I want to write about my campaign, but do so I want to write about creativity and tools I use. So before I write that i thought I’d write a little on tooling and developments in general. My campaign started in early 2022, I sat down and with a laptop and a browser I searched for helpful tools, and also resources on my chosen subjects.

My chosen subject was Dungeons and Dragons 5e, the Forgotten Realms campaign, the Sword Coast and at the time the beginners campaign Lost Mines of Phandelver. I picked Dungeons and Dragons as the known system by the majority, and the requirement for simple and fun seeking to escape angst and darkness of the real world at the time, simply kick down doors and write stories of adventure not tragedy and adversity.

Helpful tools I considered at the time were wikis with background information for the campaign, rules websites and pdfs, a way to manage the game, and a way to manage the sessions. Due to what I had chosen as my subject I did not need to draw initial maps of places, countries or realms they existed in books and wikis and digitally online I just needed a way to collect those references. I did not need lore and history it was the same story for those. My players needed characters and due to geo diversity and the still looming global pandemic we needed online connectivity, characters sharing and communication.

Communication and connectivity came in several parts chat and audio which was a blooming tech business in the wake of the pandemic, we chose for no good reason Discord, a initially free Software as a Service (SaaS) featuring a simple server a few minutes of working out access controls and a small community sprang up for my players or at least for the people invited to consider being players. But not every one had it, so a step back was taken a step back to Facebook a group formed with all the invited people to let me collate links to resources and invites and game session events for them to be able to choose to play or not, everyone had Facebook it was an easy choice to use for the initial group management and event co-ordination. We all know arranging gaming sessions is cat herding. This lead to needing material for Session Zero and to be able to collate that, this lead to (Pinterest)(https://www.pinterest.co.uk/digitaladeptmk2/dnd-session-zero/) and a board dedicated to material for new players or creation of new characters and facilitating session zero. I’ll talk about session zero in a different post, but Pinterest is ideal for sign posting resources from across the web. This included settling on (D&D Beyond)[https://www.dndbeyond.com/] for character management and limited campaign management. Again initially D&D Beyond is free for all, allows limited characters and Campaign management and some sharing.

This meant I could see player characters at creation, and at stages of game play and levelling up, we were provided a dice roller by D&D Beyond and by Discord in the form of a bot which links Discord and D&D Beyond Avrae that was a new feature to my games and gaming.

The campaign tools in D&D beyond are limited, but I was not creating I was mainly reusing, and having the game module Lost Mines of Phandelver or the Beginners Box turn out to be a freebie along side the core rules thanks to the System Reference Document (SRD) and original Open Gaming License(OGL). Made it an easy choice I didn’t really look for alternatives. But I did augment my organization with one simple addition Google Drive and Docs, a place to store PDFs which can be shared, a place to manage docs on notes and campaign notes in a familiar markup that has far more capability than a simple box but no where near the complexity of Software platform s such as World Anvil etc, but I didn’t need it at the time.

So there we were, early 2022 with the following list;

That’s a lot of information, and a lot of browser based software and services, along side distinct applications and integrations, and we still don’t have a Virtual Table Top, and I’d dismissed map making and world building software. So we were not even intending to use the whole gambit of “required” tools and technology. But we were using all of this to replace what in it’s heyday had been word of mouth, books, pencils and dice in your front room.

All of that is development, it sounds like a lot but to put that list together and to progress those decision trees took maybe a week at most, a few minutes to an hour per product and mainly some screen time for me to traverse the player Q&A and satisfy my needs to organise and their needs to be fulfilled.

  • A popular social network solved initial scheduling, organization and communication needs.
  • A popular chat and desktop sharing service solved those requirements for connectivity and live communication augmented by a bot.
  • The core product platform solved character and gaming admin issues augmented by a bot it supplies and integrates with the chat platform.
  • Several smaller resource sharing platforms provided resources and extended the core product platform.
  • A known document storage and admin platform solved the administration and storage needs with access controls.

There were gaps in what we recognised we needed, but for session zero we had everything, organised event date, platform for execution, a way to communicate both synchronously and asynchronously as required, record and time keeping and the ability to come together regularly and play at a virtual table of sorts.

At the time no one product offered all of this in one good platform for free or even a agreeable price when you are just tentatively considering playing and not committed, which was a consideration. Would we all get on, online. Would I be able to heard the cats. Was the game on offer compelling enough to spend an initial fee on etc. That is a discussion in it’s own right I guess. But for this point in time the problem was solved this way.

There was no thought of Artificial Intelligence prompts, learning models. No idea of the storm coming in the gaming world with the OGL and more, there was not even really consideration of a Virtual Table Top I was a theatre of the mind and rule of cool GM, always have been. But that was a short sighted thing on my part and had discounted the VTTs on offer due to price and complexity in every case not seeing a real need. But we will come back to that decision in another post.

For now this article speaks to the technology and developments we encountered setting just a small game and with the hindsight of the 18 months that followed allows me to give you a glimpse of trends that changed after these moments in time. Hopefully I’ll write more posts about all of them shortly.