Tag: discord

Tabletop Adventure Games Community

Maybe its the whole middle life thing or distance decades-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder, but I’ve been reminiscing quite a bit about places I chatted on and hung around online throughout high school and college, and all of the benefits of forums, in contrast to the current contender of Discord, have seemed very appealing.

The obvious first benefit is the whole indexing and reference problem – Discords are highly segmented, private, and even the big ones you can search – have terrible tools for actually finding things. I don’t know how many times (a day) we have a “what is OSR” debate where everyone is making the same points, and maybe forums don’t completely solve that, but having a publicly searchable topic is WAY more appealing than beating the grave of long-deceased equine or trying to convince someone to peruse Discord’s search.

Another benefit, for me, is just the asynchronous nature of forum communication. I’ve been (failing to) curtail my social media usage, and when I try to limit Discording to a specific time, that often means I am pinging someone from hours ago, outside of the context of the conversation, and sometimes interrupting an ongoing conversation.

Somewhat related to the first point, but the fact that forums are often referenced years later I think can serve to maybe (slightly) reduce the amount of hot takes and thread conversation-crapping that occurs in Discord. Sometimes I’ve just become sensitive to it recently, but the negativity and “dunks” on Discord have seemed to increase in the past few years. I’m not going to claim I don’t contribute to this, but I think there is something to the format of semi-private throwaway conversation that promotes this behavior.

Each of the above also have their own downsides of course, I’m not going to claim forums didn’t have a recession for a reason. I just feel there are benefits in the above, and I’m in a position where I at least think I want more of the above.

I’ve tried looking around for forums to call home, and there are a few places I still like reading or lurking on (like the classic odd74), but I haven’t found a place that really feels like home to me. So then I thought – why not just throw an instance on one of my servers?

I will mince no words and say this is likely to be a pretty sleepy place, but I’ve done some community building locally, and I feel like I know the kind of community I would like to participate in, and if you’re a reader of this blog, you’re likely to understand what that sort of thing is. So if you feel similar to the above, feel free to join me at Tabletop Adventure Games.

Thank you!

Doomed Reach

I have started running a West Marches-styled game over Discord/Roll20 named “The Doomed Reach.” This came about mostly because of my move from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and wanting to stay in touch with many of my gaming groups, both face-to-face as well as online.

So far we have done two character creation sessions with supplemental world building. I spent a few weeks coming up with a hex map, adding materials to it, building a little bit of lore, etc. But I also wanted the players to have some input into the setting.

Obviously with something like a West Marches, the content requirement prevents players from being able to ad-hoc add tons of material in (or at least, it prevents it in terms of my preferences), so I used the system from Beyond the Wall’s Further Afield – players get to add a feature from a random table, and then other players get to embellish on the detail. All of this is delivered in-character, and the Referee rolls in secret how accurate their description is.

So this allows players to add new stuff to the setting, and I get to keep the tied together bits of dungeons and lore that I want. I intend to run this setting relatively anti-canon – one player decided to play a Kobold, and while I told him I’d prefer if he played a dog-kobold, he could do whatever. I fully intend to lean on him for all things Kobold related. Equally a player decided she had been swept up by missionaries who had deemed her cursed and sinful, and now she walks away wondering the reach of the religion that raised her – that player is going to be my main source of info for that sort of religion.

I’ll be posting some lore details and session reports as they come, right now I have a bunch of material I need to prep for the first actual adventuring session.