How to Upload a Portrait in Avrae
In the historic period of stay-at-home orders and social distancing best practices, it'southward a lot harder to assemble around at a friends house or a local game shop for a few hours of Dungeons and Dragons . That doesn't mean that campaigns have to stay on an indefinite pause though. Thanks to a large toolbox of remote gaming support resources, many dungeon masters are able to proceed their adventurers moving forward on a weekly ground fifty-fifty if they tin can't gather together in person.
Obviously DnD Beyond has been a major resource for tabletop RPG fans who want to go along playing at a distance. The digital toolbox allows DMs to access tons of rules, players to edit and manage character sheets, and it even has some very smart integrations with Discord. The officially-supported Discord bot of DnDBeyond, called Avrae, goes a lot further than simple roll1d20 commands and tin can be a very powerful tool once Dungeons and Dragons players and the DM master its command lines.
Like any new tool, Avrae can be incredibly intimidating when it is first added to a Discord channel. Keep in mind that there is going to exist a chip of a learning curve for everyone involved. Don't expect your kickoff combat encounter run through Avrae to be equally fast-paced as it would be in person while rolling concrete dice on a tabular array. That said, give it a flake of time and practice and the tool can end up saving a ton of time in the long run. The final thing DMs want to do is distract from the immersion and story with boring command lines of code for players to figure out, so in that location are some things that groups can do and acquire ahead of time to try to avoid that lark.
What Non To Do With Discord's Avrae Bot
Using Avrae for the first time during a live session and trying to learn the tool in the middle of a gainsay encounter is a recipe for disaster and can both kill the pace of your hazard and any run a risk that your players volition actually take to the tool with a positive mental attitude. Avrae isn't a hard tool to use, merely it does require some patience and practice during the learning curve. Whatever role thespian with a decorated schedule will assure you that the time to tackle that learning bend isn't in the middle of a session. So, first thing is showtime: Don't introduce and learn Avrae in during a real session.
Load in Character Sheets
After inviting Avrae to the Discord channel for your DnD grouping, you lot're going to want to add each histrion'southward character sheet. That'due south easiest if all the players have created a character in DnD Beyond and have information technology ready to Public. If that's the instance, but grab the URL for the character and drop in the post-obit control:
!beyond https://ddb.ac/characters/...
That's all information technology takes! After that, the character sail should be in the channel and associated with the histrion who ran that command line.
Run a Practise Combat
Making simple checks and saves like !check arcana or !save dexterity is going to be easy for the vast majority of players to go the hang of in one case their character sheets are loaded in. That'southward non going to be the problem. Combat on the other mitt... That gets a bit complicated.
The best fashion to tackle this learning curve is to schedule a special session specifically just to play around with combat in Discord. This will remove the idea of wasting fourth dimension during a regular session and give anybody the singular goal of focusing on mastering the bot's control lines.
Take this as an opportunity to toy around with some of the fauna types that will exist in your adventures, peradventure you're planning a Magic-inspired Theros campaign and want to see how your political party does against a Sphinx.
Tips for Dungeon Masters
Practice makes perfect and the tool is definitely going to get easier to apply after a few practice sessions, but there are still some control lines that DMs may desire to have conveniently fix in a clipboard while they set for each session. Here are some of the most important ones DMs will utilize:
Start a combat encounter - !i begin
Adding a monster to combat - !i madd <monster name> [arguments]
Note: Arguments are actually important to making combat run smoothly and too maybe the hardest part for DMs to wrap their heads around if they aren't used to control lines. Basically arguments are how y'all'll name monsters, grouping them together, and make other customizations.
Ofttimes used arguments:
-north <number of monsters> (ex. -n 5 adds 5 creatures)
-name <monster name scheme> (ex. -name "Orc#" -n 2 adds Orc1 and Orc2)
-group <group name> (makes all creatures in the group act on the aforementioned initiative)
-rollhp (rolls for a creature's HP)
-hp <hp> (overrides a animal's initial HP)
-air conditioning <air-conditioning> (overrides a brute'south initial AC)
Tips for Player Characters
From a player perspective, combat is actually a bit easier since they don't need to worry about loading in or managing monsters during the encounter. Instead, the main thing to master with be casting their spells and making their attacks. This takes a flake of getting used to, but is adequately like shooting fish in a barrel once y'all have a good handle on what options are available to you and how targeting works.
!i attack <set on proper noun> -t <target proper noun> [arguments]
!i bandage <spell name> [-t <target name>] [arguments]
To come across a list of available attacks, run !i attack list. That'southward about all in that location is to it and from here players and the DM just need a fleck of practice. Some players are always going to prefer actually rolling a d20 and their damage and that tactile experience may exist part of what they dear virtually the game. There's certainly nothing wrong with that, but for tables that don't mind a more digital approach, Avrae can definitely be the tool y'all're looking for with but a bit of practice.
Be sure to bank check dorsum in the near futurity for moreDungeons and Dragons news, updates, and strategy guides. Until then, roll well, adventurers!
Dungeons and Dragons is available now in hardcopies or digitally on DnD Beyond. The Avrae Discord bot is available now.
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Source: https://gamerant.com/dungeons-and-dragons-avrae-discord-bot/