Playing Tabletop RPGs online with Miro — Part 2!
In where we sit down to talk teams, boards, settings, and law-bending physics for operating several boards with your other tiny friends.
Last time in …
Welcome again to this cozy metaphysical little garden of ours. Have you been putting your board-making skills to good use? I sure hope so—because we’re about to go next level.
This is the second and final part of my guide for hosting role-playing game sessions on Miro, the first of which you can find here.
Let’s go back to this image. After having gone through all you can do inside a Board, today we will focus on the settings and member list available on B, and on how to set things up across different teams over C.
B. Settings— The Team List.
You will land on this page upon clicking on the settings. Most of the options are pretty straightforward, but I want to draw your attention to the Active users tab in particular.
Here’s the gist of it: Every person that’s invited to your team will show up on this list as team members. All team members have access to all the boards inside the team (both active and inactive).
As the Team Admin (ie. the person who created the team), the only difference between you and a regular member is your ability to grant administrative permissions (changing the name of the team, etc.) and take other members out of the team. Your only way to delete boards created by other members is to take their owners out of the team.
This is important. Why is this important? Well, imagine the following scenario:
You (Ema), invite people to your team to play a oneshot. You play your oneshot, and your friends realize Miro is like the best thing ever and they’ve lived in darkness for years. Their views on reality crumble. It was a good oneshot. Anyway, around a week later, one of your friends (Kyle) decides to take his friends over to Miro for their regular Friday game. Great! Thing is, the poor soul doesn’t know what he’s doing, so he just goes ahead and creates a board inside your team.
Next thing you know, there is now “SPACE JAM UNLIMITED” taking up one of your board slots. (You nose around the board and find out the whole thing is a Pasión de las Pasiones hack, obviously.) You cannot delete the board yourself, and what’s even worse, maybe you already had all 3 board slots in use— so now one of your boards has turned inactive.
So, you now have to choices: You either unpromptedly kick Kyle and all of his friends out of the team and delete their board, or you go through the pleasant interaction of telling Kyle you love him but to please take their Space Jam off your lawn. It is always awkward.
The catch with the previous example is that if you are Kyle, you didn’t even have the option to create your own board. You just logged into Miro, and all you could access was my board. How do we solve this? Well, bear with me for a second— we’ll get back to that.
Maintenance on the team list.
To avoid the previous scenario from happening in the first place, do yourself a favour and make it a habit to remove people from your team after your game is over. They can join again anytime if you invite them to another board in the future, it’s no big deal.
This will not only prevent people from accidentally making boards on your team, but you also save yourself from the possibility of someone you don’t know (if your friends invite more friends) gaining access to the e-mail addresses of all the other members.
To take someone out of the team, just click on the three dots next to their name and choose delete. Did you catch that warning? That prompted because the user had created a board, which now belongs to my admin account.
Something important to keep in mind is that you can copy content between boards you’re part of with a simple ctrl+c. So if you found yourself on the previous scenario, you can save Kyle’s board by re-inviting him to your team once he’s created one of his own. Let’s go over that, actually.
C. Hosting different boards (or allowing people who’ve played with you to do so)
Say you’re Kyle. In the past. Before Ema kicked you out.
You log into the dashboard, see the flashy plus icon on the top of the right sidebar, click it, and… there are only paid plans? That is pretty weird. Ema has access to like four boards, right? So why can’t you have one of your own?
In a move that I can only call back-end corporate mysticism, Miro treats your account differently depending on the order you’ve done things. Essentially, there are two states your account can be in:
- You create an account and immediately become a team owner, after which you can join (to my knowledge) as many other teams as you want. Or—
- You create an account through an invite link from a friend, and their team is now flagged as your primary team. So the app prevents you from creating another one.
The good news are this is pretty easy to fix. Let’s see what happens when Ema swings that good ol’ banhammer on ya.
Just upon reloading the page after leaving Ema’s team, the app immediately prompts you to make a team of your own. For free. After that, the only thing Ema has to do is re-share the same invite link from before, and voilà! You now have access to both teams.
This is how you can host several teams. If some people in your group are running games of their own and they’ve signed up to your board, all you have to do is to kick them out so they can create their own boards, and invite them back afterwards. You can easily share the limit across a group this way. Naturally, if you own several e-mail addresses the process is the same.
You’re welcome.
And that’s it! I hope this has made any semblance of sense. I tried being as clear as possible on how all of this works. If you’re still confused about something, feel free to leave a comment below.
until next time,
Ema is a freelance illustrator and game-maker based in Lisbon. Find her work over at ema-acosta.art, and get a peek of her troubled mind over at @spookymeal.
