Is there a way to reference between printed 5e page numbers and equivalent D&D Beyond content that doesn't suck?

Question

I'm currently playing in a 5e campaign hosted on D& Beyond by a DM who owns nearly all of the material published so far for the game. This is great! The material is accessible, well-organized, searchable(ish), and hyperlinked in mostly reasonable ways. Also, for my purposes, it's free (you can view, though not keep, any content owned by the DM of a campaign you join on that platform).

However, I keep running into a problem trying to use the material:

• I look for something (a piece of content I heard about, a rule that covers something, whatever).
• I find something online that gives me a book and page number reference.
• I look in the section for that book on https://www.dndbeyond.com/
• There aren't any page numbers.
• I can't find the thing.
• I'm sad.

For instance, I just pulled up this suggested edit from the review queue. This is a reasonable edit which I would approve, as long as it's actually correct about the rule being optional. However, I don't want to just blindly approve it without checking the reference and make sure it's correct.

No problem, I have access to Xanathar's Guide to Everything online, right? Well, turns out that doesn't help, because I can't find the rule in question anyway, since the online version doesn't have page numbers.

---

Given a book and page number reference for published 5e content, is there a good way to find the same content on the D&D Beyond version?

• If there's a really good way to do this (like, "yes, lookup by page number is a built-in function, just click on [whatever]"), then of course I would like to know about that.
• If not, I'd be interested in any kludgy solutions people have worked out - for instance, has someone put together a Google Doc of each book's table-of-contents cross-referenced against D&D Beyond links or something like that?

Answer 1

Search by content, not by page

Unfortunately, you are right in that you can't search by page number on DNDbeyond.

What you can do is search by content. Someone has referenced a rule on X with an associated source and page. Rather than searching by source and page, DNDbeyond is more about searching for that particular mechanic.

It's hard to give you an exact instance to help, but this works well for looking up spells, feats, specific named mechanics. It doesn't help when searching for sentences or phrases because that's not how dndbeyond is currently set up.

I'm not sure if this totally helps, but my idea is to change you how you search for something.

Using a third party

Another option to locate a specific quote on DNDbeyond is to use a search engine such as google. By restricting the search to the exact quote and the dnd-beyond site, the first google result is usually a dnd-beyond page with another search that includes what you want in its results (easily found using a browser's page search)

For example, if you are looking for the linked Xanathar quote about falling you can do the following:

1. Do this google search:

   site:www.dndbeyond.com "you instantly descend up to 500 feet"

2. The first google result is (probably) this dnd-beyond page

3. Doing a page search (ctrl+f commonly) for 'you instantly descend up to 500 feet' brings you to what you wanted.

It's very far from ideal but it's how one can search for exact quotes on DNDbeyond.