Gaming on Discord

    Recently I've started a play-by-chat on Discord with a couple friends of mine. I'll be continuing an actual play of these games as they happen, weekly if things work out. In this post I'll describe how I'm using discord to handle games like this.

    The game is all text based, no voice chat needed. We use four channels, plus a fifth for just the DM. In-Character is for just what it sounds like, anything that actually happens in game by the players or my responses to them. Play-by-Chat is unique in that more time can be spent forming a response to a situation, players can think through how to word a question better, or re-read how a room is shaped instead of asking for the description again. At most we spend five minutes between posts, usually a minute or less. Out-of-Character is for all rules questions, jokes, and memes that we want to share while someone is typing out a post In-Character or while I'm handling rolls in my notes.

    For dice rolls, we're using Dice Maiden. I've had great experience with it. All our rolls occur in the dice-tray channel so they don't clutter up the other chat logs. DM-notes is a private channel just for me, I roll encounter chance, morale, monster HP and any other rolls that should be secret here. The last channel we use is for character sheets just to make life a little easier. As with many OSR games the DM keeping a map secret from the players is normal, so we don't need a virtual tabletop to play, and while we use theater of the mind I do keep a map open on my computer in paint.net to track combat accurately. Other than that I don't need any other programs to play. I expect my players to keep their own map but as long as they don't get lost they don't need it, right? 

If anyone has advice on playing a game like this, I'd love to hear it.