Michael E. Shea's Blog, page 31

Playing D&D Over Discord

In these times of social distancing, it becomes even more important for us to connect and spend time with family and friends. There is no better way to do that than playing D&D. D&D gives us the excuse to get together, be with one another, and share stories of high fantasy. Playing D&D is important.

There are many ways to play D&D online. Today we're going to focus on one single-tool approach: playing D&D over Discord.

Why Discord?

With so many solutions out there, why are we picking Discord as our platform for playing D&D online? Here are a few reasons:

It's free.
It has clients for PCs, laptops, tablets, phones, and web-browsers.
It has excellent support for D&D including the Avrae discord bot.
It's easy to use.
The audio quality is good.
It now has video support in audio channels (yay!).
It has a good text chat feature with image uploading built in.
It includes a screen sharing application called "Stream It".
It has everything you need in one application to play D&D.

I'm not trying to argue anyone out of their own favorite stack of software to play D&D. All that matters is that you're still playing D&D, whatever tools you use. Do not take this article as a slight on other wonderful solutions out there. I'm focusing on this one for the reasons above and because I found it to be the easiest way to play D&D online. Your results may vary.

Getting Set Up to Play D&D on Discord

Getting set up to play D&D on Discord isn't effortless but it's doable by just about anyone who can operate their phone or computer.

In order to get set up to play D&D on Discord you'll have to do the following:

Download Discord and set up an account.
Create a new server. You can use my Discord D&D game template to get set up fast.
Set up text and audio channels.
Help your players get set up.
Optionally, set up the Avrae Discord bot on your server.

There are a number of tutorial videos and help articles on the web to help you get set up if you have trouble. Otherwise, once set up, you now have to get your players onto Discord as well. Here are some steps for getting your players on Discord.

Help them download Discord and set up an account.
Give them an invite link to the server.
Help them test their audio in the audio channel.

To make things easier, I've created this Discord D&D game template. You can use this template to set up your own discord server based on my ideal settings. It includes channels, permissions, and roles suited for running a D&D game and integrating with Avrae. More on Avrae in a bit.

When your game is actually running, make sure to tell your players to either mute their microphones when it isn't their turn or use "push to talk". This prevents players from talking over one another over the same audio channel. It also prevents heavy breathing or speaker feedback taking over the voice channel when someone isn't talking. It's a huge help.

Troubleshooting Multiple Clients

Discord's wide range of clients makes it easy for players to use it on nearly any device. It also makes troubleshooting difficult if things don't work out well. Discord clients on different platforms have different interface options. When you're helping your players, you'll want to make sure you're using the same type of client they are so you know what they're going through. If they're trying to do it on a phone, you should work with them while looking at your own phone. It also helps to walk them through it over a phone call if they're having trouble getting audio set up.

When everyone's set up on Discord and able to speak and hear in the audio channel you're ready to play.

Troubleshooting Audio Dropouts

While running Discord as a DM, I sometimes had my audio drop out while talking. For players, drops on the DM's side can be jarring, pulling them out of the fiction and the narrative when the DM is trying to draw them in. Here are a few potential ways to fix audio drop-outs from the DM:

Switch off "automatically determine input sensitivity" in "user settings" / Voice and Video". Move the slider to the left to adjust when the mic begins broadcasting what you're saying.
Disconnect and reconnect to the audio channel every hour or so. Sometimes Discord gets tired.
Restart your cable modem and wifi routers before you start your game.
Switch the region of your server to a different region but one still close to your physical location.
Switch to "push to talk" for your own channel.
Turn off "Quality of Service High Packet Priority" in "user settings" / "Voice and Video".
Ensure other people in the audio channel are either muted when you're talking or using "push to talk".
Try using a different Discord client (web instead of native client, phone instead of PC, etc.).
Switch to a physical network connection to your router instead of wifi when possible.

This article on Discord describes other tips for fixing audio issues.

Sharing Visuals in a "Maps and Handouts" Text Channel

While much of our D&D game can happen over voice chat, we can drop images into Discord for pictures of NPCs, locations, handouts, maps, and parts of maps. You can add an image to the chat channel either by dragging and dropping it into the channel or uploading it directly. You can upload an image regardless of the device you're using. I recommend setting up a "maps and handouts" text channel and then locking down permissions so only you can add new images to it. This way you and your players can see the whole archive of images throughout a whole campaign.

Running Augmented Theater of the Mind

We're big fans of theater of the mind combat here at Sly Flourish and this style of combat shows its value when running D&D online. Programs like Roll20 let you run more tactical games online but have a high learning curve and require full PCs or laptops for all participants.

Instead of running tactical combat, you can run a form of augmented theater of the mind by uploading images of combat locations into the chat and then asking the players to describe where they are and what they're doing. Seeing the map is often a big help for players even if you don't display tokens for characters or monsters. Knowing generally what an area looks like is often enough.

This works equally well for exploring dungeons. You can take a full dungeon map (I personally love the maps over at Dysonlogos), screen capture and crop the relevant sections, and upload them to Discord as the characters explore the dungeon.

Sharing Images of Tactical Combat

While systems like Roll20 give you and your players great control over the battlefield, you can still run a degree of tactical combat in Discord. There are a few ways to do it but we'll focus on one: sharing images of a battle map and tokens.

As mentioned, we can take screenshots of maps and paste them into the "maps and handouts" channel so our players can use them. We can also drop maps into a program like PowerPoint, Photoshop, Gimp, or Google Presentations and then drop in tokens as a separate layer. We can then use a lasso screenshot tool to capture just the part of the map the characters can see. On a Windows 10 machine, you can press Windows-Shift-S to open up the Windows screenshot tool. Select the lasso tool and capture the part of your screen that the characters can see. The Mac has third-party applications such as Screenshot Maker that lets you pull up a lasso as well. With the image in your clipboard you can paste it right into the maps and handouts channel on Discord so your players can see it. As the battle changes, you can move your tokens around on the map and take a new screenshot.

For tokens, I am a huge fan of Printable Heroes who now has many tokens available. Search for "VTT" and you'll see them all. Black and white tokens are free while subscribing to the Printable Heroes Patreon gives you access to a wide range of color tokens. I love Printable Heroes and highly recommend supporting them on Patreon.

Text-Based Battle Map

Here's another option to better visualize what's going on in combat—the text-based battle map. This text list represents the current areas of a location, the combatants in each area, damage inflicted, status effects, and general positioning. Here's an example:

**Eastern Doorway**
Iron Mohawk Animated Armor 12
_Sabre_
Brass Animated Armor 16
_Banner_
---
**Northern Hallway**
One-eye Gnoll 4
Purple Fur Gnoll 4
_Shane_
---
**Southern Doorway**
_Arwin_
_Zarantyr_
_Shift_

Because Discord supports markdown text, this will actually render like this:

Eastern Doorway

Iron Mohawk Animated Armor 12

Sabre

Brass Animated Armor 16

Banner

---

Northern Hallway

One-eye Gnoll 4

Purple Fur Gnoll 4

Shane

---

Southern Doorway

Arwin

Zarantyr

Shift

Character names are italicized. Area names are bolded and define areas of roughly twenty to thirty feet square. Names within one or two slots of one another are considered within 5 feet. Three dashes "---" shows a distance of about 25 feet so a move action is required to move from one area to another. The number next to the monster's name is the current damage that monster has taken. We can add hordes of monsters with a "25x" in front of them such as "25x Crawling Claws".

Generally speaking areas of effect can hit creatures in an area. Of course, DMs and players should negotiate for edge cases as we do anytime we're running theater of the mind combat.

As a DM, you can keep this text in a text editor outside of discord and use it to track a battle as it goes on. You can keep track of damage on it and, when things change enough or its time to refresh the players, you can paste it right back into Discord so they can see generally what's going on.

This isn't an ideal tactical battlemap for those who prefer a 2D grid but it can serve better than pure descriptions when battles get complicated.

Running with Avrae and D&D Beyond

Once you have audio chat going, you don't need anything else to play D&D online. You and your players can play with all of the physical books, character sheets, and dice you'd normally use at a physical table. For a more advanced and integrated form of D&D in Discord you might turn to D&D Beyond and the Avrae Discord bot. D&D Beyond is the most popular online tool for managing D&D characters. Avrae (a bot now owned by D&D Beyond) helps integrate D&D Beyond with Discord. Using Avrae you can import characters, roll attacks and damage automatically, look up monsters, look up spells, look up abilities, and run initiative. In May 2020, D&D Beyond added the ability to access any paid content in D&D Beyond through Avrae. You can connect Discord through D&D Beyond and get access to any material you've purchased through D&D Beyond. This is a huge improvement and makes the bot much more valuable.

The Avrae dice roller is probably the easiest function for players to use. Typing "!roll 1d20+5" for an attack and "!roll 1d8+3" for damage is easy enough on its own without using any of the character integrations. Once integrated, though, you can type "!attack longsword" and it will roll both attacks and damage for you.

Avrae for Monsters

For the dungeon master, typing "!monster thug" will bring up the statistics for a thug in chat. You can load up monsters this way in your private "dms-channel" so you can look up monster statistics without having to leave Avrae. The same works for spells, items, and more.

You can also run monster attacks directly from Discord. Type "!ma thug mace -rr 2 adv" will have a thug roll two mace attacks (the "-rr 2") with advantage (the "adv"). You can easily reskin monster attacks with the "-h" to hide attack details and "-title" to add your own flavor text. Here's an example:

!ma thug mace -rr 2 adv -h -title "An Emerald Claw mercenary smashes you with a flanged mace!"

That command reskins a thug's mace attack into an Emerald Claw mercenary's mace attack. It's rolled with advantage (the thug's pack tactics) using "adv" in the statement, "-h" hides the details of the actual attack, "-title" lets you add your own flavor text, and "-rr 2" rolls two attacks.

This seems like a lot to remember but once you remember it, you can use and reskin any monster you have access to on D&D Beyond while running D&D on Discord.

You and your players should feel free to use whatever tools you want when playing D&D online. If you or any of your players prefer to roll dice on the table, that works perfectly well. If they want to use D&D Beyond and Avrae, that works well too. Individual players can pick and choose how much they want to use Avrae in Discord and how much they just want to do on their table. Avrae has tremendous functionality if you want it and you can use as much or as little of it as you want, including none at all.

Avrae for Fast and Easy Initiative

Avrae has one feature I found tremendously useful on the DM's side: rolling initiative for the whole group at once. As the DM you can set up an alias in Avrae to roll initiative automatically for all characters and a default monster with a single command. This trick doesn't use or require integrated characters from D&D Beyond. Instead you set up a single alias that rolls initiative for all of the characters and a default monster at once. When you're in Discord on a server that has Avrae set up, modify the following text for each of the characters in your game and paste the whole thing in at once into the Discord chat channel:

!alias rollinit multiline
!init end
!init begin
!init add -1 Banner
!init add 3 Shane
!init add 2 Xi
!init add 3 Sabre
!init add 2 Shift
!init add 3 Zarantyr
!init add 1 Monsters
!init list

The numbers in the above are the initiative modifiers for each of the characters. Once this is done you can type "!rollinit" and it rolls initiative for all of the characters. Modify the monster's initiative bonus to fit the monster you're running or add more than once monster for more complicated battles.

After that it's "!init next" or the shortcut "!i n" to go from turn to turn. The Discord channel keeps the initiative in a pinned message for the channel to show people what the initiative list is whenever they want to look it up. Once combat is done, type "!init end" and confirm that combat is over.

If your players are happy to let the system roll initiative, this is much faster than just about any other method of rolling initiative.

Avrae is full of crazy commands but I found rolling initiative for the whole group to be the most useful. It's particularly useful because its only on the DM side. Players don't have to do anything at all.

Discord: A Simple, Free, and Powerful Way to Play D&D Online

This article focuses on playing D&D over Discord because I found it to be a popular, free, simple, and powerful way to play D&D online. There are other popular methods as well and you may have your favorites. Choose whatever system you wish to help you play D&D online. If you're having trouble finding the right system and method to play D&D online or don't know where to start, hopefully this article helps you find an option with Discord. Most important is that we continue to play D&D with our friends and family. It's never been more important than it is right now.

If you enjoyed this article please support Sly Flourish on Patreon and take a look at Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, the Lazy DM's Workbook, and Fantastic Adventures: Ruins of the Grendleroot.

This article is copyright 2020 by Mike Shea of Sly Flourish.

Shared Experiences Playing D&D Online

Many of us currently find ourselves stuck at home and unable to play our in-person D&D games. If we want to keep playing D&D, we have to move our games online. While it may be harder for us to get our gaming groups together, it has never been more critical. Getting together with our friends and family to relax, enjoy ourselves, and share in some stories of high fantasy may be crucial to our mental health while stuck at home.

Many DMs have been playing games online for years and the rest of us can learn from their experiences. James Introcaso and I, for example, talked about his top tips for running D&D on Roll20 on a previous episode of the DM's Deep Dive. More recently Todd Kendrick talked to Lauren Urban about playing D&D online.

Running online games isn't a specialty of mine so I asked for feedback in this Twitter thread. The feedback I received helps support the ideas in the rest of this article. Let's look at some tools and tips for running D&D online.

Voice-Only Options

All we need to play D&D online is a tool to let us chat with our friends. There are many such tools used by D&D groups online including Discord, Skype, Zoom, and Google Hangouts. We need no other online tools. While playing, we can use all the physical stuff we typically use to play D&D at the table including books, character sheets, and dice. We don't even need a computer. A phone with one of the above audio chat programs works just fine.

Let players roll their own dice on their own table if they want to. Trust them. As a DM, we can use our own books, dice, and physical notes to run our game just as we would in a physical game. Write things down on paper if you want. Use 3x5 cards to keep track of initiative, character names, or just about anything else you need.

Beyond a way to talk online, we don't need anything else to play D&D online.

Sharing Visuals

Most text and voice chat programs have a way to share images. Discord, for example, lets you drop images right into the text channel for your server. This works well for pictures of NPCs, handouts, artwork, and other visuals. For maps, you can cut and paste the relevant parts of a map and share it as an individual image. Load up the map on your computer, screen grab the relevant portion, and paste it into the chat window so everyone can see what the area looks like around their characters. This works for both exploration of a location or for visualizing a combat location.

Some DMs have had success using Google Drawings to share multi-layered images with their players. Drop in the map and draw some shapes over it to act as a fog of war. As the characters explore you can move the fog of war around and reveal what they can see. Because it's a shared image, the players can move their tokens around as well. This works well if the players are using desktop or laptop computers but probably won't work if they're on a tablet or phone. Instead, consider capturing the relevant parts of a map and sharing them as images in your chat program.

Other DMs have had success using layered image software like Photoshop or Gimp to act as a local virtual tabletop. You can use image layers for the map, fog of war, and tokens. You can erase the fog of war layer to reveal the map and move the tokens around to represent the positions of both characters and monsters. This requires that the DM moves the tokens around, which isn't ideal, but the whole view can be shared over the screen sharing function of most chat programs or the "broadcast" feature of Discord and is more compatible with those on phones or tablets.

For tokens, you can use Game-Icons.net for excellent generic monster and hero tokens or generate your own tokens using art from the web and Token Stamp from Roll Advantage. The Avrae Discord bot, a wonderful D&D-focused bot for Discord, lets you pull up monster tokens for SRD monsters with the "!token otyugh" command. And, of course, for maps, we have the nearly 1,000 Dyson Logo maps, all perfect for digital play.

The Single-App Solution: Discord

For a simple single-app solution to play online, I recommend Discord. It's free, well supported in the D&D community, and available on the PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. The voice chat is relatively solid although drops do occur. The best way to fix consistent drops is to disconnect and reconnect to the voice channel.

The Avrae Discord bot is a wonderful way to integrate D&D Beyond into Discord. This full-featured bot includes initiative tracking; spell, monster, and ability lookups; token lookups; character sheet integration; and dice rolling. You need not use all of it, though. Using it as just a dice roller works perfectly fine, as does using it to quickly look up monster statistics. Some players can use it fully with their D&D Beyond character fully integrated while others can skip it entirely and both methods work just fine in the same group. You and your players can choose as much of it or as little of it as you want.

For visuals we can drop in pictures of NPCs, handouts, pieces of maps, battlemap images, and any other images into the text chat so players can follow along visually. Using Discord to play D&D is probably one of the easiest ways to play D&D online.

Other Online Tools

The list of tools to expand your online D&D game is nearly endless. I'll just touch on a few of the more popular ones here.

Roll20. Roll20 is a well-known and well-received web-based tool for running roleplaying games online. It has a built-in 5e D&D character sheet. Purchasable add-ons give you all of the material in the D&D core books. Getting started is free, includes the D&D basic rules, and a free adventure called The Master's Vault written by James Introcaso. Roll20 has a high learning curve and a lot of features to dig into. If you and your players are willing to give it the time to learn, it can bring the full tabletop experience to your online game.

D&D Beyond. The number one online tool for building D&D characters and online access to digital D&D sourcebooks, D&D Beyond goes hand-in-hand with online play. Players can build their characters and share them with the DM. It's integration into Discord through the Avrae Discord bot is very powerful. A popular Chrome extension integrates D&D Beyond with Roll20. None of this is needed to play D&D online but some groups might enjoy the technology integration.

Fantasy Grounds. A very popular shared tabletop application for RPGs, Fantasy Grounds is a paid application for your desktop or laptop. Like Roll20 it has all the D&D books available for purchase and integrated into the application. Like Roll20's integrated book licenses, these don't share across systems so if you start buying books for one application, you'll likely want to stick to that application. The more recent Fantasy Grounds Unity has a free version able to play in games and monthly paid versions to host games. It's client-focused nature means it tends to run smoother than web-based applications who are limited by the nature of the different web browsers we use.

For a more detailed look into these tools, check out Roleplaying Tips on Moving Your RPG Campaign Online and RPG Musing's List of Online RPG Tools

The Common Virtual Battlemap Solution: Discord and Roll20

Many DMs use a mixture of Discord for audio and video chat with Roll20 for the virtual tabletop. Some groups leave the dice rolling and text chat to Discord while others move the dice rolling and text chat to Roll20. Feedback suggests that the audio and video quality of Discord is superior that within Roll20; enough that it's worth having it as a secondary system to carry the load of audio and video chat.

This pairing works well for technically savvy DMs and players who have good desktop and laptop computers to play from. It doesn't work well for those who are using a phone or tablet to play. For them, sharing the DM's screen for maps and visuals through Discord's "broadcast" feature or sticking to pure audio and theater of the mind play likely works best. You and your group will have to decide what setup works best for your group.

Online D&D Tip: Play With Fewer Players

This is a hard lesson but an important one. Running with six players is hard for in-person games and even harder online. The latency of online services means people will often talk over one another. The more players you have, the worse this problem can get. A simple but hard way to deal with it is have fewer players. Playing with four, three, two, or even one player can go a long way to help you streamline an online game. If you have a lot of people who want to play, try splitting them up into separate groups even if they're in the same campaign.

Online D&D Tip: Simplify the Story and Situations

When it comes to understanding what's going on in a D&D game, players are in trouble about half the time. Playing online can make this even worse. Keep your story simple. Keep the plot simple. Keep the situations simple. Keep your combat encounters simple. Dig into the fun part of your story and focus on that. Laurin Urban recommends focusing more on the story and less on the complexity of the combat environment. We can put our focus on a different aspect of the game than tactical complexity, heresy to some I am sure, but useful for keeping things smooth while playing D&D online.

Online D&D Tip: Use Theater of the Mind

More DMs and players are beginning to accept theater of the mind play for D&D combat. For online games, running in the theater of the mind means things stay simple, fast, and fun. You don't need anything but an audio connection with your players to run a full game of D&D if you're willing to run combat in the theater of the mind.

Running combat in the theater of the mind goes hand-in-hand with running with fewer players. The fewer players there are, the easier it is to understand what's going on when we're describing a battle. The fewer characters, the fewer monsters. The whole situation becomes simpler, easier to understand, and easier to visualize.

Online D&D Tip: Communicate Online Table Etiquette

Playing online is different than playing in person and we need new rules of table etiquette to account for it. Discuss these with your players early and often to make your games run well for everyone.

Take extra time for tech support. When you bring four to six people online to play D&D, someone's going to have trouble with their setup. Getting all of the audio working, both in and out, is tricky. Different systems, different software, different setups; all of these complicate getting connected. When you bring in a handful of people to play online someone will have a problem.

Ask your players to come early to get set up or, better yet, set up an individual session with each of them ahead of time to make sure everything is working. Even then it may work at one time but not another so be patient and be prepared to help them out or have another player help them out. When in doubt, call them on the phone and walk them through any problems they might have.

Mute audio between turns. If you have more than a couple of players you may want them to mute their mics between turns. Latency and drop-outs can break up the smooth stream of conversation so muting mics can help prevent interruptions at the wrong time. If it gets really bad you can use the text channel to have people queue up with questions so when you're done with your (hopefully short) narrative you can go through the list of folks who have questions.

Shine the spotlight equally. When you don't have the players there in front of you it can be hard to ensure you're giving each player their due attention. This can get exasperated if some of your players are more active (and loud) than others. You'll want to pay special attention to ensure you're giving each player their due time. You might go so far as to keep them in initiative order throughout the whole game and keep going through the list to see what they will do in any given circumstances. Let players know you'll be cutting them off to bring other players in when their turn is up.

Use webcams to increase engagement. Many online DMs mentioned the value of using webcams. Not only do they help keep people more physically connected to one another but they help players to stay engaged with the game itself. Without a camera it's easy to alt-tab over and check the news. No one wants to do that.

Use headphones. Some camera and mic setups are sophisticated enough to avoid feeding audio back into the mic but many are not and even the good ones screw it up from time to time. Ask your players to wear headphones when they play. Mention it before the game so everyone's prepared.

Lowering the Barrier to Play D&D

When we find ourselves unable to get together in person to play D&D, it's worth the effort to play online. I'd say it's important. Socializing with other people is a critical component of our health. Playing D&D online takes work but we need nothing more than a good audio chat program to continue to share fantastic stories with our friends and loved ones.

If you haven't tried playing D&D online or are not comfortable doing so, give it another try. In these days of social distancing it is ever more important to our health and well being to take the opportunities we can to play games with our friends. Push yourself out of your comfort zone and have some fun playing D&D online.

If you enjoyed this article please support Sly Flourish on Patreon and take a look at Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, the Lazy DM's Workbook, and Fantastic Adventures: Ruins of the Grendleroot.

This article is copyright 2020 by Mike Shea of Sly Flourish.