Take the dungeon master's key everywhere with you and expand your Dungeons and Dragons world in the process.

Part of the joy of Dungeons & Dragons comes from playing with friends. The other part comes with the complexity of throwing dice, manipulating pieces and maps, and managing stats. These things are at odds with one another.

Keep reading to learn how to pack your dungeoneer's kit onto your smart device with the D&D Beyond Player App.

D&D Beyond is an interface and marketplace for digital D&D tools, including soft copies of resources and rule books, digital dice, and more. While your digital collection can cost you some copper, there are a lot of free tools that let you manage campaigns and characters more easily than with the conventional tabletop setup.

For the more complex tools and resources, the Dungeon Master may prefer to access D&D Beyond on a desktop, and there is another app for referencing rules and resources. However, the platform's more agile tools are best accessed on a free 19.47 MB mobile app.

Download: D&D Beyond Player App iOS | Android

We took all the screenshots in this article in the Android app, so if you're following along on an iOS device, be aware that some things might look a little different.

Once you have downloaded the app onto your device, you can sign in with your existing D&D Beyond account through Google on Android devices, Apple accounts on iOS devices, or a Twitch account on either operating system. If you don't have an existing D&D Beyond account, you can also create one through the player app.

Once you have connected your D&D Beyond account to your app, you arrive at the My Characters menu, where you can see the characters that you already have. That includes characters you play as in your campaigns and non-playable characters that you created as a DM.

There's also a button at the bottom of this page where you can create a new character. Provided that you haven't filled all six of your character slots yet.

Creating a character in the Player App should look familiar to you if you've ever created a character using D&D Beyond on desktop. The same three character creation options are there:

From any screen in the character builder, select the stacked icon in the upper right corner to open a menu of resources like race and class details. If you need additional help, click the ? icon next to the home button in the toolbar across the top of your screen.

Between a solid user interface and additional help from those menus and resources, creating a character is incredibly user-friendly.

Selecting a character from the My Characters menu opens that character's sheet. It will look familiar to you from D&D Beyond's desktop interface, or from the classic, hard-copy tabletop character sheets. Though, it is a little condensed for usability on a mobile device.

There are things that you can change and things that you can't. There are big, friendly buttons at the top of the character sheet for managing hit points, conditions, and defenses, for example. However, you can only change things about your character like their race or class through the browser interface.

The campfire icon near your character portrait applies rests. The D20 icon in the lower right of the screen is for digital dice rolls, just like on the desktop version. Other than that, the icons and menus are pretty straightforward.

Below your main stats, select the grid icon to open just about any element of the character sheet that you can't see with the standard view. That includes your inventory, spells, player notes, etc. The speech bubble icon next to the grid icon opens the Game Log where you can share info with other players, but only while one of your campaigns is open and active.

The game log is a more recent development in the D&D Beyond toolbox, so if you don't like it, keep in mind that there other mobile D&D tools that do the same thing.

Of course, the one major benefit of the D&D Beyond Player App over the desktop interface is that the app is much more portable. The app also works offline, which we can't say about the browser interface.

Before the Player Tools app came around, a lot of players basically replicated the experience by adding their D&D Beyond character sheet to the home screen of their mobile device. This optimizes the interfaces and menus just enough that it's worth downloading the app anyway, unless you just can't find the extra space.

At the very least, having the app will let you manage your character from your mobile device while you use your laptop to look up lore or interact with party members on Zoom.

The D&D Beyond Player App is the best way to take your campaign with you. Depending on how you use D&D Beyond, you might still end up using your laptop or hard copy resources when you play as well.

But, if you're the kind of player that likes to make your DM do all the work, the app is definitely worth the free download.

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Jon Jaehnig is a freelance writer/editor interested in exponential technologies. Jon has a BS in Scientific and Technical Communication with a minor in Journalism from Michigan Technological University.

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