I know a lot of people are using Discord with various channels. What else do people use, and why?
Also, for those using Discord, how do you handle the character sheets?
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I do use Discord, and I usually have the character sheets in Google Sheets. I include a channel in the Discord server with a link to the Google Sheets, in case people need to find their way back.
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I use discord + Kettlewright (for Cairn). I use Button Dice Roller for the dice.
Doing a write up right now!
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I’ve done some between session play-by-post in the past. We used Discord with two channels: in-character, out-of-character. We also had a channel from our live game that we used for handouts and character sheets (form-fillable PDFs) and such. And I’d make a thread in the in-character channel if someone went off alone.
Really looking forward to Yochai’s write up on this topic!
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If it’s helpful, here is what I shared with my players to introduce them to our Discord play-by-post:
Summary
Play-By-Post
Guidelines for playing-by-post.
## Channels
- maps-and-handouts:
- game-journal:
- play-by-post:
- out-of-character
## Formatting
- For the play-by-post channel, use third-person prose to describe what your character is doing.
- Put character dialogue in quotations.
- Put out-of-character talk, clarifications, and rules questions in parentheses (or in the out-of-character channel).
- Wait to make a roll until instructed by the GM.
- To roll dice, type: !roll 1d20 (or whatever dice are called for).
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In looking at most folks’ answers, things tend to lean Discord here. I would think that Discord would be hard to do as I think if it more as chat rooms. It can be easy to get lost in posts if you had to be away for a bit. Maybe psychologically for me, forums are easier to navigate in PbP? Maybe I just imagine PbP to be quite a bit slower than what I see Discord servers being overall.
I am eager to see/hear explanations, pointers for Discord PbP management mentioned by @yochaigal . However, I will admit I did something slightly similar to what @cobb.land is doing.
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I’m writing my post as we speak! It keeps becoming more and more sprawling lol. I did create a template for Cairn PbP if you want to check it out:
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I’m with you on your feelings about Discord. I think I might hate it, haha. If it was easier and/or cheaper to set up your own Discourse (or other modern forums platform) I would definitely prefer that.
I will say that my play-by-post channels always move it a much slower pace than other Discord channels. They’re very structured and procedural.
You could host Mattermost yourself for $5/mo (if you know what you’re doing) or pay $15/mo if you don’t. That said it is hard to compete with free.
There is also Ponder, which is less robust but free. I think it would probably work well for play-by-post, but I’ve never actually tested it out. (Also, with smaller projects like this—or even big ones, if Google is involved—you never know how long they’ll stick around.)
Sure, but is just as proprietary as Discord right? So what’s the difference?
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Good point. But I could see it being useful for someone who doesn’t want to set up a whole Discord server or has even somehow avoided using Discord at all so far. Of course an open source solution is usually (read: always) better.
Crazy idea: a Hometown server for play-by-post. (I can’t imagine how this would be better than forums, but it might be fun.)
Discourse actually is pretty decent for PbP. But there are already plenty of web-based PbP forums, Gamersplane and Rolegate come to mind.
Discord works pretty well though…
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Here is my post:
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