UNT Esports Does DnD: Collaborating With A Student Club

This one was a doozy.

I was never a Dungeons & Dragons guy. I’ve always was interested in the premise of it, but I never could convince myself to get into it. I mean, where would I even start? That’s why I can’t tell you this was my idea to begin with. Every semester, I task my creative student staff with an original project that they’ll complete throughout the semester. It could be esports related, it could be whatever they were interested in, as long as it was a project that’s relevant to their position and they believed would bolster their resume. Jocelyne, our broadcast manager at the time, would always joke about the intricacies and complexities of doing a DnD stream similar to Critical Role, a popular DnD stream. It got to the point that, during our free time, we both would casually start talking about, if we were going to pull it off, this is how we could do it. Soon enough, those casual talks became meetings about how we were actually going to pull off streaming a DnD campaign.

Jocelyne running the stream. Huge props for being able to manage switching the music, the overlay and monitor the chat while listening into the actual campaign itself.

Video Capture Layout

Four players, one DM all within our not-meant-to-be-a-DnD broadcast room. After some funky angles, we decided on pairing up players to share a camera except for the DM who will have their own camera. It’s perfect, because we only had three elgato webcams to work with! Except, we didn’t account for the fact that all video feeds need to be on simultaneously, something that our BlackMagic Design couldn’t do. Also, the Elgato’s we had only had USB-C which makes the BlackMagic Design irrelevant. So, how did we manage to get all three cameras on?

We utilized two laptops to Discord stream the player cams video feed and the third elgato was hooked into the streaming PC as a standard webcam for the DM. We essentially just had a Discord call and cropped the videos into separate sources on StreamLabs. A bit scuffed, but it turned out really nice!

On-Screen

Now that we got the layout of the room and the layout of the video feeds figured out, it’s time to cover up those awkward black spaces. Neither me or Jocelyne are graphic designers (good ones at least), so this part we relied on our graphic designer Mark! Mark and Jocelyne spent hours in the office cooking up some overlays and other information that would be of use for the viewer.

Something that we had to account for was, since there were multiple layouts that we would switch between, we needed multiple overlays that could accommodate. It’d be simple to just make one overlay and slap our videos over them, but we had a request to showcase logos of UNT Esports and UNT Critical Hit as much as we could. Coupled with a change of scenery in the middle of campaign, Mark ended up making 8 overlays!

For this campaign, it was rather information heavy in terms of specific items, menu lists, etc. Hearing it read from the DM wouldn’t sufficiently allow viewers to grasp exactly what was happening in the story. To remedy this, Jocelyne took a PDF of every menu, ingredient, NPC character and turned them into image sources in StreamLabs. This allowed for Jocelyne to pull up key items on the stream for viewers to read along with the players. As tedious as this was to scan every PDF, it was worthwhile as this campaign made it easy to get lost in all of the items and menus being introduced.

Here is the handheld mic put on a stand where both players would essentially share the mic.

Conclusion

There were a series of hiccups as the stream went live. The introduction of the first stream was muted because we forgot the Shure mic needed phantom power on the audio mixer. The lights blew out in the first stream and we had to replace bulbs later. Streamlabs spectator consistently crashed due to reasons unknown after 2 hours of streaming with this setup. These were not perfect streams. Yet, they were my favorite streams I’ve ever done.

From the jokes we made in the beginning of the semester to the last second addition of player name overlays I made while the stream was 10 minutes in, all of it was so much fun to me. As a creator, being able to bring a vision into action into results is a feeling we all live for. Not only that, but watching how big some little fixes can impact a production motivated me not to skip out on those small details. As great as I felt pulling off the first stream, seeing the second stream left me inspired. Just pull up any time from the first stream to the second stream and you can already tell the growth immediately.

I’m so glad Jocelyne chose to do this for her semester project and like I’ve mentioned in the beginning, none of this would be possible without some help. From Mark’s overlay, the Rec Center’s tables, Kris’ DMing so many pieces came together to create these productions and it goes to show that with the combined efforts of so many, greatness is sure to follow.

A drawing on MS Paint that we made to depict a layout we were planning to use for three camera feeds and a food recipe for the campaign.

After we gauged for interest in our program for potential players for DnD, it was overwhelming. Having enough players wasn’t going to be a problem, we even had some Dungeon Masters ready to take up the mantle. Instead, we used this opportunity to collaborate with the DnD club on campus, UNT Critical Hit, to essentially lend us a DM. I’m glad we did, because we had the honor of working with Kris and they were a pleasure to work with. That leaves the production of the stream the next obstacle. Planning for the stream, we foresaw 3 major challenges that needed to be overcome:

1) How are we going to get a visual feed of all players at all times?

2) What will the on-screen of the stream look like?

3) How will we cleanly capture audio with all of the players in a cramped space?

Screenshot of our streamlabs output with our four video capture devices on simultaneously. That’s Kris on the top-left laying out her DnD setup and me underneath looking confused as always.

However, we realized we weren’t able to capture the maps the campaign would be using. We needed a fourth video feed that could capture the entire map laid out on the table. To do that, we did something we hadn’t done in a couple of years; we used our mirrorless camera as a webcam.

As simple as that sounds, there’s a couple of hardware pieces to make this work, 1) a battery that never runs out, 2) a cable that converts the screen of your camera to hdmi or anything a computer can read. Luckily, we already had those from our experiences running shows with them a couple of years ago, but it was nice to refresh ourselves and find those cables again.

In this clip, you can see that camera put in action. Don’t worry, we found a tripod for it later, it was only like this for this part of the stream. I actually cannot remember why it isn’t on one to begin with, but nonetheless, a solid workaround for our issue of not having enough video devices.

Audio

With the look down, we are ready to move to the sound. If there’s anything I’d improve with the stream, this element would be the biggest one I’d address. The thing with this stream that differ the most compared to any of our other broadcasts was, the players and DM didn’t have headsets. This is crucial in our other broadcasts for communication from our broadcast director to our talent, but in this case, we didn’t want headsets because we felt it would take away from the causal vibe we were going for.

You can see these issues become more apparent when you’d see me come in with a whiteboard with instructions or Jocelyne would be handing sticky notes from beyond the backdrop.

Another issue was simply not having the correct microphones for a situation like this. Since our main broadcasts were esport titles, we were complacent with using our headsets our hand mics. In a group setting like this, we didn’t have a mic that could pick up multiple people. We ended up having to borrow a player’s Shure microphone that you see our DM using. The other pair of players we gave them a hand-held mic that was mounted on a stand which had limited success. Often you would hear broadcast conversations, keyboard typing and doors opening/closing due to our lack of audio resources.

Regardless, the audio was good enough the stream could continue and even though there were some shortcomings when it came to audio it was a valuable learning experience.

Some players got really into it, they even brought some costumes to get into the mood!