Why the Strong Preference for Discord in Remote Games?

[Ulfgeir]

Some good stuff with Discord... Persistent, and you can have multiple channels, for different games etc, and can create separate vopice-channels if the GM need to talk in private with a player. You can access it on many different devices, both phones and computers. You can upload images, have bots for dicerolling. Also rather good voice. video was not so good when we tried it though, but if it is your regular group then that might not be so important..

 

[Campbell]

Most of the online gaming I do (even if it is with local folks here in Colorado) is part of one of several gaming communities I'm part of. I also do recruitment for games over Discord it's just much easier to hop in someone's server. You just pop into a voice/video channel.

Occasionally we will use Google Meets if there are hang ups with Discord because you can just post a link in Discord.

 

[Bilharzia]

Roll20 and Zoom for us. Roll20 has all the game-specific features and character sheets and buttons to press, while Zoom is the go-to video meeting tool. I didn't know Discord could even do video?

I am flabbergasted that Enworld does not have a Discord server, or at the very least, flabbered.

 

[Morrus]

I am flabbergasted that Enworld does not have a Discord server, or at the very least, flabbered.

So flabbergasted, yet it has one! Linked in the main menu, no less! Flabbergasted!

 

[Bilharzia]

So flabbergasted, yet it has one! Linked in the main menu, no less! Flabbergasted!

Oo-er I see it now.

 

[Umbran]

I am flabbergasted that Enworld does not have a Discord server, or at the very least, flabbered.

 

[Bilharzia]

The direct connection to the forum is clever, but at the same time incredibly annoying and off-putting. Joined and left in a couple of minutes. Definitely an example of old-tech/community meeting new-tech/community and not getting along well.

 

[Blue]

I use both and do not prefer Discord.

Zoom has much better "several people start to talk" than Discord, and that's really a big deal for me.

But for the most part, we use Zoom along with something else, like Roll20 or a Google Draw. It is not complete by itself, but paired with a free tool it's fine.

Discord has the advantage of dice bots for a bunch of games.

It also has persistent chat and images. I'm playing a pulpy Call of Cthulhu on Discord, and the DM has a staggering amount of clues he posts up for us to sandbox investigate. Zoom doesn't have anything like that, but again since we pair it with a visual one that would it's not a great loss.

 

[Bilharzia]

Discord + Roll20 is a common pairing. Roll20 is good for handouts, maps, images, character sheets and rolls-from-character sheets which is more fiddly without. I use an importer to get NPCs and Creatures into Roll20. Discord works well for voice and an additional chat channel. If people use the Roll20 text chat it's for in-character stuff, Discord for everything else. We also use Roll20 for posting session write-ups in the game forum.

 

[el-remmen]

We use Zoom and nothing else (two cameras - one pointed to the battlemat/minis). I have considered complementing it with a Slack channel, but Slack feels like work to me (just in the sense I only use it for work), while since I quit teaching before the pandemic, Zoom does not have that association for me.

It would be nice to be able to keep the chat log, but mostly we just have a group text message if saving something is absolutely important.