Remote D&D Done Easy (ish)

As I grew older, friends changed and so did adventuring parties. My role as a Dungeon Master remained the same but different players came and went as grades, classes and schools evolved. However, in high school I met what would turn into a life long group of friends, thus cementing my adventuring party forever more. We adventured through everything TSR first, then Wizards of the Coast, could create ... and on breaks, we'd wander through our own worlds, unharnessing imaginations galore. This wondrous group continued to dungeon delve into early college, rarely taking breaks for education or work schedules. It was a D20 or bust world for us ...

... and then we all missed our saving roll against "Growing Up" ...

Our closely knit party began to move apart for various reasons and those adventures into the realms of imagination diminished. We did manage to placate our thirst to some degree within the new worlds of online gaming. Digital Massive Multiplayer Online games became a mainstay for us since it still allowed us to adventure out together and our friendship was the most important aspect of gaming. We were also blessed to discover new adventurers along the way that we built close friendships with over time. Eventually our party had grown and even received a name (Daffy Blokes) but that passion to play the ol'dice and pen RPGs was still there and we weren't able to gather together enough to satiate our appetites. 

Until now ...

The argument for using 5E was primarily focused on its community support, app support and overall presence in the world. Dungeons & Dragons 5E is EVERYWHERE ... and I mean EVERY...FRICKIN...WHERE ... which meant, as a DM, I have resources available without even looking past the first page of a Google Search. This is a huge assist for me, since I no longer have the time to invest in preparing games like I did when I was in high school. Life, family and career just make that level of dedicated commitment impossible. 

Next came the map or "play surface" ... for years we used whiteboards, miniatures and other devices to create visual representations for the worlds we wandered throughout. Our group of adventurers are very visual learners so we have always enjoyed such tools since our start decades ago. Digitally, there are several products that offer a great solution including Astral VTT and Fantasy Grounds. However, it was Roll20 that offered two things above and beyond: tons of resources and low cost. I was able to get off the ground with a full campaign in ten minutes and being web based, I could utilize my Chromebooks to play (and so could my players). The script is easy to manipulate, especially for the several code monkeys in our party, empowering us as users to get the most out of the system. The only area I feel Roll20 falls short is in their character sheets, in particular, for D&D 5E. Roll20 was built to cater to ALL RPGs, not just D&D, so the character sheets are "loose" in design. They can be manipulated in many ways, empowering the user to create fantastic solutions but that requires a large investment of time ... something we just don't have.

So in my search for other ways to manage characters, keep compliant with rules and ease our own time in developing characters I stumbled across a magnificent product: D&D Beyond. Being a long time lover of the original Curse engine for my multitude of WoW Addons (I was known for having more than 150ish - sad), I found excited to discover this application. And even now my excitement continues to explode with all the development team  has been doing with D&D Beyond. Character development, character management, party management, campaign management, encounter creation, rule references and the upcoming combat tracking - Schuuu-WING! The biggest thing that all my players enjoyed was the cost sharing ... each of us can purchase a resource book and share among everyone in the campaign. Spreading the costs out so that we may all partake of the D&D 5E world just makes us want to get more stuff ... /hatsoff to the D&D Beyond Team.

So once a week we gather our intrepid band of adventurers in a Discord channel ... six players of the role-playing type along with their goofy Dungeon Master (Me). We all join into our ongoing Roll20 Campaign to witness first hand the cities, towns, dungeons, fields, roads and camps we adventure across. We load up our avatars in the D&D Beyond system so that we may keep track of our successes, treasures ... and failures. And from there, we continue forth into the realms of D&D 5E ... all from the cozy seats of our homes ... despite having distances more than 100 miles between some of us. We have conquered the challenges of large gaps in the space between our players. 

Now if we could only figure out time ...

-Bones

Post Script

If you use Roll20 and D&D Beyond in combination such as our group does and all your players utilize either Chrome or Firefox as a web browser, I cannot recommend enough that you go fetch Beyond20. Beyond20 is a Chrome and Firefox extension that lets you integrate the D&D Beyond character with Roll20. You can click on any of the side panels in D&D Beyond to roll the dice directly into your Roll20 window. It supports all roll types in your character sheet, monster pages and spell pages. This simple extension allows you to play nearly everything in your D&D Beyond character while using the Roll20 to demonstrate results, track combat and provide the dice rolls. The app has worked flawlessly for us since we discovered it and has made an already simple play setup ever better.