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misslakill.medium.com/how-to-set-up-a-dischord-server-for-dnd-f91a496a879
Selena Houle
5 min read
For the last three years, I’ve been an avid DnD player. Looking forward to the next session
is what gets me through a long week.
But with recent events forcing everyone to stay home, the campaign I run has been put on
hiatus indefinitely.
So, I decided it’s the perfect time to try running a session using Discord.
The Steps
1. Sign up for Discord
2. Create a New Server
3. Add Categories and Channels
4. Invite A Dice Bot
5. (Optional) Add Custom Member Roles
6. Send Out Invites
From here, you’ll be asked to pick a server name, a cover image and to invite some
friends. BOOM. You now have your own Discord server.
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Add a server icon located on the left side panel of the
app interface.
After some tweaking, I settled on five main categories that cover everything I need in a
server.
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1. A place to sort out scheduling, provide
bot commands (more on this later), and
post announcements.
2. A place to play long term campaign
settings.
3. A place for players to take turns running
one-shots and experimenting with new
character concepts.
4. Private channels where players can store
notes, stats and acquired items.
5. A catch-all for memes, Youtube videos
and off-topic discussions players might
want to have outside of role-playing
sessions.
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From here you can decide who has access to the channel. For a more thorough
explanation on creating private channels, there is a great tutorial on the subject here.
If you want a bot that can roll dice, look up spells and build character sheets, I’ve heard a
lot of good things about Avrae.
Unfortunately, I found the commands a little too complicated and wanted to keep things
simple for my players.
This is why I ended up going with Sidekick. This sophisticated little bot by ArtemGR is
designed for one thing and one thing only, rolling dice.
To get the most out of Sidekick, I did two things. I created a dice tray channel under the
Campaign category where players can try out the commands and keep track of their roles.
I then created a channel under the General category called Rolling Dice. After setting
channel permissions to read-only for players, I posted instructions on how to use
Sidekick.
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Dice Tray Channel created under the Campaign
category.
1. Full permissions.
2. The ability to manage custom Campaign or One-shot channels.
3. This role has limited permissions and cannot make changes to category, channel or
server settings.
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The DM role won’t be necessary if you are the only person running a game on your server.
But, if you have players that would like to try it out or rotate on a weekly basis, additional
permissions will make it easier to run their sessions on the server.
For a detailed guide on how to create and manage user roles, check out the official guide
from Discord support here.
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