Dungeons Async Dragons

I’ve been playing D&D for over 25 years. Something new I’m having fun with is playing RPGs asynchronously via Discord, mostly D&D. This is primarily a way to solve the Scheduling Problem (without using the recent DM-centric patch that was circulating) by largely avoiding scheduling in the first place. It turns gameplay into a “snackable” experience that can be squeezed in in short bursts anywhere you’re logged in.

I got the idea from a random call for an async campaign in a Star Trek podcast Discord (like ya do); while that game of the Curse of Strahd sadly fell apart due to being a bit too asynchronous for everyone, I was inspired to try it myself.

My Setup

A while ago I created a personal Discord server to run live sessions for a campaign for two of my original high school gaming group since we’re no longer local. We’ve had bursts of activity over the last four years but between work, parenting, and time zones we’ve had long gaps in the story. It has been fun continuing an adventure as opposed to our previous habit of doing a one-shot session when we were all together for some trip.

More recently I started a new game with some book adventures I had on-hand with both of my college roommates and part of one of their in-person D&D groups.

This is all powered by the D&D Beyond integrations with the Avrae bot which works pretty well but has some sharp edges that I’ll get into later.

Of course it feels a little uncomfortable tying these long running games to Discord with their recent pre-IPO changes and I’m sure eventual enshittification… but for now I’m hoping my Nitro subscription buys something reasonable.

Channels

For each campaign, I have four main channels plus a video channel for real time sessions:

• #ic-dialogue
  • Intended for in-character speaking as well as descriptions of people, places, and things
• #ooc-discussion
  • Intended for socializing, rules questions, and out-of-character planning
• #dice-tray
  • Avrae is hooked up here and this is where combat happens
• #maps
  • Sharing screenshots of maps to show latest movement
• #live-session
  • A video channel

It sometimes feels like too many channels but it helps keep the “noise” of combat contained. I also have a private channel for each player to share information that they may learn from a roll.

Roles

To help manage multiple games in one server, I have separate roles set up for each group of players, which in turn have permissions to the right set of channels by game. The private channels I just grant permissions to the individual user. (When I first invite someone no channels are visible.)

The automatically managed Avrae role only has access to the #dice-tray channels, each of which is tied to the separate !campaign in Beyond.

Maps

I’m paying for the Master Tier of Beyond, which allows me to use the Maps beta as well as share my sourcebooks with my players. I use the tool to update combat maps periodically and then post screenshots of that in the #maps channel.

Gameplay

Combat is pretty straightforward since the Avrae bot’s !init mode will @-mention players or me as our turns come up.

Non-combat is a little harder, since players can be jumping in at different times, or one player can be more active than others with a specific NPC. As DM I try to give everyone opportunities to engage. I’ve thought about using a conversational initiative order to help manage key scenes better, giving everyone a structured chance to shape the story. I think both games I’m running are still figuring out a good balance.

For both games we started (or restarted) with a live session to do the adventure hook in-character and get used to the online tools. This worked pretty well. For one of the games we’ve done an occasional brief live session, flexibly scheduled, when it feels like we need faster back and forth for a combat or exploration encounter.

Notifications

I do allow Discord to send mentions, as well as any new activity, for the IC and OOC channels. That way my phone’s notifications view is kind of the inbox for my campaigns, and I can keep the game going so at least the players mostly aren’t waiting for me as DM.

With my players mostly being Eastern Time, I usually make sure the game is in a good state for them before my bedtime, so if someone wants to take action in their morning it’s ready for them.

Pain Points

Tools

Unfortunately all of these in theory great digital tools are a little bit half baked. Avrae works well a lot of the time, but there are a few conditions and spells it doesn’t understand, which requires manual workaround by me as the DM (usually involving separate counters or HP management). The command syntax I also find impenetrable; things are not grouped the way I would expect, multitoken argument quoting is handled poorly, and different commands with similar arguments are handled inconsistently. With practice it gets better but the learning curve is steep. (I should probably set up some !servalias.)

The Maps tool on Beyond seems cool but was clearly designed for live sessions only. My players can only view the map if I leave the session open (it seems to be spinning up some live session instance on the backend that expires after 30 minutes). Hence all the screenshots posted to the #maps channel.

The low latency synchronized token movement is nice during live virtual play but totally unnecessary for this kind of asynchronous play; the player could just update and submit and other players who load the map could see that static state. This should be easy and cheap to build but it wasn’t a product use case priority.

Also frustrating is that even during a live Encounter, the state in Maps is completely separate from the state in the Avrae bot, even though rolls and such are forwarded through the linked channel. As such even for live sessions we’ve kept everything in Discord, because we might have to continue asynchronously. I do find the token quick reference a nice way to jump to specific abilities even if I activate them via Avrae.

That brings the other main limitation of Maps: the mobile layout is pretty terrible. Lots of unnecessary borders, weird tap target behavior (a token should always be more easily grabbed than an area), and important buttons overflowing off the screen.

I’m working around this for now, but it does seem like something that could be made more usable. Maybe I need to add some CSS hacks on top of this to make it flow a little better on my phone?

Rules

I’ve learned that there are a few things to be selective about within the D&D rules to keep asynchronous play flowing and fun. First, I need to keep encounter sizes manageable. Too many monsters and it’s either too much for me per turn or too long between player turns that they lose context. For one of the campaigns we had a big battle that took over 4 weeks of real time to complete 22 rounds. Second, I need to avoid “stunlock” type effects that put a player out of commission for multiple turns or otherwise prevent them from choosing to take their interesting combat actions. For future encounters where the monster’s primary threat comes from such spells or abilities, I’ll need to make adjustments.

The other thing I’m trying to balance is different player habits: some are more Online than others, or at least more active in their play, and I want to make sure that everyone has a chance to have fun. I think I’m still learning how much I should actively manage that versus let players have their own comfortable level of engagement.

Based on this I don’t think my approach would work for more than four players, because the time between turns would just be too long.

The Adventure Continues

The key takeaway in spite of these problems is that we’re having fun. I’m hopeful it will get better on the Wizards end, or I’ll find some better processes that improve the experience.

Separate from running these two D&D games I’m also playing in a Discord single-channel game of Dungeon Crawl Classics; there the DM is mixing all actions in one thread in a channel, with out of character commentary marked using the spoiler notation.

Are any of you running asynchronous games? What tools are you using? What is working and not working for you?