A reflection on Gaming over Discord.

    With my players back together and in person gaming happening again, my actual play series is done. Looking back using Discord as a medium for play-by-post was a decent idea. The ease to make multiple channels and adding in a dice bot gave it all the functionality we needed. But using text only? Not the best.

    I was unsure of the situation one of my players would be in during out game time, he was staying on location for his job and was in a semi-shared bunk house. Because of that I tried using text only for this campaign, no voice chat to prevent him having to explain why he was talking about killing people with an axe to prevent them from taking his treasure. 

    Mapping and exploration was easy, feeling like an old CRPG. I could give detailed descriptions and the players didn't need to ask over and over how big the room was, they could check the message and map accurately, mostly.  The players leaned heavy into working with a faction and didn't explore much after the first session. Below is Shawn's map compared to the actual map on the left. I numbered his rooms to correlate to the ones they believed they were in.

    Post times were decent by play by post standards, about 3-5 minutes between them at most, but this is terrible for the step by step gameplay of OSR. That's only 12 to 20 posts an hour, terrible for actually running a game in real time. It gave too much time to think AND too little. In the middle of combat players had a ton of time to consider their options, when at the table it would have been a stressful situation. During roleplaying a player would post a comment that then would set a precedent, such as asking a question or leading the conversation away from the topic the other players were typing a response to. Looking back the players should have talked more out of character, that could have cleared up the issue of talking over each other. But the issue of long post times becomes even more apparent. One solution is using voice chat for out of character, but at that point why not use voice chat for the entire game? I'd love to hear any comments on running games over discord or play-by-post.