Here’s the position this post takes: a D&D server needs at most three bots, because a campaign has exactly three problems a bot can solve. Rolling dice when you play online. Getting five adults into the same two hours. Remembering what happened. Everything else on the listicle is either a toy that’s fun for a week or a solution to a problem your table doesn’t have. Below is one honest pick per job, what it costs, where it falls down, and which bots to skip entirely.

Job one: rolling dice (you might not even need this)

Start with the uncomfortable question the listicles skip: do you play in person? Then close the tab on this whole category. Physical dice at a physical table beat every bot ever written, and a phone coming out to type /roll is a phone that stays out. The dice-bot job exists for online and play-by-post tables only.

If you do play online, the pick is Avrae, and it’s one of the least controversial picks on Discord. It’s free, it’s run by the D&D Beyond people, and it goes far past rolling: it imports your character sheet from D&D Beyond, tracks initiative, and automates attacks and saves against monster stat blocks. For a 5e table running combat in text or over voice, it collapses a minute of arithmetic per turn into one command.

Two honest caveats. First, Avrae’s depth is a learning curve; your table will use five commands and ignore three hundred, and that’s correct. Second, it’s a 5e machine. If your table plays Blades in the Dark or Call of Cthulhu, you want a system-agnostic roller instead, and frankly any of the small ones will do, because outside 5e automation the job is just “random numbers in channel.”

Job two: scheduling (the bot that actually saves campaigns)

Unglamorous, and the closest thing to essential on this page. Campaigns die in the group chat, two reschedules deep, waiting for a date that never firms up; the dragon rarely gets the credit it’s given. A scheduling bot turns “can everyone do Thursday?” from a 40-message thread into a poll with buttons.

The pick is Sesh: availability polls, RSVPs, time-zone handling, and reminders that ping the people who said yes. The time-zone part matters more than it sounds; if your table spans cities, every “7pm” in plain text is a small bomb, and we’ve written about how tables across three time zones survive. Discord’s own built-in Events feature covers the basic case for free, and if your group reliably shows up at the same time every week, the built-in feature plus a pinned message is genuinely enough. Sesh earns its slot when attendance is the thing you’re fighting, because the poll-then-remind loop is the fight.

Whatever you pick, the bot only enforces a contract the table already made. Decide at session zero that the game runs on a fixed slot with a quorum, and the bot becomes the referee of that agreement. A poll without the agreement behind it is just a prettier way to watch four people leave a question on read.

Job three: remembering (the job the listicles don’t name)

Here’s the gap in every fifteen-bot roundup: nothing on the list remembers your campaign. The dice bot forgets each roll as it lands. The scheduler knows when you played, never what happened. And yet the question your table actually asks every single week is “wait, what happened last session?”, because six players reliably rebuild six different versions of it.

You can assemble this job from parts. Craig records your voice channel, free, multitrack, rock solid; we’ve compared it honestly and it’s excellent at the one thing it does. Then you transcribe the audio, then you summarize the transcript, then you do it again next week, forever. The assembly line works, and we wrote up the whole honest roundup of it, including when the free stack is the right call: if someone at your table will genuinely do that recall work every week, you don’t need to pay anyone.

This is the job we built Loracle for, so weigh the obvious bias accordingly. It sits in the voice channel like Craig does, but the recording is the start of the pipeline instead of the end of it: transcript, a recap written in your table’s own vocabulary, a campaign wiki that accretes across sessions, and a “Previously On” ready before the next one starts. One bot, the whole third job. The honest framing is the same one from the roundup: pay with weekly effort or pay with money, and only the third job gives you that choice at all.

The bots you can skip

A few categories show up on every list and mostly subtract from real tables:

• Music and ambience bots. The giants of this category, Groovy and Rythm, were shut down over YouTube licensing years ago, and the survivors live in the same legal weather. More to the point: ambient music over Discord voice fights with the thing your game runs on, which is people talking. If you want atmosphere, one player streaming a playlist on their own speakers does it without a bot in the channel.
• Mini-game and economy bots. Fun for a week, then a channel of noise. Your server has a game already.
• Moderation suites. Built for thousand-member communities. Your server is eight people who know each other; the moderation system is named Dave.
• A second bot for a job you’ve filled. The failure mode from the opening paragraph. Every overlapping bot adds a “which command?” tax, and the tax is paid mid-scene.

The ten-minute setup

So the honest table, in full: Avrae if you play 5e online, nothing if you roll real dice. Sesh if scheduling is a fight, Discord’s built-in Events if it isn’t. And one answer to the memory job, chosen deliberately: Craig plus your own weekly recall work, or Loracle doing the pipeline for you.

Three jobs, at most three bots, about ten minutes of invites. Then close the listicle, mute the bot-spam channel, and spend the time you saved on the only thing on this page that makes the game better: showing up Thursday knowing exactly where you left off.