Tools for Playing DUNGEONS & DRAGONS Online Part 2

Welcome to part two of many for a series that highlights some tools that you can use to play Dungeons & Dragons. Last week, all the tools I highlighted were geared towards playing a game online. This week, I wanted to explore tools that are helpful when playing online but can also help if you meet with your group in person. Let’s get started:

D&D Beyond

I saw some comments about why I didn’t include this in the first article, but it’s simply because you don’t need D&D Beyond to play online. In its current state D&D Beyond is fantastic for character sheet management and just having digital copies of all the books. Of course, you can create and find homebrew content as well. In the future, D&D Beyond is very promising as they’re currently working on an encounter builder and I think I’ve also seen that they’re working on creating something similar to Roll20. That would make D&D Beyond extremely valuable. The catch is that unless you want to be limited to the Standard Rules, you do have to fork out some cash in order to create your characters. However, if you have a friend who is a Master Tier subscriber, they can share their purchases with everyone else in a campaign and open things up.

If you’re using D&D Beyond for your character sheet and want to use your phone, I highly discourage use of the mobile apps. They do not have character sheets on the mobile apps yet. The apps are only good if you want to read through your digital copies of the books. However, the mobile site works beautifully, so don’t worry about only having your phone at the table for your character sheet.

Kobold Fight Club

Besides putting an amazing mental image into my brain, Kobold Fight Club is a neat tool. It’s an encounter builder and a helpful one at that. Fans have uploaded the information for a lot of monsters, so you can create an encounter, put in how many characters there will be, what level said characters will be, and it will tell you how hard the encounter will most likely be and how much experience to reward your players. It also has a random button for those moments when you can’t be bothered to think of what your players will run into. The plethora of sorting tools really help KFC stand out from the rest.

Azgaar’s Fantasy Map Generator

I have never enjoyed creating maps for the worlds that I create. However, Azgaar’s Fantasy Map Generator is fantastic, and it works for literally anything that you need to make a map for, not just Dungeons & Dragons. Writing a fantasy book? Azgaar’s got you covered. Playing a different tabletop game? Use Azgaar’s. I don’t know what I would do without this tool. You can either build your map from the ground up or generate a random map. Then, you can go through and edit the map with lakes, roads, a culture map and a political map, etc. There is a learning curve for Azgaar’s, but they do have a subreddit where you can ask questions and they’ll help you out. Once you have your map made, you can save it as a PNG or a MAP file. If you save it as a MAP file, you can later load it back into Azgaar’s to work on it more or simply to zoom in and see where your players are and what’s around. I highly recommend this tool for anyone wanting to create a world map.

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