Building an online TTRPG toolkit - Part 2: Group communication

Hello again! If you're here, you probably know I'm doing a series of posts on the toolkit I've woven together for running my D&D campaign online. This is the second of those posts.

Day-to-day (well, most days) communication with my group happens through Discord. Until coming back to TTRPGs, I'd never been a member of more than a couple of Discord servers (mostly for playing WoW years ago). Now I'm on several for various things including gaming, solar energy independence, software support, and a couple of other interests.

My group has its own instance where we share gaming content, as well as a bunch of more social things. Even if we were playing together physically, Discord offers useful ways to record and maintain information, so long as you have something like Obsidian as your source of truth. After all we're here in Brogo, and in four other locations. Playing around a table is going to be infrequent at best.

What you can see here is the channel list on our Discord server; they are chat channels unless noted otherwise. Here's what's going on in them:

• server-info - announcement-only  information about the server and what's going on there
• code-of-conduct - the code of conduct for the server
• intros - the place where new members write a post introducing themselves to others
• welcome - the automated welcome to the server channel
• speakers-corner - admin announcement-only for members to read
• bot-channel - where we run output from a couple of bots
• yarning-circle - our general discussion channel for any topic
• the-shed - a place to show off our crafting, creations, hobbies, tools, and toys, whether TTRPG related or not
• the-good-oil - a good news only channel where we can share things in the world that inspire us or make us happy
• game-lab - a place to discuss game mechanical questions
• in-game-chat - pretty self-explanatory; the place where chat and notes from games go
• in-game-economy-and-rewards - a place to record in-game transactional things such as purchases, treasure and other items, and GM rewards which is also connected to the West Marches bot and site we run (see below)
• dramatis-personae - a forum channel for conversation about characters, builds, and related things, also linked to automated posts from West Marches
• the-realms - a forum channel that is the front stage of our game where adventure-related content and summaries are posted by West Marches and scheduling happens
• the-village-hall - the voice and video channel where we gather for gameplay sessions

While this quite extensive and certainly far more than is needed, I'm trying to think ahead to possible growth. The current list can change if needed, but for the foreseeable future, it's probably about right.

If you've used Discord, you've probably encountered a Discord bot. These tools provide additional functionality within Discord, and I have a small set enabled:

• Avrae - the official D&D bot, add things like dice rolling, encounter and combat management, and links to D&D Beyond character sheets, monsters, and other resources.
• West Marches - the bot that connects our West Marches site with Discord. I'll be talking about this tool in another post.
• Kenku Integration - a bot to allow piping of sound effects and music from a range of sources (see below) into a voice and video channel. Another thing I'll be talking about.

For Discord, that's about it. There are no secrets. It's not fancy. It does the job.

Tomorrow, we'll look at VTTs and the choices we've made for our campaign.