As part of the RPG Writer Workshop, I had to playtest my adventure to see if it survived contact with the enemy players.
I also didn’t want to spend money and time learning a new system, when I have other things to be getting on with – writing and parenting and so forth. That ruled out using a Virtual Tabletop, this time at least.
With that in mind, I set up my own Discord server to get the game going, and then had to work out what I wanted to do with it once I did.
There are plenty of dice-rolling bots to choose from, but I also wanted a bit of functionality so we didn’t have to bounce around with checking rules and stuff. That meant engaging with Avrae, and then even adding all kinds of other bits and pieces to make her work and…
Yeah, that got old real quick.
So I ended up using the Rod bot more or less exclusively, with the occasional Avrae lookup request.
It went… OK, I guess?
Discord seems to work really well for play by post games, but not so great for the group games over voice. It felt clunky and slow.
Maybe that’s because I wanted to use pregens, and people didn’t have D&D Beyond accounts to integrate with Avrae. I’m sure with everything in place, it works like a charm, but we just had the bare minimum.
That’s my experience anyway, your mileage may vary.
I can confirm that the botify music bot is fantastic though.
I’ll be back with another post soon about my experiences with the rest of the course, and what I made with it.
jot jot ïota 