COVID struck at the height of the table role-playing revival Dungeons and Dragons, and although it isn’t the worst aspect of a global plague, nerds not allowed to congregate at the local hobby shop and pretend to be elves is really worthless. Fortunately, with a little know-how, you can put the fantasy online. Computers can’t replace the personal joy of D&D, but overcoming a few technical hurdles can get you pretty close.
The technical side of putting your paper game online can be a bit daunting (especially if you’re playing with crunchy technophobes like me) as there’s no one-stop app or website that offers everything you need to play, so you have to be a little creative. I first created this guide based on the most technologically simple solutions.
E.essentially there are three aspects of it Dungeons and Dragons:
- C.ommunication
- R.ules and dice
- The table top
… and you will have to replace each of these personal things with a computer equivalent. (If you’re new to D&D in general, check out the official one new player guide.)
Level one: teleconferencing only
D&D can be played entirely as a theater-of-the-mind game, so everything for you need to play are a few friends, some agreed rules and a way to communicate. Hell, you could play around with Morse code if you wanted to, but teleconferencing programs like Zoom, Skype or Discord will probably work better, plus the addition of webcams helps to give the face-to-face feeling.
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To play this way, every player has to do their own ‘bookkeeping’, ‘die-rolling’, stats keeping and looking up rules, so everyone has a separate copy of the Player’s Handbook (essentially the basic rules of Dungeons and Dragons), a character sheet and a set of dice. From there, it’s just a matter of jumping on Zoom and telling a story together – one with a lot of math.
Speaking of math, computers are really good at it, so when you play D&D this way, you choose not to streamline the most annoying (to me) aspect of the game. Another downside to this style of play is that the ‘tabletop’ portion of the tabletop RPG is missing, so groups dealing with the tactical, wargame aspect of D&D will have a bad time, as will players who love hand -outs, props, miniatures, or actually something physical.
Also: if you’re playing with someone cheating on things, you can’t see their dice rolling – “Sure, Noah, it was another of course 20– so you have to trust your peeps.
Level two: D&D Beyond and conference calling
It cost Dungeons and Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast more than 20 years to get it right, only the fifth edition of D&D offers a free, fully integrated, easy to use, slick online portal. D&D Beyond simplifies and automates the paperwork-and-math part of Dungeons and Dragons, freeing players up for the imaginations and bad accents in the game.
You can use D&D Beyond to create characters, manage campaigns, roll dice and even create custom spells, classes, items, and more. With the online character sheets, you can attack, cast spells, win levels and basically do everything you could ever need just by clicking on your character sheet. It will add up all your modifiers and if not, and spit out the numbers you need to keep the story flowing. Dungeon Masters can create campaigns, invite players to join them and also easily share notes and handouts.
Perhaps best of all, D&D Beyond lets players share books. As long as a player has a $ 5.99 “Master Tier” account, any official book published on the site can be shared with players in a campaign. That means that only one person needs to purchase a module or rule extension and anyone can use it. In a move reminiscent of the neighborhood pusher in an 1980s anti-drug ad, Wizards of the Coast even releases the first flavor for free: The basic version of the D&D Rules is now available, for nothing. Go ahead, try it. You will not become addicted to it a game…
Level three: combination of a virtual tabletop, D&D Beyond, and conference calling
The pinnacle of online D&D is adding a virtual tabletop to your game. This allows players to move around on a shared map, roll virtual dice for everyone to see, and give the dungeon master a ton of in-game options to spice things up up.
There are a number of apps and websites intended to allow players to all use the same shared space (and millions of pages of nerd arguments about what’s best and why), but the most used virtual tabletop is Roll 20, a free web-based app that is relatively simple to usable for players, providing everything you need to embark on your shared fantasy adventure.
Players will need to have a basic understanding of how computers work, and it can be a bit tricky at first, so if you’re playing with noobs, you should probably start with a game with no expectations to figure out how to do it. Also: I highly recommend the Beyond20 Chrome extensions that D &D. Beyond with Roll20.
As with pen and paper role-playing games, the Dungeon Master has a lot more work to do in Roll20 than the players – the prize of being God, I guess – so when you’re DMing, you need to prepare. Fortunately, there are a ton of in-depth tutorials online for you to study. Start here.
Roll20 lets you run full campaigns from Wizards of the Coast and indie developers, complete with pre-made maps, documentation, NPC tokens and everything else you need to get started, and even offers some free one-shots and mini-campaigns . To make it online transition as simple as possible, you should probably start with a pre-made game.
Once you have climbed Roll20’s first technical hill with a few modules or two, you can roll your own cards, import your own cards, create your own encounters and otherwise create your ideal fantasy world.
It’s possible to use Roll20 to play an improvisational game on the fly that can make anything happen, if you’re fast enough. You can even add sounds, music and custom effects, and dig into macros and API scripting if you want to get really nerds …and it’s D&D, so you probably want to get really nerdy.