I played Dungeons and Dragons with my friends last night. We had a blast, but due to Coronavirus lockdowns, we all played from the comfort of our homes. There are a lot of ways to play distributed D&D, but I’d like to share how we go about it.
There are several platforms that we use to make the roleplaying experience fun and simple to execute. Let’s go through them.
Voice Chat: Discord
It is very hard to go past Discord for robust and reliable voice communications. We already use it for our various online gaming communities so it was a natural choice for our online roleplaying sessions. We regularly use Discord to organise our sessions and include players who can only play remotely.
Discord offers users a solid desktop or browser application with the ability to create personal servers from which you can host text and voice chat rooms, as well as dice rolling bots like Avrae to keep the adventure going.
Character Sheets: D&D Beyond
We tried a whole range of options when looking at character sheets including paper and pencil, Excel spreadsheets and the various digital offerings. However, the one that stood out for us was D&D Beyond.
In my opinion, D&D Beyond has the best character creation system on the planet. Making a new character has never been so easy. Simply pick your options in the character builder and boom – character done in less than five minutes. Adding equipment and picking spells is also very straightforward.
D&D Beyond can be a little expensive if you’re buying the content by yourself. However, if your party is willing to chip in for the highest tier subscription, the DM can share all of the content with you. There is also a free option that lets you build some basic characters.
Virtual Tabletop: Roll20
Our virtual tabletop of choice is Roll20. In conjunction with Discord and D&D Beyond, we can visualise our roleplaying sessions on-screen through Roll20’s digital play mat which is highly customisable. It is also importantly for us, free to use.
It is also possible to create characters in Roll20. However the creation process is not as robust and requires more fiddling than D&D Beyond. You can roll dice through Roll20, and with the assistance of the Beyond20 plugin for Chrome and Firefox, attack, damage and skill rolls are streamlined. Simply click on the ability in the D&D Beyond character sheet and the roll appears in the Roll20 play mat chat window.
Party Tracker: Google Sheets
Finally, when adventuring it’s expected that we will accumulate money and loot from the monsters slain the dungeons explored. This means keeping track of it all can quickly become a nightmare. Google Sheets allows us to overcome this difficulty by providing us with a free platform for sharing spreadsheets.
Our party maintains a spreadsheet with multiple tabs for shared money and loot. We also track what happens from one session to the next with a basic event log. It contains information about important NPCs and other cool notes about our campaign. It’s a very versatile tool, as we even have maps of our base of operations on a separate tab.
So there you have it: a viable way to play from home in these difficult times. Let me know in the comments about your own methods for virtual gaming.