ELI5 - Discord RP
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I tried to get my kid to explain, but like…they couldn’t explain the technical stuff nor relate to my MU experience, and holy shit 15 year old me playing a pooka on The Dreaming couldn’t dream up the insane drama these kids got going on with Warrior Cats so….I was SUPER lost. It didn’t help that there were like 5 of them on a call and they all wanted to tell me crap. (Tbf I also was too dumb to understand GTA RP, so the entire concept of computer based RP that isn’t on a mu may just be lost on me)
So, can someone grown explain Discord rp to me, a lifelong MU person? Is it like playing on AOL Red Dragon Inn with a central meeting and then breakout rooms or are there perma rooms and bots and shit? Pros? Cons? I can see a huge pro in not building a grid because holy crap that’s annoying and the last time I honestly organically navigated a grid has to have been in the 90s on CyberSphere. Even then I’m almost certain I legit just followed people, I don’t remember, I’ve slept since then.
Also, y’all are my people so you’ll understand my general expectations. The people who take 5 lines of text to say hello and god forbid we have nothing to say, that’s at least 10 lines of describing that you didn’t do anything this pose round.
Yes, I could just join one and find out. But that’s not going to happen if I don’t remotely understand things because otherwise I’ll just avoid it for forever and potentially anxiety out of something that could be fun.
I’m also apprehensive because discord is just so…discordy. I can’t figure out how to make it a little less visually cluttered so I do get a bit lost. Though, thinking about it, it can’t be much different than keeping up with straight game text that just scrolls. I just generally have a lot trying to get my attention on discord.
Tl;dr - is discord rp legit, how do it works, is it hard to navigate, and is it all teenagers playing warrior cats or are there places for psycho milf necromancers on the path of Doom? (asking for a friend bc I’m not a degenerate and if anyone says otherwise they are a liar)
Fun? What is this fun thou speakest of?
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@Luna said in ELI5 - Discord RP:
So, can someone grown explain Discord rp to me, a lifelong MU person? Is it like playing on AOL Red Dragon Inn with a central meeting and then breakout rooms...
I don't have extensive experience with Discord RP, so it's probable there are many variations. But what you've described above is what I've seen. It's basically just a MUSH with channels and temp rooms. Private scenes can be done via DM. Some have dice plugins for rolls. Haven't seen any extensive bots.
It's functional, but it lacks a lot of the conveniences that MUers are used to. Like ooc chat being separate, logs, etc.
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@faraday I could see ther being an OOC chat channel for either a single server as single MU* or multiple games per discord server sharing one or more OOC channels.
Now I wantt to figure out a way to have a bot that you can ask it for a room, and it will spit out the desc, either as something to copy/paste to a scene channel, or directly injected.
I have a waggish sense of humor.
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I've only been peripherally involved in one Discord RP server... someone invited me, but I didn't really feel up to the hurdle of participation at the time. I left after observing a while. They had a separate website and a lot of game rules for how to generate a character. They had a lot of channels, each channel being a separate room/area, and some channels were for specific events. They had bots for character generation and levelling and dice. It was super serious and legit. I'm pretty sure that there is a lot of variation in Discord RP servers but the one I saw seemed pretty hardcore. There were a lot of teenagers, it's true. It was hopeful thinking that the next generation is also into text-based roleplay, in their own way, and might come around to older games (the person who invited me had found a MUD to play in, too).
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@hobos Was it all text like a MU*, with maybe talkign to handle some quick OOC communicattion, or was there a mix of speaking and writing?
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@Misadventure I think we’re on the same page with the bot thing. Thinking about it, frankly I don’t see why it couldn’t have the conveniences were used to. Likely the reason why there aren’t bots now for that are likely just that no one thought about it.
We expect a lot of front end work on a game before we give it much of a chance. A grid, all the systems, the back lore, etc…and then most of us end up teleporting to the same 3 places or temp rooming. Half the cool hooks the people write to start the game get ignored, mages barrel though and change the setting because mages gonna mage, that sort of thing.
Looking back I can pretty honestly say I feel bad for people who put so much work into a game that got ignored, derailed, over run….like my bad. I’m sorry y’all.
Fun? What is this fun thou speakest of?
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@Luna said in ELI5 - Discord RP:
Thinking about it, frankly I don’t see why it couldn’t have the conveniences were used to. Likely the reason why there aren’t bots now for that are likely just that no one thought about it.
Maybe, but it would be clunky as heck. MUs have a lot built into them - especially now with the web support that Ares and Evennia have. You can't do all that with Discord bots.
That's not to say you couldn't adopt a few things to make it more convenient, just that you're not going to replicate a MU interface in discord. And you probably wouldn't want to. They're different mediums.
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@faraday That’s fair. I haven’t even checked out the web stuff. I haven’t connected to a game in years. Since The Reach really I think.
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It was all text from what I saw. But I did hear about another server (I didn't join that one at all, too busy at the time) that was run like a tabletop game, mostly over voice chat.
