While my introduction to D&D was in-person, most of my D&D experience has been online. There are many different tools out there for online play! So far, though, I’ve preferred a pretty simple approach that uses Discord for sessions and campaign organization.

In this post, I’ll talk about different ways I’ve used Discord as a Dungeon Master.

Our group transitioned from using Skype to Discord for our sessions a while ago. Discord lets you do voice or video calls, and it also has the ability for you to set up servers with different text or voice channels. For example, you could have a voice chat for sessions and a text chat for out-of-character discussion and session scheduling.

You can also assign roles to people and permissions based on those roles. So, for example, you could have a text chat for everyone to chat in, and then a text channel that only the DM can post in (but that others can see) for distributing handouts or making announcements.

This is the channel setup for my previous campaign where we played through Curse of Strahd.

The intro channel introduced what the different channels were for. I could post in it as the DM, and the players could view it.

The campaign_schedule channel was where I posted when the next session would occur.

Campaign_expectations was a channel where I stored information about the campaign and expectations for how we would interact with each other. For example, one of the expectations was that players would let me know if they could not make a session and what we would do in that situation.

Campaign_handouts was where I would post handouts the players received. Magic item stats, images, and other things I wanted to show them would live here.

Campaign_questions was a channel both the DM and the players could post in. That channel was intended for any questions people had about the campaign, their character, or D&D in general.

The chat channel was for general messages and conversation within the group. I’d post reminders about an upcoming session here, and players could also post memes or other discussion.

The random channel is the same as the chat channel, in case someone wanted to post something while a different conversation was happening in the chat channel.

The voice channel never got used, because I organized sessions as direct video calls in Discord outside the server.

This structure was fine, but I wanted to try some different ideas in the next server I made.

So here’s the discord I recently set up for my new campaign:

More channels! But, hopefully, it’s also more useful. I’m planning on holding sessions within the Discord server this time, so that’s part of why there’s more here.

These channels are split up into groups for more organization. The info group has channels that only I, the DM, can post in, but the players can view (with a few exceptions for now). The session group has channels for playing our sessions. The general group has channels for everyone to use at any time.

In the info group are the schedule, npcs, jukebox, and player-handout channels.

The schedule channel is where I’ll post when the next session is.

The npcs channel will hold portraits, names, and descriptions of each NPC the players will meet. This campaign has a small cast of NPCs, so I’m hoping this channel can help everyone learn the NPCs’ names/pronouns and connect with them. This one is hidden until we have our first session.

The jukebox channel will hold links to playlists for the different areas and boss fights in the campaign. This one is also hidden until the first session.

The player-handout channel is a container for the player handout PDF I sent everyone.

In the session group are the session-chat, session-handouts, and session voice channels.

Session-chat is a text channel for messages relevant to the ongoing session.

Session-handouts is a channel only I can post in and the players can view, for visual aids and other handouts during the ongoing session.

Session voice is where we’ll host the sessions of the campaign. This means I won’t have to create a new group DM for each session, and all our correspondence during the session is kept in one place.

In the general group are the chat, random, campaign-questions, and general voice channels.

Chat and random are both for any discussion outside of sessions.

Campaign-questions is for specific questions the players might have for me or each other about D&D or the campaign.

The general voice channel is in case people want to chat in the server outside of a session.

I hope this all comes in handy! I’ll be interested to see whether this server setup gets more use than my Curse of Strahd campaign’s Discord server.