How to Prepare for an Online Session of D&D

Justin:

Ulf woke up. He was in a cave, but he saw a face above his. It was Herlia. Ulf, we thought you were dead. Ulf sat up and saw Hepom sitting not too far off now, sporting a few more days’ growth of beard. Ulf looked around. He could see the exit from the cave a few yards away. It was snowing outside. About a week. We still don’t know what happened, Ulf, but we are sure glad to see you up and walking. We… we didn’t know what to do.” Hylia said as her voice trailed off. of breathed deeply. I’m sorry.” Ulf looked into Herlia’s eyes. I’ve failed you these past few weeks. I should have been more, but I thought just about myself. Herlia was taken aback. Ulf, we didn’t blame you for what happened to Hüde and Kujari. Ulf began to stand up and walked towards the snowy cave entrance. He turned and looked back at Herlia. I was not asleep or in a coma. Instead, I was taken back to the home of my ancestors. There, I lived for weeks in a tribe, and I had to perform some sort of test. Actually, I still have to perform the test, the trial. Early, I stood up and rubbed her temples. Ulf, you’re not making any sense. Ulf turned and looked at her once again. We have to go north. and conquer the tribes of the North. Silence. Then Hipon piped up and said, well, when do we leave? What would you like to do? Welcome back to today’s show. I’m your host today, Justin Lewis, and in the world of being a dungeon master there are now essentially two types of dungeon masters. There are those that prefer playing in person and those that prefer playing online. And actually I guess there’s probably a third group that likes either one. But today I want to give a small guide to preparing to preparing for an online session for those people who feel like the online format may be limited or they’ve just never done it before. Sorry about my voice cracking there. But hopefully this guide helps you feel ready and prepared for a nice game with your friends online. And this is generally what I do when I prepare for my one shots, which you can sign up for by going to betterdungeonmaster.com slash one dash shot. It is free and you can see this firsthand. So first step. find your players. As always, the first step to any session of D&D is to find players. And with an online game, your pool of players has both narrowed and expanded. Because now you can play with anyone all over the world, but you do need to find people who are willing to play online. Me, I can’t even get my wife to play online, so I resort to asking people I’ve never met in person over my podcast. Namely, people like you. So second thing you need to do is send out a player brief. Second thing you need to do is prepare the story. You need to write a full story and the nice thing about playing D&D online is you don’t necessarily need to change the story to fit the online format. For the most part, you can do everything online that you can do in person. Naturally, whispering in people’s ears is a bit hard. However, it’s still possible. You can, there are tools that allow you to send discrete messages, and if need be, you can just email each individual person because theoretically you will have each of their emails. So prepare the story, write it down, and we have tons of podcast episodes that should help you with that and get you where you need to be. So the second thing is you need to choose theater of the mind or virtual tabletop or a VTT. So the difference is with a theater of the mind, and this is more of a tech choice than anything, with theater of the mind, you don’t need more than one software. Well, I guess, let me explain. So a virtual tabletop is essentially a platform that allows you to connect audio visual for seeing your face and hearing your voice, but it also allows you to play music over the connection. It also allows you to display a map whenever you are in combat or a similar situation. That’s a VTT. A theater of the mind is where you simply use an audio visual connection like Zoom or Google Meet, whatever have you. I use Riverside just because I actually record my one shots online. But you have this visual and audio connection and that’s it. And if you need to, I suppose you could share your screen and show anything you needed to. You rely mostly on your descriptive words to tell people where they are, even in combat. And even in Theater of the Mind, or just using, sorry. And even just using Zoom or Google Meet, you can still share your screen to show visual aspects of your campaign. And with that, you can include audio aspects as well. VTTs are just a little bit more native, so they’re a little bit more set up for things like that. For example, when you share a map in combat, you can create tokens and assign each of those tokens to each of your players. and that allows them to move the player in the combat rather than you having to ask them where to go and things like that. And you need to choose this, and I guess number three is a little bit more than this, you need to choose your whole tech stack. So are you planning on streaming the encounter or the session? Are you planning on recording it like I am? In both cases, you need to make sure you understand exactly what your tech stack will be. So in my case, dabbled around using a few things. I’m actually recording this on the 29th of April, which is the day of our last one-shot. And I’m planning on using Riverside, which is a podcasting platform, so it allows you to podcast with guests online. I’m planning on using that as the audio visual portion of the session, which will record the show. And then I will use Roll20, which is a virtual tabletop. to actually play the game. And if that doesn’t work, then I will actually probably switch to just using Roll20 and then using a, I believe it’s called Streamlabs, which is a desktop streaming where you can capture what’s going on on your screen and then stream it out to either YouTube or whatever. And that’s kind of my backup. And then if that doesn’t work, I’ll probably resort to Discord and things like that. But as you see, you need to choose your tech stack and also, Be very aware of the fact that things might not work out. People might not have microphones, headphones, their internet might not work. Playing online, there’s a lot more technical snafus that can go wrong, so you need to be aware of that and plan ahead. Number four, probably one of the most important ones you can do is send out the player brief, okay? And you would do this just like you would do it in any in-person session or things like that, especially if you’re in one shot, but a player brief has it’s like a packet of information or or Segments of information. It’s not necessarily packet. I guess you can send an email or send multiple emails, but It has very important information for the player to get ready for the session and that starts with character creation. So Information about hey, you can have these types of characters. You can’t have these types of characters so forth and so on. So in the one shot that I’m running today, and obviously, you know, no spoilers because this will be out after the one shot, but I told the characters or the players, they can make any character they’d like. The world is in, the session will be set in my homebrew world of integrity, which has its own pantheon of nine gods, and that’s it. So if they are connected to a deity, they should let me know and I’d give them further information. But. As far as characters and classes, feel free to go forth and do what they want. Generally with Oneshots, I’m pretty flexible. Now in hindsight, I would tell my characters, or tell my players not to do any character that can breathe underwater. And the reason why that’s important is because the Oneshot takes place on a cruise ship, and spoiler alert, but the cruise ship goes down, right? Naturally, that’s what happens in Oneshots. And actually that brings me to the next point that you should include in your player brief, which is information about the situation. So in this case, the players will find themselves on this cruise ship, and mind you, integrity is set in a high fantasy world. So this cruise ship is really kind of top of the line. There are a few countries that have banded together to create this marvel, essentially, and it’s fueled by the resources of one… country called the Bastion of the Crown. It’s fueled by the ingenuity and the technical know-how of the Kula Uwea Confederacy and then it’s fueled by the technology of the Sivarish, sorry, it’s fueled by the technology of the Sivarish Protectorate. So it’s kind of this joint creation of a few countries. So with that, the players, I told them you have to make sure that your character is from one of these countries because the ship is actually going from the Kula Uwea Confederacy to the Sivirish Protectorate and then finally to the Bastion of the Crown. So all of your characters need to have a reason to be on the ship and to go there, right? And with that I also explained a little bit of the situation around the world. Okay, so this ship is first of its kind, like nothing else like it. And it’s also coming around in a time of disunity. So the world as a whole has become very unorganized and disintegrated, okay? So allies have severed and are now kind of looking at each other as enemies. And the whole world is in a commotion. So that’s why the ship is so very important. It’s kind of a symbol of the world kind of knitting itself back together. So that’s the situation, that’s the information I gave my characters about the situation. Now, the next thing you need to include is any information about the world. So for example, like what I said about the… the gods, the deities. So in integrity there are nine gods and each god has kind of their own domain. And one important thing about the gods is that their alignment constantly shifts, okay? So every year, and this is kind of how they gauge their zodiac, every year there is a lawful good god and then there is a chaotic evil god, all right? And during those years, those two forces are directly opposed. Okay, and every year it changes up randomly. And a lot of effort and time in other areas of the world is spent in figuring out which god is good because that determines some of the major events that will happen and things like that as far as political events or natural disasters things like that. So that might be something I would include in my brief, but in this case I didn’t because none of my characters decided to be a cleric or a paladin. But I did extend the invitation to them saying, hey, if you would like more information, reach out to me. Another bit you need to know about this is that a lot of this information can be exposed or you can display through exposition in the game. So for example, the cruise ship is technologically powered by a substance called Spark, which is a, it’s actually a magical drug that was first designed. kind of in other parts of the world, and then it came to the Sivirish Protectorate, and the government actually didn’t regulate it or whatever, and many engineers and scientists found that you could use this drug to create a powerful energetic substance, right? So the entire ship is powered by this drug, this very volatile drug called Spark. That’s something that the players will figure out in game because exposition and things like that, right? So again, you definitely need to include information about the world, but don’t give too much, right? Make sure that it’s salient to what the player needs and relevant. Lastly, you need to include links. So you need to include links to the online campaign. So if you’re using D&D Beyond, which I neglected to mention, that’s another tool that I’m using in my tech stack. That’s essentially where all the players are making their characters in a place where I can see it. and I can actually use it to make encounters and things like that, which will come in very handy. You need links to the audio and visual, so I sent out links to Riverside for my players, and then links to the virtual tabletop if you use it. So I sent out links to Roll20. And that’s essentially what you need to send in the player brief. Again, it doesn’t need to be one single email or whatever. You can just make sure the information gets to your players and they feel ready. Number five. You need to… plan any encounters that you need. And what I mean by this is, you need to prepare the stats and the situations so that way when the time comes, you don’t have to spend precious time doing that, but instead you can give your full attention to your players. Breaking the flow is not a very good thing in D&D unless it’s intentional, in which case have at it, right? So what I did was I looked at the chain of events and on a cruise ship it’s very nice. I suppose maybe it’s railroading, but it is what it is. That’s kind of the situation. They have limited choices as far as what the major events affecting the cruise ship are going to be. And then next you need to prepare any maps you need if you’re using a virtual tabletop. So in my case, I use Dungeon Alchemist, which is an awesome tool. It’s actually a 3D tool on Steam that you can purchase. And what it does is it allows you to create very in-depth maps for different situations. And I can actually, well, if you sign up for our Dungeon Master Guild Level 1, you can get access to a lot of the maps that we create and download them for free. So you can upload them to your VTT or whatnot. But essentially, Dungeon Alchemist allows you to drag and drop different elements into a map. So you can… click a specific room you want to create, you draw the shape and then you click the check mark and it auto-populates using AI that room and then you can go ahead and customize it using different objects, different floor tiles and things like that. And let me tell you, when I first backed it as a Kickstarter, it was very, it was pretty sparse, but now it has so many options, including Gingerbread House as one, Ice House. You can actually make caves now, which is a pretty cool feature. It’s just becoming way more. Developed and in depth so now it’s the time to get on it because it’s just gonna get more in depth Last thing you need to do is follow up with your players The common bane of the dungeon master is not getting players to come to the sessions or having players bail things like that Even on one shots that happen because someone listened to a podcast and signed up with me people bail You know all the time And when I say bail, I don’t necessarily mean that they just decide not to come. Oftentimes, it’s like family issues or emergencies or things like that, but it does happen a lot. And so you do need to be flexible and follow up with your players the day of or the day before just to make sure that they have the right time, the right links, and there’s no issues, right? Especially if you’re new to being an online DM or if you’re trying to do it in a professional sense, you wanna make sure that all your ducks in a row so that way people come back and play with you again. So there you have it, there’s my guide to preparing for an online session of D&D. It’s not hard, honestly. It’s basically just like planning for an in-person session. You just need to add the technical aspect and do a little bit more communication and follow-up because if people don’t hop on, you can always reach out to someone else and get them on the link and have fun anyways. So if I missed anything, go ahead and let me know. Reach out to Instagram at the… Reach out to Instagram at howtobetterdm. Again, this episode is hopefully helpful to you for preparing for online sessions. If you do want to test out your online sessions, reach out to me or sign up for one of our one shots coming up and you can do that at betterdungeonmaster.com slash one dash shot. We’ll be back next week for another amazing episode, but until then, let’s go ahead and roll initiative.