I took a little break from gaming after last Christmas, but then life happened and here I am, 3 months later, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, no longer able to play face to face even if I wanted to.
My son, who I was running the game for, is chomping at the bit for some game time with his friends and I’ve been investigating how to do this.
In my last post, I talked about some of the tools I used to help run games, and many of them were already online tools, but I still need to bridge the gap a little to allow for a fully online game. I’ve seen numerous articles online about this, but at the moment I’m thinking a combination of Roll20, which I’ve mentioned before, and Discord.
I know I’m slow on the uptake where Discord is concerned. I only recently created an account as a result of World Anvil and GM Binder having channels, and to be honest, I thought it was just another chat program and I kinda dismissed it. But then I saw an article online somewhere pointing out how cool Discord bots were and that there was a D&D bot called Avrae that does all sorts of cool stuff.
I haven’t got my head around all of it yet, but you can create character sheets in Google Docs (amongst other things), and import them into Discord. Avrae can keep track of combat initiative and track dice rolls. It knows the stats of all the monsters in the rule books (I think it gets this data from Beyond D&D), plus you can create and import critters from CritterDB and use them in fights.
I’ve still got a ways to be comfortable using all this, but I’m hoping to run a game or two over the Easter break with my son and his friend.