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Our group, the Roll with Advantage crew, uses a communication stack that involves Google Calendar and Google Groups. To be upfront, this can work with non-Gmail accounts, but it works best when everyone has a Gmail. So let me dig in.

What I absolutely love about using Google Calendar is it is integrated with everyone’s smartphone. People can see on the fly, what is going on that day, when the event is, and even accept/decline the event. This part is great for me as a DM because we have an attendance rule, that if a certain percentage of people can’t make it, then we cancel the session. When I cancel the session Google will email everyone on the event for me, telling them about the cancellation. This also works for when the event changes, like maybe if the session gets bumped up by an hour or has to move to the next day. How I like to run this is by creating a repeating event for our standard time and add everyone in the group to the repeating event. This takes a lot of guesswork out of planning, and for my players that live by their schedule, it is handy for them to have it there on their calendar.

Now, “Google Groups?” you might ask. Google Groups is not a widely popular Google Application. It is basically a way to simplify emailing a group of people, and a way to manage those email chains. Think of a hybrid of Emailing and a Forum. This allows anyone in the group to easily email the entire group and start a thread of communication. It also has a dashboard so that users can graphically see the conversations and threads, and then interact that with them in a formatted way, like you would hope and expect you can create groups that are Invite Only. There is a lot of customization options as well. If you have not considered Google groups as a potentially valid part of your communication stack, then you really should. It works with any device or email.

That is where I am going to leave it for this time. I would be very interested in reading what your communication stacks look like. As always, thank you so much for stopping in and reading. Feel free to comment, I love to read constructive feedback and love discussing topics like these. Check back in next week to see what else I have on my mind or decide to analyze. Remember to follow The DM’s Table on Facebook or on Twitter @dmstable for updates and to let me know what is on your mind, or what you might want to read about. Also, go check out Roll with Advantage! It is a Dungeons and Dragons podcast that releases every Monday by 5 pm Eastern Time. We play, laugh, and have a good time playing a game we all love. Thank you for reading and if you enjoy these articles feel free to donate, using the button below, to the website to help keep it up and running!

― The DM