My Favourite D&D Collaboration Tool (It's Not What You'd Expect) (Patreon)

Since returning from D&D Live I've been using D&D Beyond to manage my games, create characters, and search reference materials. D&D Beyond is an official 5th edition digital toolset that allows you to create characters, manage digital character sheets, and interface with all of the official game lore, rules, and adventures. Full disclosure, the Wizards of the Coast team kindly gave me insider access to the content library. 

That aside, D&D Beyond is a wonderful tool. I use it for my freelance GM for Hire work. It's a perfect tool for organizing character sheets and sharing 

Here's where I struggle with it. What if I want to play a game set in a world of my own? What if I want to make little ad hoc changes to classes or abilities during character creation? What if I want to really dive into what I'm calling the "Three C's of RPGs" (hear that rhyme?) - Communication, Collaboration, Critical Thinking, and Creativity? While D&D Beyond is an absolutely fantastic tool and will forever be used in any 5th edition game I run, it's toolset is not suited to the one thing I love about playing the game - collaborative world building. There isn't really a tool within a campaign I manage where I can share ideas, mood boards, and simply... engage with the creative process alongside my group. 

For example, my upcoming game is set in a fantastical version of ancient China. My players and I all want the characters to be culturally specific classes. That means, familiar terms like the bard, cleric, paladin, warlock, sorcerer, and wizard do not necessarily work with the setting. The themes associated with these classes are quite Euro-centric, and thus don't fit within the setting we are trying to create. The monk certainly carries a certain orientalist stereotype I wish to avoid. Even ones like the barbarian carry a certain historical connotation that I personally would also like to portray from a different perspective. This kind of flexibility is not found in D&D Beyond, as it understandably has to follow the existing content library or work within the confines of its homebrew capabilities. So how to I achieve this kind of flexibility AND ensure that my players are able to join me in the process?

Here's my solution: Microsoft OneNote (*full disclosure: I'm a Microsoft employee).

OneNote is a free single or multi-user collaboration program that allows users to collect their notes, drawings, images, and even audio files in shared digital "notebooks". For an upcoming campaign I plan on GMing for an actual play, I have started creating a campaign setting based on the Xia and Han dynasties of ancient China. In order to help my players take ownership over their characters and the story we're about to create together, I shared a OneNote notebook specific to the setting. That way, we're able to create sections and subsequent pages for areas of our game that pertain to world building. When paired with a game-specific digital tool like D&D Beyond, OneNote offers an incredible tool for my players and I can engage in free-form collaboration that will enhance our experiences at the table. Our role playing interactions will feel more authentic, our characters more real, and the narrative richer. While at the table, each of us has access to the evolving campaign setting and can contribute notes and updates as we discover them through play!

What's your favourite collaboration tool? Leave a message in the comments and I'll give them a look!