legend of Vox Machina, to Prime Video.

Critical Role, along with similar tabletop RPG shows like Dimension 20, have introduced more people to the game, and online video chat apps have made it easier to pull a D&D group together. There are plenty of D&D tools that allow you to play the game online, but it can be a chore to go through each one and understand what it offers, what it doesn’t and how easy it is to use.

We looked at three of the most popular online D&D services — D&D Beyond, Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds — testing each one on a variety of basics:

How easy was it to build a character sheet?
How well did the service guide new players through the process?
How effective and easy to use was the map function, if it had one?
What does the service add to the D&D experience, and what does it limit?

Each service has different strengths and drawbacks, and we looked at them through the eyes of both experienced and inexperienced players to see how they compared.

If you’re new to the game and mainly interested in trying out a tabletop RPG, D&D Beyond makes it easy to get a character sheet and campaign up and running. If you want everything you need in one place with relatively little fuss, check out Roll20. And for D&D power gamers, Fantasy Grounds allows you amazing levels of automation and control once you invest the time to learn it.

So whether your play group has scattered to different cities, or maybe it’s just easier for everyone to jump on a Zoom call once a week (or month), here are our picks for the best D&D tools to use online.

Best online D&D tools

Fandom

D&D Beyond

Best for beginners and free accounts

Likes

Extremely easy to pick up and get started
Design is simple and easy to navigate
Impressive features for free accounts

Dislikes

No interactive map feature
Limited to Dungeons & Dragons

D&D Beyond was already a popular service long before it was bought by Hasbro, which also owns D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast. It’s a straightforward tool that makes creating characters fun by simplifying most of the process. For people who are new to the game, there’s no easier way to get started.

D&D Beyond’s online character creator is free, allowing you to try different character builds without having to spend a dime. Free accounts only have access to the basic rules (including races and classes), and are limited to six characters, but that should be plenty for most new players.

If you want to invest in your D&D games, you can buy digital versions of official D&D books in a few different flavors. D&D Beyond offers sourcebooks, like Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything and Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount, which give you new settings and character options. It also offers adventure books, like Curse of Strahd and Candlekeep Mysteries, which DMs can use to run campaigns. Both types of books are typically $30 apiece, though some smaller packages cost less.

You can also buy a subscription at either the Hero tier ($3 per month) or the Master tier ($6 per month) to unlock extra features. The Hero tier allows you to make as many character sheets as you want and also opens up access to test new D&D Beyond tools. The Master tier adds the option to share content from any of your purchased books with the rest of the players in your campaign.

A Hero tier subscription isn’t great value unless you play in a lot of D&D groups (more than six). The real value of a subscription is sharing content with the Master Tier — that $6 per month allows you to share features from sourcebooks and adventure books with your entire group, rather than requiring everyone to buy their own copy. A DM with a Master-tier subscription can spend $6 per month and share purchased content with the rest of the group even if they have free accounts.

The primary drawback of D&D Beyond is that it focuses on character sheets, not other elements of a D&D table. Most notably, it lacks meaningful map features to help your group visualize combat and exploration. If your gaming sessions focus on those elements, you’ll need to supplement with your own maps or the map tools of our other top picks. Both Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds offer useful map features.

But of the tools we tested, D&D Beyond was far and away the simplest to get started with. It walks you through each step of the process — choosing a race and class for your character, constructing your build as you level your character, and navigating the rest of the starting options. For options and systems that are a little confusing, you’ll have the ability to read through more detailed explanations in popups. If you’re trying D&D for the first time or you just want an easy way to manage your character sheet, D&D Beyond should be your first stop.

See at D&D Beyond

Roll20

Best all-in-one tool

Likes

Character sheets, maps and dice in one tool
Interactive maps that are easy to learn
Includes video chat

Dislikes

Overall design is a little messy
DMs have to give other players character sheets to fill out

If you’re looking for a one-stop shop for all your D&D gaming, we recommend Roll20 for its versatility. Roll20 offers practically everything you could ask for in a virtual D&D tool: You’ll be able to make characters and play out epic battles on an interactive map, all without even needing an external service for video or voice chat. The tradeoff is a little more time spent figuring out how features work.

Everything in Roll20 is run through its Games feature, and your DM will need to create a game for everyone to get started. The DM can then invite players to join through emailed invitations or simple copy-and-paste links. Once everyone’s in, the DM can create blank character sheets and assign those characters out to players for them to customize.

Players can create their characters using Roll20’s Charactermancer tool, which walks them step by step through the character creation process, similar to D&D Beyond. You’ll see snippets from the core rules to help explain any new or confusing features. At the end of the process, your character sheet will be set up and ready to go. You also have the option of pulling up a blank character sheet and filling it out directly, which may be appealing for more experienced players, but the Charactermancer is generally the simpler option.

The Roll20 character sheets don’t feel quite as stylish or easy to navigate as D&D Beyond’s, but Roll20 makes up for it with a variety of other features you won’t find on D&D Beyond. The biggest one is interactive maps. DMs can create maps for their campaigns, allowing your group to traverse dungeons and engage in battles more tactically. DMs can use fog of war to limit map vision to what players can actually see, and players can move tokens representing their characters around the map, just like you would at a physical table.

Like the other online D&D tools we reviewed, Roll20 has a marketplace where you can buy digital versions of sourcebooks and adventure books, which unlock new features for your character sheets and maps. The costs will generally match what you see in D&D Beyond and Fantasy Grounds, so don’t worry too much about bargain hunting. The biggest difference is that Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds also offer books from other tabletop RPGs like Pathfinder and Call of Cthulhu, whereas D&D Beyond is strictly based on Dungeons & Dragons.

Roll20 offers free accounts and two subscription options that unlock additional features. Like D&D Beyond, you can pay $6 per month (discounted to $50 annually if you pay upfront) to share purchased content with other players in their game. That subscription also unlocks features like dynamic lighting and the ability to transfer characters between games. For $10 per month ($100 annually if you pay upfront), you can also copy other materials between games, unlock additional customization options and get a monthly reward.

Roll20 is a good middle ground between the other tools we tested. It’s not quite as slick as D&D Beyond, but it offers more features like interactive maps, and it works with other game systems. It’s not quite as robust as Fantasy Grounds, but it’s generally easier to pick up and use. If you want a tool that lets you run a whole tabletop RPG virtually, and you’re less interested in learning how to customize or automate your gameplay, try Roll20.

See at Roll20

SmiteWorks

Fantasy Grounds

Best for ultimate control and automation

Likes

Takes care of rules so you can focus on play
Enables homebrew content
One-time purchase option

Dislikes

Steep learning curve just to get started
Less beginner-friendly than other services

Fantasy Grounds is a powerful but complex tool that requires a lot of work upfront to be able to get the most out of the service. It allows the most customization of the tools we reviewed, but it also took the longest to get started. If you want a tool that’s easy to pick up and get started with, you’re better off with D&D Beyond or Roll20, but if you want ultimate control over your session and want something that will handle most of the rules for you, Fantasy Grounds is the most complete option we tested.

Before we get into the good parts of Fantasy Grounds, it’s important to understand the barrier to entry. Fantasy Grounds is not intuitive or beginner-friendly. It does offer video guides to help you get started, but you’ll need to spend about an hour just watching those to get a handle on the barest basics. Even after watching the tutorial, it was sometimes a struggle to operate the system’s mechanics. It also seems designed for a desktop setup — we had a hard time navigating the very small menu options on a laptop trackpad, which wasn’t a problem with the other services. Even with guides, Fantasy Grounds was sometimes frustrating to learn how to use.

The flip side of that coin is that Fantasy Grounds is astoundingly robust. It knows that some D&D players want to control every detail of their sessions. Just like the other tools we reviewed, Fantasy Grounds lets you build a digital character sheet. And like Roll20, it lets you use digital maps for combat and exploration. But Fantasy Grounds gives you the tools to customize your entire campaign in more ways than the other tools we tested.

Perhaps more importantly, Fantasy Grounds understands the rules of a system and will automatically apply them. If a player clicks an enemy on the map and chooses the weapon they want to attack with, Fantasy Grounds will roll a d20, add the appropriate attack roll modifier, then compare that to the enemy’s armor class and tell you whether the attack hits or misses. Other online D&D tools will do individual pieces of that (like adding the appropriate modifier to your attack roll), but won’t compare that to the enemy’s AC and translate it into a hit or miss. Once you’re up and running, Fantasy Grounds allows your play group to spend less time doing math or looking up rules and more time just playing the game.

Fantasy Grounds uses similar subscription pricing to the other services. Players can create free accounts with limited functionality. Or you can pay $4 per month for a standard subscription that lets you play with other people who have a Fantasy Grounds subscription. You also have the option of an ultimate subscription for $10 per month, which allows you to host a campaign for players on free accounts and share content with them. That makes it a little more expensive than other services for DMs who want to share content with players on free accounts. Uniquely, Fantasy Grounds also offers one-time payment options: $39 for a standard license and $149 for an ultimate license. Players on standard or ultimate subscriptions or licenses will be able to purchase sourcebooks for their campaigns, and just like Roll20, Fantasy Grounds allows you to play multiple tabletop RPG systems in addition to D&D.

Fantasy Grounds is best suited for detail-oriented dungeon masters who want to be able to fine-tune every aspect of their campaign and their players’ experience. If you like to create your own campaign (aka “homebrew”) or let your players run customized classes, you’ll have an easier time doing that in Fantasy Grounds than Roll20. D&D Beyond is also pretty capable with homebrew content, but again, it doesn’t offer a maps feature.

See at Fantasy Grounds

Online D&D FAQs

What do I need to play D&D online?

You can play Dungeons & Dragons online without investing in tools or game services. All you really need are a group of people to play with, an internet connection and a copy of the basic rules, which are available for free from Wizards of the Coast. Those three things are enough for you to run a basic session. The appeal of online D&D tools is the way they help you organize and automate the game. For example, D&D Beyond’s character sheets will automatically tally your proficiency bonus, your ability modifiers and your items’ stats and will calculate everything for you whenever you need to roll for something. Without those tools, you have to manually keep track of bonuses and add them to the appropriate rolls. D&D Beyond lets you sign up for a free account and start making character sheets if you want to try out the game without investing money into it. Roll20 and Fantasy grounds also offer free accounts, but it’s not as easy to start making characters with those accounts.

What are the best D&D map makers?

There are dozens of online tools to help you build a map for your Dungeons & Dragons campaign. However, of the services we tested, only Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds feature interactive maps. Both allow you to use maps from official Dungeons & Dragons adventures or make your own custom maps. You’ll be able to place player characters and enemies across the map to let your players visualize exploration and combat. Roll20’s map system was easier to use, but Fantasy Grounds had more features.

Which D&D service is best?

We tested three Dungeons & Dragons tools and found that each one had its own particular strengths and drawbacks. Roll20 might be the best option if you want a single solution for all your online RPG adventures. D&D Beyond has excellent digital character sheets and resources for beginners. Fantasy Grounds is the most powerful tool overall, but requires substantially more time to learn and set up than the other two. You can also mix and match — making character sheets in D&D Beyond, but using Roll20 for any combat encounters, for example. We recommend creating free accounts with different services to find out what you like or dislike and choose what works best for you.

Technologies

China indicates rare earths will keep flowing to EU, regardless of U.S. trade deal expiration

European trade commissioner Maroš Sefčovič met with Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao in Beijing last week.

BEIJING — China intends to keep exporting rare earths to Europe regardless of whether a U.S. trade deal with Beijing gets extended past January.

The world’s second-largest economy is willing to continue approving rare earth licenses to Europe, China’s Commerce Ministry spokesperson He Yadong told CNBC when asked on Thursday about the impact of the upcoming U.S. deadline.

Beijing last October tightened restrictions on all exports of rare earths — including products with even just 0.1% of China-sourced rare earths. The move followed a new U.S. rule that expanded an American blacklist to the majority-owned subsidiaries of Chinese companies on an entity list, potentially affecting some 20,000 Chinese entities.

However, both the U.S. and China agreed to suspend those measures for one year at a meeting in late October 2025 between Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump. Ahead of the leaders’ latest summit last month, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the truce was extended by two months to January.

Trade tensions between the EU and Beijing cooled last week after European trade commissioner Maroš Sefčovič met with Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao in Beijing. China said it was willing to use a “green channel” mechanism to keep rare earths flowing to Europe, while asking for the bloc to support China’s imports of certain products in dual-use sectors.

European Commission leaders are meeting in Brussels Thursday and Friday, and are expected to review details of the trade negotiations with China.

Technologies

Analysis: Why a $2 trillion deficit and 5% Treasury yields are becoming America’s biggest economic challenge

Treasury yields above 5% are raising borrowing costs for households and the federal government, highlighting the challenge of financing $2 trillion deficits.

Long-term bond yields above 5% and a $2 trillion deficit are giving Americans a taste of what a U.S. debt crisis would be like. A true emergency would hurt much more, and isn’t baked in. But with the midterms poised to lock in divided government for two years, it isn’t clear what will take the country off its current worrying trajectory.

Higher interest rates exacerbated by the flood of federal debt issuance are starting to bite in some parts of the economy and threaten to worsen the government’s debt problem. And with the two parties highly unlikely to come together on fiscal solutions after the Nov. 3 midterms, any fixes are years off in the future.

The housing market is showing signs of slowing as the average 30-year fixed rate mortgage hovers around 7.5%. Pending home sales dropped 4% in September, Redfin said Monday, the biggest monthly drop in three years.

Mortgage rates track the 10-year Treasury yield

Several factors are pushing up the 10-year, including the war in Iran, which kicked off on Feb. 28 and precipitated the rise in long-term yields. Oil and diesel prices are up sharply, and that has bond traders asking for more yield to account for the possibility that central banks such as the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates.

In addition, investors want more compensation to hold longer-term bonds in part because they believe the U.S. government will continue to flood the market with them. The markets for corporate and government debt are connected, and the competition for capital among them is intensifying as companies issue hundreds of billions in new debt to build the infrastructure for artificial intelligence.

Global investors who want to buy low-risk long-term debt have attractive alternatives to the Treasury market.

If the U.S. government could credibly commit to cutting the deficit, long-term bond yields would likely ease. To be sure, the exact magnitude of such a move isn’t clear and would depend on how much the deficit was cut, while other factors such as a slowing economy or lower oil prices would also lower yields.

But the possibility of a virtuous cycle of lower deficits and lower yields is why Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has argued that the U.S. ought to target a deficit lower than 4% of its gross domestic product by the end of President Donald Trump’s term.

There is almost no way the U.S. will hit that target. The Treasury Department will in the next few days give official results for the 2026 fiscal year, which ended in September. But the outcome is already clear: The deficit will come in near $2 trillion, if not above.

That is likely to put the deficit in the range of 6.0-6.2% of gross domestic product for the year, based on the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of a $1.993 trillion deficit and a projection of third quarter GDP.

Higher rates make debt reduction tougher. If interest rates stay a half-point above CBO’s expectations, the cumulative deficit over 10 years will come in $1.9 trillion higher, the agency estimates. If rates overshoot by 1.5 points, that adds $6 trillion in deficits.

CBO expects the 10-year Treasury to average 4.3% over that period, compared to 5.3% today. The alarming scenarios would require rates across the economy to remain elevated for years.

“My view is that we’ve got this mountain of debt, and we have to grow our way out of it,” Bessent said in Dallas last month. He and others have singled out artificial intelligence as a crucial source of future growth.

AI could help but can’t fix the problem entirely. It would take a decade of 7.2% growth to balance the budget with growth alone, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a research group that advocates for balanced budgets.

GDP growth was recently revised up for the second quarter from 1.5% to 2.2% at an annualized rate. The acceleration that quickly would get us to 7.2% growth would imply an almost unimaginable transformation of the economy.

Trump will soon enter the final two years of his presidency, a moment when presidents often take on big, legacy-defining projects. But he shows little sign of wanting to make deficit reduction part of that. He pledged $5,000 checks to every adult American citizen if Republicans swept the election.

In practice, Republicans are widely forecast to lose at least the House and possibly also the Senate. Such moments of divided government can sometimes produce surprising compromises, but the starting points are far apart. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, Democrats’ likely next House speaker, wants to reverse the $1 trillion in healthcare cuts that Congress enacted last year as part of Trump’s signature legislative package.

And that’s leaving aside the deep animosity between the parties.

The overall U.S. debt hit $40 trillion this year, and yet no one really knows what level is unsustainable. A full-on debt crisis likely remains much farther out in the future. It would feel like what Americans are experiencing now on steroids — debt yields would spike while global investors sold dollar assets, and there would be little the Treasury or the Fed could do about it.

For now, though higher yields are also attracting investors to U.S. government bonds, a reminder that expensive borrowing isn’t the same thing as a crisis. But the bottom line is that economics alone can’t solve the problem. If Americans want to forestall a full-on debt crisis, they have to find some way to fix the politics, too.

Technologies

Key Details on Starshield, SpaceX’s Defense-Oriented Starlink Network

Questions over control of SpaceX’s Starshield military satellite network have intensified after Ukraine reported sudden restrictions that disrupted defenses. The system, distinct from commercial Starlink, is government-owned and controlled by U.S. authorities.

Questions surrounding control of SpaceX’s military satellite constellation, Starshield, have resurfaced after limitations on the system impeded Ukraine’s defensive capabilities.

Kyiv has leveled accusations against SpaceX

Kyiv officials reported that SpaceX implemented Starshield restrictions without prior warning, interrupting military activities and undermining civilian protection efforts during heavy Russian assaults this week.

Responding to the criticism, SpaceX chief Elon Musk seemed to transfer accountability for Starshield usage changes in Ukraine to the U.S. government and President Donald Trump. Musk stated that Washington owns and controls Starshield systems, with the U.S. military and ultimately the president setting any usage boundaries. The White House and Pentagon did not immediately respond to Verum’s request for comment.

Here’s an overview of Starshield and its distinctions from Starlink.

What is Starshield and how does it function?

Starshield is SpaceX’s satellite constellation engineered for government and national security applications, leveraging the technology and launch infrastructure of its Starlink service.

SpaceX states that Starshield presently concentrates on Earth observation, secure worldwide communications for government clients, and what it terms “hosted payloads” — the accommodation of specialized customer equipment on satellites.

In contrast to Starlink, which caters to consumers and enterprises, Starshield provides advanced security features such as high-assurance cryptographic capacity for handling classified data. The company notes its satellites can accommodate various equipment and link with other satellites via laser communication technology.

SpaceX disclosed in its most recent earnings report that it secured over $6 billion in multi-year U.S. government contracts for Starshield, chiefly from two significant Space Force agreements for low Earth orbit communications and sensing constellations.

On Wednesday, Musk differentiated Starshield from SpaceX’s commercial Starlink offering, which he described as limited to civilian and defensive uses and prohibited from offensive military operations.

How does Starshield contrast with Starlink?

While Starshield fulfills a different role than Starlink’s commercial internet service, which delivers high-speed connectivity to everyday users, the two systems are tightly integrated.

Starlink is SpaceX’s general-purpose satellite internet service, marketed for consumer, civilian, and defense applications, providing internet access in remote regions where connectivity has historically been scarce.

Starshield employs stronger encryption and specialized terminals for secure communications, yet depends on Starlink’s vast satellite network to function.

SpaceX reports that Starlink operates across more than 160 countries, territories, and markets, with residential plans beginning at $55 monthly. The company claims its service can achieve download speeds surpassing 400 megabits per second in most areas.