Hey I'm going to run my first campaign with a bunch of my friends from discord. We are all in different states and time zones so obviously we have to do this online. I'm having some trouble not just using this app but also finding tools to run this game online. I'm mainly looking for the best (preferably free) maps, tokens, etc. If I can't find what I want on here then I will take a link to a different site that is compatible with dnd beyond and discord 😊
I personally use D&D Beyond for Character Sheets, Discord for Voice Chat, and Owlbear Rodeo for the battlemaps.
My process is to design battlemaps in Inkarnate, build the encounters in D&D Beyond (or my notes app). I upload the battlemaps to Owlbear, build out the fog of war using the Smoke and Spectre extension. On game day I start discord, hop into a voice channel with players and have Kenku.fm sending music for ambiance to my discord server. For most of the session we're actually sat looking at the Owlbear screen for our battlemaps.
Discord is divided into servers, categories, and channels. I have one server for all my games, a private catergory for each game/campaign which only players in that campaign can see. Then I have a few channels for each category as you can see below. Usually these are - Session Zero/Set up, Character Creation and Development, Group Chat, Memes & Off Topic, Lore and Story, Session Recaps (for notes about previous sessions), Maps (of settlements or important locations).
My owlbear screen usually looks like this (last night's session actually):
As you can see there's a lot here. I have my initiative tracker open as the party ended the session having killed off bugbears and sent a doppleganger fleeing. The hexagonal tokens are my player characters, the round ones are NPCs/Enemies. The grey out areas are fog of war (through which only I have visibility. There is dice rolling baked right into owlbear, and there are drawing tools that allow for the quick and simple drawing of spell effect areas, written notes or anything else. In addition, the extention I use (Smoke and Spectre) allows for dynamic fog of war. That is to say each player when they log on can only see what their character can or already has seen. You'll notice status/effect rings around the bugbear tokens, these all come from owlbear. Everything in these two scenes were 100% free with the exception of the tokens (for which I paid some money). For full disclosure while you can achieve all of what I do for free, I do pay a subscription for Owlbear because it's worth it for me as someone who runs multiple games and at $35 a year to support indie developers - great value. The map was a recreation of Wave Echo Cave hastily put together by me in Inkarnate. Do check out Inkarnate's instagram - https://www.instagram.com/inkarnaterpg/?hl=en as it has some great examples of what can be created. It's got a good free tier, but if you choose to subscribe you get access to more stuff at like $25 per year.
Now, here's a round up of every tool I can think of that you might encounter. Just to balance out my bias towards Owlbear & Inkarnate.
Owlbear is less laggy and less bloated than Roll20 and is far more friendly across different devices (mobile/PC/Laptop/Tablet etc). It has a whole host of extensions so you're able to tailor the experience more to what you want to have. https://owlbear.rodeo It's built by two folks from Australia and has an incredible Discord server of helpful folks. Cannot recommend it highly enough especially as it is free to start with, but it's paid tier is not terribly expensive for the increase in stuff you get. It's now on it's 2.0 version and is a lot better than it's 1.0 version.
Roll20 has tried (and in my experience) failed to be an good all in one solution. It's a really unfriendly interface and not the easiest to use. That's based on my experience and the experience of 18 players over the last three years. We've slowly moved away from R20 over the last six months. For the money they have, they ought to be ashamed of
Foundry is another attempt at an all in one solution. It is unjustifiably expensive to buy outright and then properly host, and a massive security risk if self-hosted.
Shard Tabletop is less well known, but pretty interesting VTT attempt that combines the battlemaps and the sourcebook info. It's a little old fashioned in the way it looks, has a bit of a learning curve but can function well. I'm just not a fan.
Demiplane is an alternative to D&D Beyond and works incredibly similarly to D&D Beyond which isn't much of a surprise because from what I understand it was made by the original people behind this site. I use it for Pathfinder and I know other GMs who've been using it to test out Daggerheart. The character sheet, campaign, and sourcebook tools are incredibly and work well.
Inkarnate is THE place to be designing and building your maps. They've got an incredibly helpful discord server of people willing to offer advice and feedback, as well as galleries to share and download other people's maps if you're more pushed for time. There isn't a better solution...and I've tried dozens of the darn things.
Chronica and Kanka are campaign management tools. You can essentially build your game world there and track the NPCs and quests, and all other kinds of stuff. Both are relatively expensive and to be honest, a notes app is probably a better solution. The difference with these is the access to your world that it can provide to your players if you're into that kind of thing.
D&D Beyond is the place that I use the most for the character sheets, sourcebooks. Combined with Avrae which links to my discord server I have a trackable dice roll log which really helps. Since WotC started selling the physical digital bundles for the same price my local game shop charges for just the books...well it just makes sense to get any D&D content from their shop (not the D&D Beyond Marketplace - instead dndstore.wizards.com).
D&D Beyond - Maps - are an absolute joke and the designers should be ashamed that they put something so limited into the public's hands. WotC (and Hasbro) are big enough companies that they could've put a whole team on this that could and should have got maps to a place that could compete with Owlbear, but instead have had their backsides handed to them by an indie team of two. It's an inexcusable mess being in alpha does not change or alter this fact.
Two Minute Tabletop is a great place to get assets - maps, tokens, and the like. Highly recommend if you don't want to design your own.
Heroforge is a great place to design and create minis...if you have a subscription you can download those minis as tokens, portaits or even 3D printable files. I tend to subscribe at the beginning of a campaign - get the tokens for my characters - then unsubscribe until I need it again. It's the most cost effective measure for me.
Donjon is a great place for random tables, world and even map generators, it's not my go-to place, but is really quite cool. Also free!
Roll20 is hands down the best and easiest free tool. And probably the only vtt your players will have heard of. Find some battle maps with google search(resize them to 1 mb or below) and start rolling dice 🥃
You could probably find some decent maps online. I like to make my own though. I use Inkarnate to make my maps but it is a bit more time intensive and takes time to master it. Dungeon Scrawl is also very good, it is also pretty basic though.
As for other tools I use discord and roll 200 for communication and VTT.
Maptool you can get it here. there are multiple frameworks you can use i suggest this one, Rod Takahara has a slick parser that you can paste monsters from DDB into and it will add it to the game Monster manual. Note Maptool is free, the Framework is free, but the learning curve is huge. The Maptool community is very active in both forums. so if you run into trouble you can ask question.
Roll20 is an option however in this case if you are using the free version you have limited storage and you would have to purchase the monster if you wanted easy to use tokens that would have the monster info linked to the token
There is also Fantasy Grounds. I do not suggest this unless you have more money than common sense as the VTT just to play is is either a subscription, everyone pays 39 for the standard license or the dm outlays 149 and that is before purchasing any books.
D20Pro is another option it there is a price tag but not nearly as steep as fantasy grounds at 50 dollars for a gm license which includes six guest licenses However its support for 5e is meager at best.
next on my list is The Foundry one time 50. dollar fee when combined with D&D Importer and D&D Beyond Gamelog both of these features are pay features but they vastly improve the quality of game life as players can opt to run their characters from the D&D Beyond App with the D&D beyond gamelog and the D&D Beyond can import content from D&D Beyond Monsters and encounters
Hey I'm going to run my first campaign with a bunch of my friends from discord. We are all in different states and time zones so obviously we have to do this online. I'm having some trouble not just using this app but also finding tools to run this game online. I'm mainly looking for the best (preferably free) maps, tokens, etc. If I can't find what I want on here then I will take a link to a different site that is compatible with dnd beyond and discord 😊
Thanks in advance fellow DMs!
Roll20
Foundry
Avrae bot for Discord
And you can check the Tools drop down at the top of this webpage.
I personally use D&D Beyond for Character Sheets, Discord for Voice Chat, and Owlbear Rodeo for the battlemaps.
My process is to design battlemaps in Inkarnate, build the encounters in D&D Beyond (or my notes app). I upload the battlemaps to Owlbear, build out the fog of war using the Smoke and Spectre extension. On game day I start discord, hop into a voice channel with players and have Kenku.fm sending music for ambiance to my discord server. For most of the session we're actually sat looking at the Owlbear screen for our battlemaps.
Discord is divided into servers, categories, and channels. I have one server for all my games, a private catergory for each game/campaign which only players in that campaign can see. Then I have a few channels for each category as you can see below. Usually these are - Session Zero/Set up, Character Creation and Development, Group Chat, Memes & Off Topic, Lore and Story, Session Recaps (for notes about previous sessions), Maps (of settlements or important locations).
My owlbear screen usually looks like this (last night's session actually):
As you can see there's a lot here. I have my initiative tracker open as the party ended the session having killed off bugbears and sent a doppleganger fleeing. The hexagonal tokens are my player characters, the round ones are NPCs/Enemies. The grey out areas are fog of war (through which only I have visibility. There is dice rolling baked right into owlbear, and there are drawing tools that allow for the quick and simple drawing of spell effect areas, written notes or anything else. In addition, the extention I use (Smoke and Spectre) allows for dynamic fog of war. That is to say each player when they log on can only see what their character can or already has seen. You'll notice status/effect rings around the bugbear tokens, these all come from owlbear. Everything in these two scenes were 100% free with the exception of the tokens (for which I paid some money). For full disclosure while you can achieve all of what I do for free, I do pay a subscription for Owlbear because it's worth it for me as someone who runs multiple games and at $35 a year to support indie developers - great value. The map was a recreation of Wave Echo Cave hastily put together by me in Inkarnate. Do check out Inkarnate's instagram - https://www.instagram.com/inkarnaterpg/?hl=en as it has some great examples of what can be created. It's got a good free tier, but if you choose to subscribe you get access to more stuff at like $25 per year.
Now, here's a round up of every tool I can think of that you might encounter. Just to balance out my bias towards Owlbear & Inkarnate.
Owlbear is less laggy and less bloated than Roll20 and is far more friendly across different devices (mobile/PC/Laptop/Tablet etc). It has a whole host of extensions so you're able to tailor the experience more to what you want to have. https://owlbear.rodeo It's built by two folks from Australia and has an incredible Discord server of helpful folks. Cannot recommend it highly enough especially as it is free to start with, but it's paid tier is not terribly expensive for the increase in stuff you get. It's now on it's 2.0 version and is a lot better than it's 1.0 version.
Roll20 has tried (and in my experience) failed to be an good all in one solution. It's a really unfriendly interface and not the easiest to use. That's based on my experience and the experience of 18 players over the last three years. We've slowly moved away from R20 over the last six months. For the money they have, they ought to be ashamed of
Foundry is another attempt at an all in one solution. It is unjustifiably expensive to buy outright and then properly host, and a massive security risk if self-hosted.
Shard Tabletop is less well known, but pretty interesting VTT attempt that combines the battlemaps and the sourcebook info. It's a little old fashioned in the way it looks, has a bit of a learning curve but can function well. I'm just not a fan.
Demiplane is an alternative to D&D Beyond and works incredibly similarly to D&D Beyond which isn't much of a surprise because from what I understand it was made by the original people behind this site. I use it for Pathfinder and I know other GMs who've been using it to test out Daggerheart. The character sheet, campaign, and sourcebook tools are incredibly and work well.
Inkarnate is THE place to be designing and building your maps. They've got an incredibly helpful discord server of people willing to offer advice and feedback, as well as galleries to share and download other people's maps if you're more pushed for time. There isn't a better solution...and I've tried dozens of the darn things.
Chronica and Kanka are campaign management tools. You can essentially build your game world there and track the NPCs and quests, and all other kinds of stuff. Both are relatively expensive and to be honest, a notes app is probably a better solution. The difference with these is the access to your world that it can provide to your players if you're into that kind of thing.
D&D Beyond is the place that I use the most for the character sheets, sourcebooks. Combined with Avrae which links to my discord server I have a trackable dice roll log which really helps. Since WotC started selling the physical digital bundles for the same price my local game shop charges for just the books...well it just makes sense to get any D&D content from their shop (not the D&D Beyond Marketplace - instead dndstore.wizards.com).
D&D Beyond - Maps - are an absolute joke and the designers should be ashamed that they put something so limited into the public's hands. WotC (and Hasbro) are big enough companies that they could've put a whole team on this that could and should have got maps to a place that could compete with Owlbear, but instead have had their backsides handed to them by an indie team of two. It's an inexcusable mess being in alpha does not change or alter this fact.
Two Minute Tabletop is a great place to get assets - maps, tokens, and the like. Highly recommend if you don't want to design your own.
Heroforge is a great place to design and create minis...if you have a subscription you can download those minis as tokens, portaits or even 3D printable files. I tend to subscribe at the beginning of a campaign - get the tokens for my characters - then unsubscribe until I need it again. It's the most cost effective measure for me.
Donjon is a great place for random tables, world and even map generators, it's not my go-to place, but is really quite cool. Also free!
DM session planning template - My version of maps for 'Lost Mine of Phandelver' - Send your party to The Circus - Other DM Resources - Maps, Tokens, Quests - 'Better' Player Character Injury Tables?
Actor, Writer, Director & Teacher by day - GM/DM in my off hours.
Roll20 is hands down the best and easiest free tool. And probably the only vtt your players will have heard of. Find some battle maps with google search(resize them to 1 mb or below) and start rolling dice 🥃
You could probably find some decent maps online. I like to make my own though. I use Inkarnate to make my maps but it is a bit more time intensive and takes time to master it. Dungeon Scrawl is also very good, it is also pretty basic though.
As for other tools I use discord and roll 200 for communication and VTT.
VTT that i can recommend
Maptool you can get it here. there are multiple frameworks you can use i suggest this one, Rod Takahara has a slick parser that you can paste monsters from DDB into and it will add it to the game Monster manual. Note Maptool is free, the Framework is free, but the learning curve is huge. The Maptool community is very active in both forums. so if you run into trouble you can ask question.
Roll20 is an option however in this case if you are using the free version you have limited storage and you would have to purchase the monster if you wanted easy to use tokens that would have the monster info linked to the token
There is also Fantasy Grounds. I do not suggest this unless you have more money than common sense as the VTT just to play is is either a subscription, everyone pays 39 for the standard license or the dm outlays 149 and that is before purchasing any books.
D20Pro is another option it there is a price tag but not nearly as steep as fantasy grounds at 50 dollars for a gm license which includes six guest licenses However its support for 5e is meager at best.
next on my list is The Foundry one time 50. dollar fee when combined with D&D Importer and D&D Beyond Gamelog both of these features are pay features but they vastly improve the quality of game life as players can opt to run their characters from the D&D Beyond App with the D&D beyond gamelog and the D&D Beyond can import content from D&D Beyond Monsters and encounters