Let's Talk: The Discord Discussion

[Lord Wraith]

L E T ' S T A L K: A C O M M U N I T Y D I S C U S S I O N T H R E A D

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As a community, I think the conversations found in the roleplaying discussion are very important to the Roleplaying Community as a whole particularly when discussing the evolving trends and patterns found both here and on other roleplaying websites and mediums. Lately, a lot of conversation has been focussed around the necessity of a character sheet and its structure, but I'd like to discuss another modern trend in Post-by-Post RPs.

Discord Servers.

Before making this topic, I took a quick peruse through the existing topics and I did notice there were previous discussions on roleplaying on Discord and while that is a modern trend, that's more or less the same as roleplaying in any instant messenger medium. I would like to iterate at this point, that 'Discord Roleplaying' is not the focal point of this discussion but rather the use of Discord as a replacement to the Out of Character Thread.

Often when looking at an interest check or a new RP, including my own, there's a link to the RP's Discord floating around, whether in the opening post or later on. If there isn't one provided by the GM, it's often requested and in some cases even provided by one of the participating players. But are these Discord Servers and Channels actually conducive to the overall health of an RP, or are they another distraction?

Discord Servers offer a great way for a GM to get to know their players, provide feedback and answer questions a lot faster than a conventional Out of Character Thread allows. Servers can be divided up in channels with specific purposes, I often divide mine into the following:

-General Chat
-Character Application Discussion
-Plot Discussion
-Character Discussion

Each of these channels is micro-managed by assigning roles and appropriate permissions. For those of you not familiar with Discord, each server contains channels within it, the list above is an example of my channels that I use for an RP. Users can be assigned 'roles' and each channel can be given permissions which allow you to set which role can and can't see the channel. So using the above list as an example, a player who has been given the 'Accepted Role' would be able to see every channel, except the 'Character Application Discussion' because I like to avoid the 'too many cooks in the kitchen' situation. Whereas someone who was 'Pending Acceptance' would only be able to see the 'General Chat' and 'Character Application Discussion'. A 'GM' would be able to see every channel.

In this regard, a Discord Server can be a lot more organized than the conventional OOC Thread. However, does organization necessarily promote productivity? In my personal experiences, the single most used channel is the 'General Chat', which often devolves to gifs, memes and jokes (that I don't often understand). Now I have seen some OOCs devolve into 'shit posting', but the pace is nothing compared to when it happens in a Discord Server. This is often a problem where both with an OOC and a Discord, where people would rather 'chat' than write for the IC (although this could entirely be a commentary on kindred souls seeking each other out on a mutual medium).

My biggest personal hold up on Discord Servers is the idea that they could exclude some players. I'm a firm believer that for the Discord Server to be efficient, that all players must join the Server so that no one is excluded. Even if the GM is communicating their plans and announcements in both the Discord and the OOC, the players likely won't and can't be expected to do so. For this reason, the OOC has the advantage in that everyone who is in the roleplay has immediate access to it. Adding to this thought, even those in the Discord can be excluded due to how rapidly some Discords can advance throughout the day due to those who remain connected for sixteen plus hours per day and contribute quite regularly. Information can be missed and lost in a way that doesn't happen in even a fast-moving OOC (with exceptions).

One major difference I have noted with Discord more so than any other instant messaging service in the past is the solidification of 'cliques' leading to clique warfare behind the scene. I think this is the single largest turn off of using Discord as it creates a toxic environment and breeds a mob mentality that is not only detrimental to the RP but the site as a whole. Discord makes it far too easy to have entire channels and chats dedicated to negatively discussing threads and people. I have had mods delete posts in the OOC of my threads to avoid drama spreading only for players who were offline at the time to direct message me to find out what was deleted. This has also extended to players messaging me privately to bash on a sheet or player they don't like and unfortunately I too have displayed these same behaviours from time to time. Yes, this could happen on the Guild through the PM system, but in my past experience before Discord, it was far less common.

I'm not going to put a verdict on this post as to which is better, because that's not the point of a discussion. I'm not trying to say everyone should or shouldn't use a Discord for their RP, but merely wanting to get an insight into the community and learn how Discord has been affecting roleplaying as a whole. Are you a fan of it? Do you hate it? Would you use one or do you expect it?

Please weigh in below.

[Jerkchicken]

My problem with discord usage is simple, that it becomes very tempting to treat it as like casual chat group of the players and end up forgetting to actually post in the RP.

Other than that it's step up from using skype and other shit.

[Naw]

My two cents is that if they didn't have Discord, they would just find other outlets for their behaviour. Discord has made some of these behaviours a whole lot easier, like you said, but it's not as if they weren't even there before.

One thing I want so say is that although I'm sure some people let the shitpost chatting distract them from actually posting, I do feel that sometimes that chatting can help encourage activity by letting people feel less like a pack of strangers that happened to have mashed together for some RP. Sort of like a huge ice breaker.

Also, in the latest RP Discord that I've joined, we seem to have done well enough segregating the "important information" areas from the "shitpost" ones, so it's usually easy enough to find what you need to know without having to sift through 100 messages of nonsense.

[Supermaxx]

People have been avoiding posting long before Discord was around; someone who actually wants to post is going to, and not having a Discord isn't going to make an inactive player suddenly more active IC.

[Hero]

Toxic behavior is ubiquitous; the difference between having it in a Discord server versus an OOC is the rate at which it happens.

[Nytem4re]

I've made my views clear in previous threads but I'll say them again I guess.

The complaint of cliques on discord could have been applied to the guild long before discord was popularized/existed. It just was behind "closed doors." cliques gravitate towards each others rps and its not necessarily a completely bad thing (it is better to rp with people you know you'll mesh well with) But of course there is always the issue of inclusion/exclusion. I don't think it was any harder to "talk shit" about other users/threads with the PM system or on skype or texts or whatever. "talking shit" is going to happen organically whether discord is there or not, imo there are other venues one could reasonably do the same.

I feel discord simply made it more OPEN and obvious.

As for the activity thing, I think it might be correlated but it doesn't prove causation. Yes, obviously spending time on discord is time you didn't spend writing an IC post, but theres a dozen more things imo that distract from posting on IC, and I'd find it difficult to point blame solely on discord. As Saint Maxx pointed out, if someone wants to post they will- If someone is flakey they will find other things to do other than post.

[NuttsnBolts]

In the past I've used a few online writing pads that had a chat function included so you can communicate while you write. Later there was Google Docs that held the same features with additional benefits of being a better mobile platform. Discord is just another stage of this with its ability to talk and discuss live, to link information and pics, and have a few fun and personal customisations.

What Discord does is allow users to easily communicate with each other — Key word in that sentence: Easily. Because of this the OOC page of the threads do become less populated with people opting for an easier option to let their peers know that they are posting and what they wish to reply with. You can check with your GM about a variety of aspects and, if lucky, almost obtain an answer instantly. At the same time I do feel that it has become a distraction for IC writing with talking to your friends being made so accessable, however @Nytem4re and @Saint Maxx are both correct as well in that a flaky writer will always be a flaky writer no matter what platform of communication is available.

My believe, if we do wish to venture into the topic of committed writers for a moment, is that GMs today are placing way too much effort into an OOC to start off with and they're not getting the same return in players, commitment, or posts. Rather than letting the players imagine and build up the words, they write out aspect of the world or answer questions by the players in a way that narrows the RPs possible scope. People in turn become bored because they've somehow cheated their way to understanding what the RP and story is all about and end up leaving. Discord does impact on an RP in this manner as spending an hour chatting about an RP can be a lot different to a handful of posts where you have to wait for your GM to reply to answer your queries.

As for clique warfare, it has always been around; it's just easier to link up with others who have the same view and opinion. Venture into Reddit and you'll see toxic people, venture into Twitter and you'll see toxic people, and even on Facebook where your friends have a real life name and description of their life and you will see toxic people. The issue with RPG is that too many people place this toxicity and clique warfare above their roleplaying experience to either spend the time arguing with each other and not RPing at all. This is a limited interest site with only a small selection pool of people, and all you will be doing is harming the growth and potential for players to join your RPs if you involve cliques.

To end on a reply for a quoted section:

I have had mods delete posts in the OOC of my threads to avoid drama spreading only for players who were offline at the time to direct message me to find out what was deleted. This has also extended to players messaging me privately to bash on a sheet or player they don't like and unfortunately I too have displayed these same behaviours from time to time.

@Lord Wraith

This is where all your problems lie. A GM should be doing what they can to stop the bashing of other player's work, and in turn they should not be so negative. If you want to stop clique warfare then you have to do what you can in not being a part of the problem. You wanna bash, you wanna bitch, you wanna exclude someone from an RP as a GM? Then you have to expect your RP to potentially die. No amount of threads or discussions will help if you want to display to your players that bitching about someone is ok while you're the GM. If you don't want someone to join, just tell them this RP is not for them — what they do after that is up to that individual, but don't flame the fire when it is not needed.

[Mogget]

It's how Discord works, encouraging casual fast paced real time discussion. It's quite different to a forum where the discussion is slower, where more time can be put into each reply. For a forum even with quick posts you have to go and manually reload the page or check to see if there are any new replies. It's quite incomparable to a chat room like Discord.

[Lord Wraith]

This is where all your problems lie. A GM should be doing what they can to stop the bashing of other player's work, and in turn they should not be so negative. If you want to stop clique warfare then you have to do what you can in not being a part of the problem. You wanna bash, you wanna bitch, you wanna exclude someone from an RP as a GM? Then you have to expect your RP to potentially die. No amount of threads or discussions will help if you want to display to your players that bitching about someone is ok while you're the GM. If you don't want someone to join, just tell them this RP is not for them — what they do after that is up to that individual, but don't flame the fire when it is not needed.

@NuttsnBolts

Apologies if the intention of this thread got lost in my opening post, but I was trying to promote a discussion of Discord as a tool, not turn this into a thread lamenting my personal failures as a GM.

If we could remain on topic moving forward, that would be appreciated.

[Morose]

Like with any tool, there are going to be downsides. I used to not have any sort of chat server for my RPs, largely since a lot of my RPers were already in Lady Amalthea's chatroom and I didn't see a point in making a second general chat area for largely the same people. However, once I saw how handy discord was for a GM, I created a RP server and I have it organized by RP. It also includes a reminders and announcements section, as well as behind the scenes areas for my Co-Gms and I to discuss.

Benefits wise, I have seen players become more invested in the RPs. We aren't just a disconnected group of strangers who occasionally interact in the OOC. People know the person behind the username and I think that takes away a lot of the ~nervousness~ about posting in a RP and makes people more enticed to continue on when there is a lull in a storyline. It has allowed for players to ask me questions quickly, as well as for me to send out announcements and remind people about posting in a setting where I know everyone will check at least once a day. A lot of great ideas and memories have come out of discord.

Negatives wise, cliques are definitely a thing. It's up to the GM/server owner to enforce equal participation and opportunity. People will naturally prefer old friends over new ones, so it's up to the server owner/GM/chatroom staff to make sure that no one is being excluded or left out. You can't just hope for an inclusive environment. You need to make sure one happens. I have also found that fights break out easily on discord between players, so to counteract this I've appointed a chat moderator from one of my trusted RPers and that has been helping keep things civil whenever tensions arise (we're human, tensions will happen).

I myself really enjoy the discord server for my RPs, as well as servers I am in for other GMs. If it works for you, great. If not, then it's no big deal. Everyone just needs to follow what works for them as a GM - and this goes for RPers too. If you don't like discord servers and the GM requires you to be in one, then that may not be the RP home for you. And there's nothing wrong with that in my opinion.

[BrokenPromise]

One must be careful talking about the “good ol' days.” I'm not talking about making the common mistake of looking at the past through rose tinted glasses, but forum Rping was just a different game back then. If you had your RP buds on a messenger service, it was likely msn messenger or Skype. There were no servers. Instead we had these clumsy things called group conversations that weren't exactly intuitive. There wasn't much you could do with them in terms of organization. I remember writing collabs over skype, and I'd copy parts of the actual post into a word document among all the random shit posting. Those were good days, but I do not miss the process.

A lot has changed since then. Phones with internet access have become more accessible, and Discord's focus on servers makes it possible for anyone to create an online hangout. By bonding with your fellow Rpers on a level beyond “that stranger who writes posts,” people become more invested in each other, the group, and the RP as a result.

Discord presents distractions. I can confirm that I've wasted quite a few hours on pointless discussions that I've forgotten as soon as the new day came. But then you need to ask if it was any different in the days when you'd talk to people one-on-one over Skype. I can't speak for everyone, but I always did a fair bit of shit posting.

I just spent ten or twenty minutes gathering my thoughts on this topic and posting them. Was that time wasted? Should I have put it towards RP instead? Investing more time in IC posts doesn't always insure they will be of outstanding quality. Sometimes you get your best ideas sharing a discussion with others, or just thinking about things a bit.

[Dervish]

I love Discord. It's done absolute wonders for being a tool for keeping a group of players active and invested and genuine friendships to form; I think that it's kind of been so successful in my roleplay it feels weird being in another roleplay without one, and for discords to not be very active if they do have one.

I think a lot of the criticism people have for Discord stems from problems that already exist and GMs not enforcing rules and good behaviour, or creating subchannels for different purposes; on my discord I have a general chat (for just OOC hangout), a roundtable discussion (to talk about characters and posts, events that came up, etc), a collab discussion (for players to talk about planning a collab or working out details in it while writing it), and a few others that I wouldn't consider essential but are there because players requested them, like a meme channel and a nsfw channel and a music channel for sharing songs and playlists.

I basically have a very simple rule I hold myself to; announcements get posted OOC as well as Discord, and if there's any toxic or malicious behaviour, I pretty much have a zero-tolerance policy. If someone's got a history of shit talking other people, arguing with others, and generally just being a real asshole, they're gone. Bye bye. Go find another RP to trash because it's rare to find an RP community that's genuinely mutually supportive and interested in each other as people and players alike; my RP group has frequent discussions about each other's characters, like their history and relationships, prospective interactions with other characters, their goals, etc. We talk about the posts that go up and stuff we like about them, and off topic, I like having a place where players can feel comfortable talking about anything without being judged for it.

One thing I've seen kill so many fucking Discords and RPs and drive players away is if toxic people are tolerated; there's places on the internet to argue politics all day (let's face it, the only people who want to talk about politics all day are the ones who are so set in their ways are the ones who will never, ever challenge their views or listen respectfully to counterpoints), and I don't see how tolerating racist, homophobic, or sexist bullshit is even a thing. I can't count the number of times I've had people come to me in private and talk about being uncomfortable or feeling unwelcome by someone because of really toxic behaviour, and those people are way better roleplayers than the toxic people almost all of the time.

Onto good stuff, I actually find discords promote a more organic discussion for RPs, and it only works if players actually try to participate, and it's that reason I kind of think that discords are best saved until after the game's been established and you have core players, but I know that's unrealistic. The best thing a GM can do is to set posting deadlines and enforce it; you cannot wait for everyone, and from personal experience if you hold up a game for one or two players, you're going to lose momentum and interest fast and then your RP is at a real risk of dying. That's where Discord is handy; you can set out alerts to everyone, say "hey you have until this date to post before I move the game along" and actually have a discussion with players if they're stuck or need a hand. It's about helping everyone out, not punishing them; even if they don't make the deadline, that's perfectly fine! We all have periods where we're in a slump.

Discord's made the RPing experience way more personal and enjoyable for me, and it's helped realize a potential I never really had with Skype or anything else. Like any tool, it can be misused and abused, and not every single RP needs to have a Discord, but for people who genuinely want to talk real time and plan stuff out organically with multiple people, it's a godsend. The GM still has to do heavy lifting to keep the game active and moving along, and you need to enforce some basic etiquette rules (keeping shit posting out of general chat and eliminating toxicity are huge ones), but not having it these days is kind of like doing math without a calculator; it takes way longer and not nearly as easy.

[Mao Mao]

To be honest, I only recently made my personal discord server is because of how often I am on it. Plus, its better than making new servers for new roleplays.

[ayzrules]

NGL I really like having discord for RPs; it's easier to plot character relationships using an IM-ish system instead of clogging up the OOC, and if people take it to PMs the GM doesn't have any idea as to what they're plotting unless they disclose it. can 100% avoid this problem if you just make a "plotting" channel in ur server

Plus, having an outlet to spam aesthetics related to the RP/characters is nice. lmao

[Mixtape Ghost N]

I have many memetards that follow me around and anything is better than them using the OOC as their outlet.

[OwO]

i'm usually on discord every day and sometimes i go a while without logging into RPG, so it's pretty good in keeping me updated in that regard. there's also no reason for someone to be without info because of discord. pinned messages, important info channels, actually using the OOC, etc. it's just miscommunication, something that's going to happen even if you primarily used the OOC.

discord has pretty much been a godsend for RPs for me because of how much planning you can do when you get updated live instead of every refresh.

it also moves much faster so i can shitpost at an accelerated rate

wait, am i the baddie?

[Ruby]

Discord is where a lot of clique-think meets reality, and the result is a mess. Not a surprise.

RP wise...it's just more functionality than Tinychat and Skype. It's easier for people to come and go from Discord servers, and you can easily hype up your friends on one server and then bring that to another server. It's almost like digital tribal warfare at times when the drama really kicks up.

It's pretty funny, and sad.

Yeah I can see Discord increasing the level of toxic drama, just as much as it increases convenience and functionality for GMs and RPers. Staff often finds it's a very small percentage of people that participate in the toxic drama and RP regularly. You're usually around for one, or the other, rarely both. Discord exposes people that way.

Balances out in the end.

[Dion]

discord nice

give me outlet for meme and warfare so me not have to post meme and war-language in ooc

me like discord

In all seriousness these issues have been around forever, and imho have actually decreased a lot, lmao. Toxicity is on the down especially recently (or at least it has been in my experience. I'm sure stuff has happened behind the scenes) compared to the good old days where the Narutards thought everyone that made a Naruto RP was infringing on their copyright and should be KICKED BANNED AND DELETED FROM ORBIT for even thinking about Naruto and the same goes for other vapid and mundane shit like 'uhhhhhhhh my character sheet setup got stolen' which evolved into it's own whole ass drama.

If anything the topic of 'toxic' drama has become less vapid and more sincere in my eyes -- most of the things I've seen people argue about has been shit that deserves some form of speaking up about and the fact that discord allows you to directly call someone out for being a moron is pretty great. If doing so is labeled toxic then I'm not sure what isn't toxic.

EDIT: for clarification, I do think labeling everything that makes you upsetti spaghetti bolognesi as 'toxic' just because someone won't take dumb shit and calls you out is pretty immature and disregards the real issue i.e. you might just be a twat and if someone calls you a twat, that's not toxic, that's calling a spade a spade.

Food for thought.

[Karkinos]

I’ll throw in that RP Discord groups can be uncomfortable for people with anxiety or who lean on Internet anonymity because it adds a social pressure to the roleplaying experience that wouldn’t normally be there. It can be tough when you’re expected to assimilate in a chat room with strangers of various backgrounds, experiences, and age ranges. And there are lurkers too to consider. What happens when a person posts but doesn’t talk in the Discord? Or just doesn’t have the app...?

Also, not every GM has what it takes to be a mod. Trust me, oh my god.

(I’m not like anti-Discord, I just don’t see all of this stuff being mentioned.)

[Lord Wraith]

I believe the at this point, the general, almost unanimous consensus is that as a tool Discord is a valuable asset to any roleplay. In all of your responses, I haven't seen this truly debated. Overall, save for maybe one, the thoughts posted here have been very Pro-Discord. In fact, there's been very little disagreement.

I'm inclined to state that because of this, this thread has served its purpose and any further discussion will likely devolve into focussing on the 'toxic behaviours' which I can only see creating a negative experience.