Due to the events around us, I am looking at ways to take our group online. I'm completely lost in how to do this and am really seeking some genuine advice. We have all of our character sheets, campaign notes and so forth here on D&DB. I'm hoping to have a way to still use this to our advantage. But how can we communicate, roll die, and more easily and all. I have a couple of guys who are not overly strong in understanding how to do too many apps or programs running and want to keep it good for all without loosing the experience. Help please!
With the lockdown, and even before, we use Discord for our chatting and audio with RPBot for rolling dice, and a lot of people use the Avrae bot instead, which is the official D&D Beyond bot.
You can also use various virtual tabletops. I don't use any for my games, so I won't recommend one, but Discord and RPBot is perfect for us.
Discord is popular. Webex is offering 90 days of free webconferencing and is generally the gold standard for videoconferencing. It doesn't have bots or UI tools, just screen and/or app sharing, but it gives high quality A/V.
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First D&D set: 1980 red box. Haven't stopped playing since. :)
My wife is the techie of the group. For our last session, which we adapted about a day before go time, we used Google Hangouts. Everyone just used their dice, I used the D&D Beyond Combat Tracker, and everything went pretty smoothly one we figured out one of the player's microphones wasn't working 😅
With that being said, we're moving to Discord for our next session. It's really cool, but a bit intimidating on my end. I'm not sure if I'm up for combat using Avrae yet... 😅
Can you tell me more about your screen share? I have a lot of custom maps and stuff we are using and nothing has really been supportive of this.
through discord you can share an application to others in the chat for them to watch. I have a program that shows my maps and I can move icons around for mobs and players. Pretty easy to do.
Pretty sure Zoom is also a pretty popular program for audio / visual sharing. A small thing but I would also recommend Roll20 if you have a bit of patience for learning some of the most basic how-to's for getting around with it (and if you prefer a grid for more tactical combat). I wouldn't be surprised if someone in the D&D Beyond Community on discord was willing to donate an hour or so to just showing you around the site and features. Another benefit to Discord is that D&D Beyond has an accessible community there, and the bot Avrae is seeing more and more use.
I'm giving a trial run tonight with Avrae and Discord with one of my groups to see if we can make it work. If so we might have a winner. Thanks everyone for your feedback!
I reccomend using the app Zoom. Only one person needs an account, and can share the link to everyone else via email. Then they all join the call, and not only can you see each other, but you can also share your screen. So if you can't trust your players to roll and be honest about it, the host can screen share a dice roller. It's how my group played a few days ago, and it seems okay. There is also Roll20, a website. I have an account, but it's SUPER complicated with controls, buttons, and certain ways to do certain things, and I don't have patience to figure it out. However, I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult.
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I love roleplaying, message me so we can set something up.
I talk everything D&D, message me for questions, chat, arguements, or roleplay!
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Due to the events around us, I am looking at ways to take our group online. I'm completely lost in how to do this and am really seeking some genuine advice. We have all of our character sheets, campaign notes and so forth here on D&DB. I'm hoping to have a way to still use this to our advantage. But how can we communicate, roll die, and more easily and all. I have a couple of guys who are not overly strong in understanding how to do too many apps or programs running and want to keep it good for all without loosing the experience. Help please!
With the lockdown, and even before, we use Discord for our chatting and audio with RPBot for rolling dice, and a lot of people use the Avrae bot instead, which is the official D&D Beyond bot.
You can also use various virtual tabletops. I don't use any for my games, so I won't recommend one, but Discord and RPBot is perfect for us.
We went online as well. Using discord for voice and video. People roll their dice like normal. Have a program to screen share for maps and stuff.
Discord is popular. Webex is offering 90 days of free webconferencing and is generally the gold standard for videoconferencing. It doesn't have bots or UI tools, just screen and/or app sharing, but it gives high quality A/V.
First D&D set: 1980 red box. Haven't stopped playing since. :)
Can you tell me more about your screen share? I have a lot of custom maps and stuff we are using and nothing has really been supportive of this.
My wife is the techie of the group. For our last session, which we adapted about a day before go time, we used Google Hangouts. Everyone just used their dice, I used the D&D Beyond Combat Tracker, and everything went pretty smoothly one we figured out one of the player's microphones wasn't working 😅
With that being said, we're moving to Discord for our next session. It's really cool, but a bit intimidating on my end. I'm not sure if I'm up for combat using Avrae yet... 😅
through discord you can share an application to others in the chat for them to watch. I have a program that shows my maps and I can move icons around for mobs and players. Pretty easy to do.
Pretty sure Zoom is also a pretty popular program for audio / visual sharing. A small thing but I would also recommend Roll20 if you have a bit of patience for learning some of the most basic how-to's for getting around with it (and if you prefer a grid for more tactical combat). I wouldn't be surprised if someone in the D&D Beyond Community on discord was willing to donate an hour or so to just showing you around the site and features. Another benefit to Discord is that D&D Beyond has an accessible community there, and the bot Avrae is seeing more and more use.
I'm giving a trial run tonight with Avrae and Discord with one of my groups to see if we can make it work. If so we might have a winner. Thanks everyone for your feedback!
I reccomend using the app Zoom. Only one person needs an account, and can share the link to everyone else via email. Then they all join the call, and not only can you see each other, but you can also share your screen. So if you can't trust your players to roll and be honest about it, the host can screen share a dice roller. It's how my group played a few days ago, and it seems okay. There is also Roll20, a website. I have an account, but it's SUPER complicated with controls, buttons, and certain ways to do certain things, and I don't have patience to figure it out. However, I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult.
I love roleplaying, message me so we can set something up.
I talk everything D&D, message me for questions, chat, arguements, or roleplay!