Using a private Discord server to coordinate a roleplaying game

Peter mentioned that he was trying to coordinate more stuff with his Felltower group between game sessions over email, so that more of the time during the game session could be spent having fun.  I'm trying to do that too with DF Whiterock, except we use Discord rather than email.  Figured it was worth going into a bit of detail in case it's helpful to some other gaming group.

Discord is a voice and text chat system marketed at gamers.  There's a web client, plus dedicated clients for Linux and macOS and Windows and Android and iOS.  You can setup your own private Discord server for free, and invite whoever you want to join it.  (You give them a URL via email or whatever, and that URL is a bearer token that lets them into your private server.)

Once you have a server, you can add an arbitrary number of voice chat and text chat channels.  We have two voice channels: General (which we use for group chat if we run the game over voice), and Sidebar (which we could use if we needed two voice chat rooms at once).  We currently have four text channels: #general, #announcements, #ooc-planning, and #character-sheets.  #general is for whatever.  #ooc-planning is for separating out the Serious Talk about who gets the +2 Icepick of Flensing from the general discussion.  #character-sheets is for posting updated GCS character sheets, and summaries of character point spending.  (In this game, players don't mind the other players seeing their sheets.  In a game where sheets were private, that might be handled via private message to the GM.)  And #announcements is a place for the GM (only) to post brief announcements like when the game starts or if the character points spreadsheet has been updated.

Discord supports reactions to posts, so instead of posting "I agree with what you just said" you can just put a little picture of an upward-pointing thumb under it.  I know, I know, get off my lawn and learn to type actual words, but it's actually useful for things like voting: it's easier to count 3 thumbs up and 2 thumbs down right under the question than look for the right 5 text responses at random places further down in the channel.

Discord also supports pinned posts.  Used sparingly, this makes it easy to find important stuff (the link to the blog, the link to the character points spreadsheet, the link to the Roll20 game, etc.) in a busy channel, rather than searching through tons of text.

And that's pretty much all I've setup so far.  Make a Discord server, invite the players to join it, add a couple of a text and voice channels, configure the announcements channel so only the GM can post but players can react to posts, and done.  The only other thing I'd like to add is a bot to 1. allow rolling dice in Discord (we currently roll in Roll20 but I might want to move some between-games rolls to Discord) 2. Automatically notice when the blog, character points sheet, loot sheet, etc. get updated and automatically drop an announcement in the announcements channel, to save me the hard labor of doing that.  I'll probably write that bot next time I have a free weekend and can't think of anything more fun to do.

I guess the obvious question is, seeing that we run the actual game in Roll20 (mostly because of maps), why don't we do all this in Roll20?  The answer is that Roll20 has both voice and text chat features, but they're not as good as Discord's.  The voice chat has technical issues.  The text chat is fine, but there's only a single channel per game, plus "whispers" which are private messages.  And Roll20 pretty much just works from computer web browsers, not phones.  (It's a website, but it's a big heavy website.)  And it doesn't beep at you to get your attention when someone says your name.  And it doesn't support pinned messages.  So we use Roll20 for the main in-character game text chat with integrated dice rolling, but we use Discord for the other chats.

I guess that's enough on why we use Discord and how to set it up.  Next time I'll talk about what we handle during the game session versus between game sessions.