Prolific Dungeons & Dragons blogger Mike Shea (and author of The Lazy Dungeon Master) recently updated his popular Sly Flourish blog with an article titled “Text-based Combat Tracking for D&D on Discord.” In the post, Shea describes his process for visualizing D&D combat using only text, a topic particularly helpful for D&D campaigns being run over Discord.

As Shea relates in the post, the revelation came about while contemplating the pros and cons of playing D&D online using virtual tabletop programs (VTTs). While such programs have their advantages, one of their major disadvantages is the prep time they still require in order to set up and run a quality session. When Shea compared that to the ease of setting up and using Discord with pure theater of the mind gameplay, they found the latter, simpler method to be the one that worked best for them.

However, some elements of combat still proved to be troublesome even with this method. Visual battle maps and other simple combat aids that VTTs offer aren’t available in Discord. Questions such as player and enemy positions, and their distance and direction in relation to each other, can get confusing at times, and often limits or ignores player agency.

Shea’s answer to this (conjured with help from their wife) is text-based battle maps, a one-directional combat tracking method influenced by the gothic horror video game Darkest Dungeon. Shea states that by designating combatants as front-line or back-line, their placement on the battlefield can be shown generally with a few simple Markdown text lines.

Shea’s example of this text-based combat tracking also involves thinking in terms of “zones” found in the FATE Core and FATE Accelerated systems, representing a roughly 25-square-feet area. In 5th edition D&D, most base character movement is 30 feet, which works well with the zones mechanic. Putting all this together, Shea presents three examples of combat with a variety of creatures in multiple locations, how to track a party’s marching order, how to track two or more groups of characters some distance apart from each other, how to track player-identified monster characteristics, areas of effect, and damage.

“The intent of this simplified text-based combat map is to help players get a general feel for the situation in a battle while running narrative theater-of-the-mind-style combat,” states Shea. “It doesn’t solve every solution for representing combat but it serves well where it serves.”

You can track Mike Shea for more sterling D&D tips via their Twitter, YouTube, and Sly Flourish channels.

Source: “Text-based Combat Tracking for D&D on Discord”