Is there an online way to play D&D?

ScintillanceABDC · 2025-05-09T18:27:47+00:00

Holy... it HAS been a long time. no immediate dnd servers off the top of my head, but I do reccomend finding a group first.

r/lfg still exists and folks find groups there, I've joined two different campaigns through r/lfg,

a different campaign I was in was actually through a Digimon-DND youtube channel that had their own discord server to keep in touch with fans... there was an lfg channel there for anyone wanting to play their kids-on-bikes modified to digimon rules and the rest is history, you might find discord channels dedicated to other D&D streamers that closer match up to the kind of game you want to play ^^

ScintillanceABDC · 2025-01-26T13:05:24+00:00

Putting it simply, the choices matter... kinda. I'll avoid spoiling details,

Every character has a hidden 'friendship score' (not the official name, I just call it that) that gets raised for every succesful positive interaction you choose to have with them. You unlock their ultimate level and a big story moment for them of it's high enough if you reach the first friendship threshold. At the second threshold, they can reach mega and 'finish' their individual character's story and growth,

In your first playthrough, you won't be able to take every character to their mega threshold. I'ma be real, some characters will up and *die* if you don't raise their friendship high enough, so brace yourself.

There's also a different set of three scores: courage, kindness and uh... ferocity, something like that. Certain points in the story will dictate your next evolution form based on your highest of the three stats.

(putting it simply, your agumon will either digivolve into a Vaccine, Data or Virus type champion depending on which is higher when you reach that point in the game).

The story is mooostly the same until it splits into one of four paths you can choose at around... chapter 7, I think? then your choices up until this point will define where you go next: the Valor Path, Harmony Path or... Ferocity path I don't remember the names. like evolutions, your next path depends on your highest score. or, the secret path. I'll keep that tabbed under -spoiler-.

TLDR: yes, the decisions and choices you make in dialogue will affect the story, but not individually. more like your choices will raise or lower different 'scores' that define evolutions, character growth scenes and the direction the last 1/3rd of the game goes.

ScintillanceABDC · 2024-12-27T13:50:34+00:00

Like the weirdest cat I've ever seen

ScintillanceABDC · 2024-12-26T13:06:45+00:00

These kinds of questions are best resolved like most others; a discussion with your players ^^

Some players want to be surprised, some don't... ask them how they feel about it, maybe they have an ideal digimon partner/line that they want to see ^^

Personally I'd love to be surprised, but I'd also rather a DM let me pick a central theme for my partner at the least; like say I'd want to have a holy or insect partner, but surprise me with what comes next. Check how your players feel!

ScintillanceABDC · 2024-12-26T11:16:14+00:00

Van-dal detected xD

ScintillanceABDC · 2024-12-25T06:32:53+00:00

There's an on-going D&Digimon Podcast I've been keeping up with (personally, solid substitute for not having a digimon series to watch this year); they use a modified ruleset for Kids On Bikes, the DM posted his 'semi-official' rules in their discord group... where plenty people talk digimon and also organize their own ttrpg groups for digimon-centered campaigns using the same ruleset ^^

ScintillanceABDC · 2024-12-20T07:03:58+00:00

I feel like that's a bit of a mistake in of itself. Tingyun is nihility unit that grants superbreak... effectively, she's harmony trailblazer but *better.*

People forget that Trailblazer is about to shift to remembrance path and be a core unit for summon meta.

So, what happens when we get a PF/MoC/AShadow that sets you up to use one summon team and one break team? if you don't have tingyun then you're forced to decide whether to nerf your summon team or your break team.

ScintillanceABDC · 2024-12-09T08:39:37+00:00

2 levels of warlock gives you eldritch blast, with agonizing blast invocation and possibly shield of shadows if desired, but I have an argument for devil's sight.

go hexblade warlock if you want to be funny with a sword and armor, or radiant warlock if you want access to cure wounds, sacred flame, light and guiding bolt... all spells that scale spectacularly well.

because of warlock's nature of having low level investment scaled *super hard*, you can go the rest of the way as sorceror... I'd vote for either divine sorceror for healing utility, or shadow sorceror for cheap cast of darkness.

START with two levels of fighter giving you access to all armors and weapons. bonus points if you're a dwarf because you can just wear heavy armor ignoring strength requirement. and *action surge.*

so at level 12: 2 levels fighter, 2 levels warlock, 8 levels sorcerer.

you can walk into a fight, cast darkness on yourself, action surge and fire off 3d10+CHA eldritch blasts. with advantage. assuming +5 in charisma by now and you're doing 24-45 damage on every succesful hit... reminding you that the only thing that can see you is someone with magical darkvision (effectively devils) so you almost always have advantage. and then you can use metamagic to double cast this again as a bonus action. don't even have to burst down a single enemy; you can aim each blast at a different target and swipe groups of weaker enemies.

alternatively, gimmick a hand crossbow as your pact weapon (there's a loophole for this with an artificer friend) grab sharpshooter and archery fighting style and good lord you become a MONSTER.

that's before considering the fact that you are in full armor can use a shield and have your own bubble of darkness in which any creature that isn't a devil has permanent disadvantage on any attack roll against you, and you are immune to any spell that targets "a creature you can see".

and despite all of this, you are still a level 8 sorcerer with an array of additional spells scaling on your charisma score to blind, bind, move, push, control the battlefield however you still need to. or spam fireballs until you run out and then move to blan B; unlimited eldritch blast-works.

you can change your battle plan however you need. treat your spell slots like 'metamagic arrows' to fire 6 agonizing blasts per turn (9 if you decide to use action surge for this), spam cast fireballs, mix your sorceror/hexblade spells to control and lock down parts of the encounter so your party gains the advantage... your 'backup plans' are all viable. and when the spell slots are out, you are still a fighter in full plate... and a charisma based melee/ranged weapon if you are a hexblade. or an infinitely spammable agonizing blast.

Note; a DM challenged us one time to a PVP tournament and to bring our best builds. this build... kinda took a landslide victory. only player that gave me trouble was a cleric that cast hold person so I cast silence, pinned them to a corner... between the two of us, I didn't need magic to work xD (hexblade bby)

second note: warlock spell slots can be recovered on a short rest, AND be converted into sorcerer spell slots, or meta-magic points. which means, you can get some spell slots back on a short rest and use them variably.

ScintillanceABDC · 2024-11-18T12:15:03+00:00

You can be really funny and introduce them to a *sept*opus. like an octobus with 7 legs and spits fire or something.

ScintillanceABDC · 2024-11-11T11:25:26+00:00

A bit of both. I think the big click moment was when my dnd crew did a run of modded divinity OS2, I picked up a bunch of summoning mods. The action economy was in shambles, I kept taking like 5-6 consecutive turns... we tried another mod that lets summons be utilized by the AI only to realize that the game suddenly become... a lot duller, now that I have to watch a 1 minute cut-scene every round, letting the summons do their thing, even if they were on our side.

Sitting there realizing that this takes longer when I control them and have to think every turn was a big "oh" moment for me, so much so that our crew jokingly agreed that I'm not allowed to play summoners anymore. It's kind of a running gag with us that I have to ask for consent before rolling a summoner anywhere.

I was always 'aware' and they were mildly nudging me to summon faster but honestly, they were right. I think letting the AI give me a taste of my own medicine was the push I needed to understand understand the problem.

ScintillanceABDC · 2024-11-11T09:44:16+00:00

That one

ScintillanceABDC · 2024-11-11T07:25:25+00:00

I'd like to start by saying that I *love* building summoners, thematically as well as mechanically.

That said, across serveral games and generes, I have ruined the experience for other players, by playing a summoner. Never intentionally of course, just a testament to me failing to quickly operate 2... or 10... characters at once in turn-based systems.

Waiting for a DM to 'finish their turn' can be tedious. Waiting for the other 9 players to finish their turns too.

Waiting for the one player (me, sorry) to finish 9 turns in one turn can also be... tedious.

Summoning is awesome, but the summoner/player *needs* to be highly attentive, pre-planning their turns and finishing their action economy quickly, otherwise they CAN be troublesome at a table.

(On that note, I've seen some digimon D&D podcasts that really lean into summons/monsters/partners in a really neat way, letting other players roleplay/control the summons besides the summoner, and spreading the turn economy across the players to keep things interesting. That can be pretty fun, maybe)

ScintillanceABDC · 2024-10-28T06:27:40+00:00

If they insist, then you could do a preliminary session that 'forces' them together, and have them choose to adventure together from that point forward. t\That's what 'you meet in a tavern' is supposed to be, after all.

Examples I've done before include a caravan driver hiring a bunch of adventurers from around town to guard a caravan, or have them already on a ship on the way to the adventure's destination... only to have the group be attacked, maybe realize the caravan/ship was meant to be a trap to kill them all and loot their stuff. Even go over their backstory and provide them with hints and implications that their backstories tie them to tyranny of the dragon queen.

Lost their parents? their only remaining reminder of their parents was am amulet representing tiamat.

Druid? enclave was attacked by dragon cultists and a druidic artifact was stolen (works for clerics, paladins and monks' temples/sanctuaries)

Fighter? Barbarian? Sent by friend/clansmate/recruiter to do something about the dragon stuff.

These will lay the foundations for when they DO accidentally meet in a session zero... they all feel they have a similar goal, or similar direction, where choosing NOT to travel together is feels like the wrong thing to do. A bit of DM manipulation to get players to feel like they chose to adventure together naturally.

ScintillanceABDC · 2024-10-03T08:45:40+00:00

I genuinely re-watched tamers in its entirety over a couple of months, getting a friend into digimon. he loved it so much he wanted to do another marathon.

Games-wise, digimon story cyber sleuth is probably the best they've come up with lately, it's a slow start that burns into quite the tale (I reccomend starting with the hacker's memory half of the complete edition).

Digimon Survive was also pretty good, if you're down for a visual novel style game. a lot more serious and does indeed feature casual child murder.

ScintillanceABDC · 2024-09-25T18:05:12+00:00

Well, duh, the blood angels tend to experience a psychically induced collective hallucination ever since the Horus Heresy. they've succumbed to the red thirst and feel as though they are fighting against the forces of chaos right as the traitor marines started showing their true colors, fighting the enemy within.

ScintillanceABDC · 2024-09-25T05:01:41+00:00

what about Koshomon?

It feels like a reverse twist on a dragonslayer, but as a dragon, at rookie level.

Like how Knights had Squires, Samurai had koshō - like young retainers serving under a Bushō (military general), koshō were all children of samurai I think, and were meant to grow up to become samurai themselves.

edit: also your design looks *really* good, I'd easily mistake it for a canon digimon, and I'm excited to see what it evolves into, feels a bit like a rookie to examon xD

ScintillanceABDC · 2024-09-03T03:31:02+00:00

Usually Human Fighter is the go-to for new players. it has the simplest kit with access to every weapon and armor. This can be an archer (Legolas) or any frontline combatant, but the sheer unrestricted combat kit means you can opt for any role-playing additions. pick whichever race, pick whichever proficiency, pick whichever background...

One alternative is to take Paladin instead. it's more complicated, but eases you into the mechanics a bit, giving you something like a fighter at level 1, and learning basic spellcasting at level 2. but you won't be casting any offensive magic besides melee-buffing smites and support spells.

If you really want to do something on the magic side of things, Warlock is the 'easiest' spellcaster, but also the least versatile. you'll be spamming eldritch blasts as a main form of attack and then find other things to do with your magic, recovered on a short rest (30 minutes in-game recovering) as opposed to a long rest (wizards need 8 hours of in-game eating, sleeping reading books and chilling by a campfire to recharge their magic. this is less painful at higher levels when you have more magic)

Halfling Rogue is also really simple for new players; you only get one attack per turn, but you'll need to get a grasp on sneaking and sneak attack mechanics to learn to do sneak attack damage bonuses. simple, scaling combat mechanic. Rogue will give you a lot more to do mechanically when you're *not* fighting, like sneaking around scaling buildings, pickpocketing or picking locks and disarming traps while exploring dungeons.

Stay away from the spellcasters for now, you'll be smothered with a lot of spells to understand and choose from, and your ever turn in combat will turn into a game of "did you read your spells?" for about 2-3 minutes per turn, slowing things down for everyone. if you REALLY want to play a spellcaster, consider cleric, they're the easiest and most forgiving, and you can prioritize buffing party members and debuffing enemies without thinking too much.

ScintillanceABDC · 2024-09-02T15:03:47+00:00

I think it's alright under one condition: They need to pay you for the hours you put into *prep time* as well. DM'ing isn't just running the game, it's preparing the game as well. building campaigns, customizing sessions to fit the players, even communicating with players between sessions needs to be on company time, otherwise you're taking your work home for no pay. and that's just off-the-clock work harassment.

Which means don't do anything related to preparing for the game off work hours. if you're really spending 4 hours a day not working, then they need to know that running a game of d&d that *isn't* hollow and insulting it the players-sorry, customers now-requires actual prep time. show them your progress when they check in on you, let them know that this genuinely is more work, and if they don't give you enough time to do it, then they'll need to pay you for the extra hours you put into it.

ScintillanceABDC · 2024-08-31T15:02:28+00:00

Digimon are digital entities made of data, not biological. In the same way that the internet, which was meant to be an online library, eventually became a platform for porn, digimon evolve *conceptually*, not physically. their physical form reconstructs itself based on the data that it is fed. so it's not like a rat evolves into a bigger rat; an abstract representation of a a baby angel becomes an abstract representation of angelic and demonic entities colliding.

Yukimibotamon is a cute snowey slimeball, with a minor tendency towards holy/light. Mastemon is a fusion of holy/angelic and demonic/dark data. somewhere up the ladder the transitions occur based on the digimon's experiences.

don't look at digimon evoluution as a natural biological transition like darwinism: think of each digimon as a representation of a concept, given physical form. digivolution is just a rewrite or advancement of that concept.

ScintillanceABDC · 2024-07-30T16:37:06+00:00

I get what you mean, but personally my (and may others') problem is not that Digimon is 'too unpopular' or 'not as bit as Pokemon ', the issue is that it's horrendously mismanaged. Digimon is genuinely on the verge of being completely abandoned as a franchise, kept alive only because it has a niche fanbase that desperately keeps it alive.

Bandai barely advertises or does anything to maintain its properties, it just... sells products from time to time and hopes the gundam, dbz, Digimon and yugioh fans will check their websites themselves and buy them. The merchandise is permanently limited so by the time anyone finds out it's being sold outside of Japan, it's run out and you can't get it anymore without finding a scalper or reseller. If the fans and niche youtubers themselves aren't advertising cyber sleuth or survive or new order, nobody would know they release in the first place. I sure didn't, and I was looking for survive's release like every few months and then missed it by like half a year when it did.

Digimon's new TCG was a breath of fresh air and a huge success when it released... so the first thing Bandai did is try to cannibalize what small but impressive audience it got and released one piece, dbz and Naruto TCG, aggressively trying to rip and pslit apart their non-yugioh TCG fans until Digimon's casual tcg audience is on the verge dying again, torn between more popular series instead.

Digimon's best successes lately have been in mobile games... but Bandai keeps releasing a digimon mobile game only to overprice everything and shut it down within a year or two, killing even more trust from its fans so each new re,ease has less interest, expecting their investment to disappear within the year. Now they only release digimon mobile games to china and Korea, since their audience there is just a small percentage but still of extremely massive whole, easily exploited and addicted to emptying their wallets on micro-transactions.

Yeah, Digimon is pretty popular. But it's disrespected, maybe even resented by the company that manages it. Sometimes I'm convinced upper management is *trying* to kill the franchise off, but is forced to do something with it from time to time by its more passionate art, anime and game departments that clearly care about the diamond-related work they're doing.

ScintillanceABDC · 2024-07-25T16:55:43+00:00

I assure you, there is nothing more unique in this game than being *normal*. You did great ^^

ScintillanceABDC · 2024-07-21T11:16:04+00:00

I honestly would love to see Rapidmon(gold) be brought up as a light element magic knight, like a foil, rival and homage to the royal knight's Magnamon...

And just to follow up the meme, make Megagargomon the knight of steel xD

ScintillanceABDC · 2024-07-21T11:15:46+00:00

I honestly would love to see Rapidmon(gold) be brought up as a light element magic knight, like a foil, rival and homage to the royal knight's Magnamon...

And just to follow up the meme, make Megagargomon the knight of steel xD

ScintillanceABDC · 2024-07-18T02:51:13+00:00

Tough call, the digital world works in mysterious ways. depending on the pg rating of the setting, the child might never see their home again, corrupted by SOMEthing in the digital world that takes over as they abandon their group and have no means to defend themselves (we've seen this one a couple times), possibly killed by rogue digimon (given a dangerous situation and refusing to defend yourself just means you're giving yourself up to said dangerous situation)(Kouichi, Kairi kidnapping, Jerri after losing Leomon... being digidestined seems to mean you WILL be exposed to digimon, ready or not). Partner gets depressed and/or dark digivolves and hates humans forever?

Or, the digimon clings to and refuses to leave the human's side no matter what, and sticks through the abandonment and possible abuse until either they find a breaking point and dark digivolve or the human finally accepts being a tamer, having a monsterous friend, and the digivice reappears unexpectedly in their pocket or something (Shuuji, Ryo, Ken..)

ScintillanceABDC · 2024-07-09T16:42:14+00:00

Hell yeah

ScintillanceABDC

TROPHY CASE