D&D 5E Anyone Have Exp With Discord+DDB or mRPG app?

[doctorbadwolf]

So, my wife recently discovered an rpg chat app called mRPG, that allows you to input characters’ stats, skills, etc, set a DM and Players, and rolls dice using those numbers, all in a normal messenger app framework.

My co-DM then pointed out the Avrae discord bot, that integrates dndbeyond with discord. I have no experience at all with discord.

Has anyone here used either of these options? If so, what did you think of it?

We don’t plan on using the mRPG for fights, unless we find that it handles them well as a supplement to a separate video chat or something, but rather it was suggested as a “between sessions” way to do downtime, deal with scenes that only a subset of PCs need to be present for, etc.

The discord thing would be more where we would hope to see combat tracking functionality, if it works well.

 

[mewidner]

SlyFlourish has a complete article on how he used the combo along with some examples. I have the bot set up myself and I have been trying it out since I have some players that don't have a laptop and only have a phone. Please no comments, I shake my head also.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

SlyFlourish has a complete article on how he used the combo along with some examples. I have the bot set up myself and I have been trying it out since I have some players that don't have a laptop and only have a phone. Please no comments, I shake my head also.

lol most people I know don’t have laptops, so fair enough.

 

[pukunui]

One of my groups tried playing over Discord with the Avrae not last night. If you know how to use it, it works pretty well. The DM was fine with us using real dice and just calling out our results, so we didn’t have to use Avrae. You can use it to import your PC stats from DDB, which is cool, but I don’t think it accounts for everything. I was still having to manually add my bonus dmg for being in a rage, for instance.

Avrae can do advantage and disadvantage and even eleven accuracy!

I think Discord has the best audio of all the online options I’ve tried.

You can use video on Discord although I haven’t tried it.

Avrae can also track initiative, although we didn’t try that either. The DM had maps and pics in PowerPoint slides and had an embedded Excel table in the slides to track initiative. He used the share screen function to show us the slides.

If you don’t need things like dynamic lighting and such that VTTs offer, then Discord w/ Avrae seems like a good option.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

One of my groups tried playing over Discord with the Avrae not last night. If you know how to use it, it works pretty well. The DM was fine with us using real dice and just calling out our results, so we didn’t have to use Avrae. You can use it to import your PC stats from DDB, which is cool, but I don’t think it accounts for everything. I was still having to manually add my bonus dmg for being in a rage, for instance.

Avrae can do advantage and disadvantage and even eleven accuracy!

I think Discord has the best audio of all the online options I’ve tried.

You can use video on Discord although I haven’t tried it.

Avrae can also track initiative, although we didn’t try that either. The DM had maps and pics in PowerPoint slides and had an embedded Excel table in the slides to track initiative. He used the share screen function to show us the slides.

If you don’t need things like dynamic lighting and such that VTTs offer, then Discord w/ Avrae seems like a good option.

Thanks! The sheet integration, initiative, and video chat in the same program might be worth it alone, come to that.

 

[Quickleaf]

I've been playing around with Discord, the Avrae dice bot, and Beyond20 chrome extension (which allows you to access D&D Beyond sheets/monsters in Discord).

It works ok enough, but there are some issues that make it less than ideal for me and my group:

• Avrae still requires players to understand a few basic commands (all beginning with !, such as <!init list>). For tech savvy folks, it's easy peasy. But for folks who have trouble remembering commands or just want to click a button, it can be quite frustrating.
• Speaking of initiative, apparently because of built-in Discord limitations, Avrae does not offer a constantly visible initiative count. That's something I've learned to rely on in my face-to-face games and VTTs can handle easily. However in Discord+Avrae you need to enter <!init list> to view the initiative count. Each player also needs to remember to enter the command to end their turn. Easy to forget, and apparently the DM doesn't get a master control over that (in case of forgetful or frozen players).
• Avrae makes some assumptions about how you play the game. For example, when you call up that initiative list, rather than listing monster hit points, it provides a narrative description of monster HP using something made up by the D&D Beyond folks: injured = 51-99%, bloodied = 16-49%, critical = 1-15%, and then unconscious. Not a big deal, but if you're like me and prefer to be transparent about monster HP, then there's no systemic way to do that with Avrae; it needs to be done on a case-by-case basis by addending some extra code to the <!init add> command.
• While you can do voice in Discord and still roll dice & access other channels. It looks like Discord lacks the functionality to do a video chat and roll dice/access channels on your server at the same time. It seems like it's an either/or proposition. There might be a way to have both a video chat open & a server for dice rolling/text open, but darned if I can figure it out.

 

[rozgarth]

I've been playing around with Discord, the Avrae dice bot, and Beyond20 chrome extension (which allows you to access D&D Beyond sheets/monsters in Discord).

It works ok enough, but there are some issues that make it less than ideal for me and my group:

...

• While you can do voice in Discord and still roll dice & access other channels. It looks like Discord lacks the functionality to do a video chat and roll dice/access channels on your server at the same time. It seems like it's an either/or proposition. There might be a way to have both a video chat open & a server for dice rolling/text open, but darned if I can figure it out.

As best as I can tell, there isn't any way to get around your first three bullet points. But I was able to run video chat through Discord with my group while also accessing our text server with dice rolling through Avrae. What I did was start a group video chat, and then just click on your server on the side of the screen. Discord will do a picture in picture display of the video chat next to the normal server chat. Note that it will only show the person currently speaking, though, rather than a gallery view of everyone at the table. For us, that wasn't a problem.

I'll say that I didn't think it was worth it to use all of Avrae's combat tracking features because I thought it would distract from the game to have everyone trying to remember commands. So we basically used Discord for the video chat, I'd occasionally paste in images of monsters/NPCs in the text chat, and we used Avrae exclusively as a dice roller and as a way to quickly look up spell/item/class features in Discord (this was really useful for us to keep from having to swap windows into an internet browser, etc.). I didn't use screen sharing at all--instead, if I wanted to show the players a map, I would just take a screenshot of the part of the map that was visible to them and paste it as an image (we did theater of the mind, so the map images were just to give a sense of the layout of various rooms).

All of the players had their character sheets saved locally with them or printed out in front of them (because we weren't using Avrae's combat features, I also didn't bother with Dnd Beyond integration). If players wanted to use their Dnd Beyond character sheet, they could just have it open on their screen. I also tracked initiative on my end manually just like playing around a tabletop.

Overall, I was really happy. I'd never played dnd online before, but we've had two sessions on Discord so far now (a third tomorrow), and it's about as close to actually playing around a table as possible.

 

[pukunui]

I’m going to try running one of my games via Discord tonight! I’ll let you all know how it goes.

Pity that the voice chat function only shows one person at a time. I like that with Zoom I can see all of my players, even when I’m sharing my screen.

Can you screen share and do video at the same time in Discord?

 

[rozgarth]

I’m going to try running one of my games via Discord tonight! I’ll let you all know how it goes.

Pity that the voice chat function only shows one person at a time. I like that with Zoom I can see all of my players, even when I’m sharing my screen.

Can you screen share and do video at the same time in Discord?

I haven't tried it with video chat (you can definitely do screen share + audio chat, though). This site seems to say that you can do video chat + screen share (Discord Screen Share and Video call: A Complete, 10-Step Guide). It sounds like you're able to toggle between seeing people's faces and seeing the shared screen. Hopefully that helps!

 

[pukunui]

I haven't tried it with video chat (you can definitely do screen share + audio chat, though). This site seems to say that you can do video chat + screen share (Discord Screen Share and Video call: A Complete, 10-Step Guide). It sounds like you're able to toggle between seeing people's faces and seeing the shared screen. Hopefully that helps!

Thanks! I’ll check out that page before my game tonight.