thoughts into words into thoughts

A Discord Toolbox for Play-by-Post Perverts

I am chronically ill, and I speak by writing.

That's hyperbole, but not by much. I'm capable of speaking——sometimes I even do it——but the number of people who hear me speak regularly could be counted on two hands. I have so little energy to work with, and talking to someone is a bitter and indiscriminate drain: at its worst in person, still vicious over call, and mostly tolerable by writing. The problem is magnified by the Group of People, which chains all the most taxing parts of conversation one after the other like a fighting game combo meter unless you can find that quiet niche to sit and observe.

I'm also a tabletop obsessive. It's my job and my hobby (I don't advise that, by the way), and because of the way my body works, I can access very little of it. The most accessible form, my latest love, is the play-by-post (PbP): asynchronous play using a written forum. Ink has been spilled on what PbP is and how it functions; that's not really what I'm about right now. So let's expand that description into a shotgun definition for our purposes:

Play-by-Post is:

Discord

I use Discord almost exclusively for PbP. (Frankly, I use Discord almost exclusively for socialization, because of the aforementioned "speaking to people is like cutting a hole in a jug of water and watching it cry" energy problem.) It is easy to use, and the people I want to play with can be found there.

But a lot of games don't make the jump to PbP smoothly——or at all. Dialogues are slower in writing than by speaking, so every layer of mechanical cruft——every system that requires a decision be made and implemented——slows play a little more. Empty seconds of thought at the table bleed into the minutes or hours between digital replies. Games with straightforward procedures——storygames, for instance——are relatively safe: pose a question, give an answer, maybe a bit of discussion about how best the answer is implemented, and you're off. Games with deep and tantalizing math——like wargames——become more sluggish: move on a grid, roll to hit, compare to AC, roll damage, describe how the monster drops his hat, next monster, repeat sixty times——god, please kill me before the reinforcements arrive.

The problem is that most games assume snappy response time. They are designed with in-person interaction, or at least a voice chat or video call, in mind. But not every game is. Epistolary games——Dead Letter Society comes to mind——are basically designed for Discord girlies to bat back and forth like shuttlecocks. Journaling games can use the structure of forums in compelling ways——even using their public nature to synch up one-player experiences into a broader web of play.

What does a game designed with Discord in mind look like? What restrictions is it beholden to, and what limitations of in-person play does it transcend? Well, to understand an artisan, look at her tools. Let's consider some of the interesting little gears and levers Discord gives us to toy with, and how they might be used in play.

(As an aside, this entire essay will be written while I am playing by post on Discord. It is the only way to remain authentic. If I stop for even one moment, my heart will explode like the bus in Speed, a film I have never seen. Remember that.)

Channels

Discord servers are broken down into channels, where users can direct their messages to be seen by others. In most servers, channels are named by the topic of discussion they host, and sorted into broad categories by similarity. (Channels can also be broken down further into threads, for more specific chatter.) In a PbP game, you might expect to see a channel for out-of-character (OOC) discussion, one where all the rules and dice rolls are corralled, one for character sheets and inventory management, one for "the actual gameplay" as might resemble an at-the-table discussion, and so on.

But if you hail from another tradition of play——live-text roleplay——you might imagine an entirely different structure. Channels can be sorted geographically: in a game set in a medieval town, you might have a channel for the tavern, one for the chapel, and another for the dungeon beneath it all. A list of channels might handily replace a map, and the appearance (or disappearance) of channels can serve to represent characters diagetically discovering (or abandoning) locations. Under this model, threads can serve as partitions of those locations——your room at the tavern, the altar in the chapel, or an oubliette in the dungeon.

Turn it over; what else can channels do? If they can be spatial, then they can also be temporal. A channel might represent a particular time period of a game, with players moving back and forth between them as they flesh out flashbacks and memories and vignettes of the future——building a timeline through play. A thread here might represent a specific moment or scene instead of a location. A channel could be dedicated to a specific character, with all scenes originating from them appearing there——and threads representing their relationships to other player characters, or specific subjects in their life, or the psychogeography of their ego.

A channel is a container that holds play in it, and the way you organize it——how you name it, how often you visit it, where you place it in relation to others——influences the shape of that play.

Roles

Users in a Discord server can be assigned roles to control what permissions they have: starting new channels, deleting other people's messages, and inviting more users are all permissions a role might grant. They also serve a communal purpose: because you can label roles, many servers allow people to self-select roles from a list based on their interests, such that you can open someone's profile and see what they like or what they do.

If channels are boxes, roles are their keys: a role can determine what channels a user has access to——what channels they can even see. Suddenly, our exploration of channels and threads is blown open: what locations are only accessible to certain players? What doors might a noble background open, or membership in a guild, or a signet ring from a secret society? What parts of history might a character with the "immortal" role have access to that "short-lived" characters don't? When the library burns, does everyone lose access to the channels described in its books? Information can be sequestered, forcing players to relay it secondhand in the way their characters would.

Consider permissions. Are there places where a character might have more authority than normal? What permissions might reflect that? A guildmaster might have the power to eject other players from the guildhall channel, revoking their membership. A god might have the power to strike words spoken in the church from living memory by deleting messages. Conversely, a channel where you can only read messages——not write them——is deeply disempowering. A commoner in the halls of a noble might be so restrained by social mores that their words are not just disregarded——they literally can't speak.

Who has permission to create new channels——worldbuilding in its most literal sense? Is it a function of a character's social power, access to resources, or ability to warp reality? In a medieval town, constructing a building to house that channel might take months or years——what about in a modern setting, or something literally digital, like hackers in a cyberpunk network?

In most games, players are barred from or permitted to interact with the game by the consensus of the table——the rule of conversation. But roles allow you to make those permissions tangible and observable in a way talking struggles with.

Proxy Bots

If you're willing to tinker a little, there are all kinds of bots programmed by other Discord users that can radically alter your play experience: bots for rolling dice, doing arithmetic, tracking resources, and more. Outside of these quality-of-life changes, though, there's a category of bot that stands out: proxies. These bots allow you to create a sort of pseudo-profile with a different username and avatar from you, then send messages using that profile instead of yours. The result: a quick and impossible-to-mistake mask you can don at any time to declare who is speaking.

PluralKit and plu/ral are the two bots that come to mind. They were designed to help plural systems communicate more naturally, and they're great for that——ask us how we know——but I've also found them wildly useful in PbP. Having an explicit switch I can throw to declare I'm in-character allows me to talk much faster and looser, speeding up play and keeping things easy to parses at a glance. As a GM, the benefit is multiplicative: any major NPC could have a proxy, rendering them distinct and identifiable even after long stints of absence. (If you're feeling bold, even your narrative voices can have their own proxies, making them as much a character in the game as anyone else——named and defined and fallible.)

But what does a game designed around the presence of proxies look like? Perhaps proxies are a resource like hirelings, earned so that a player can be in multiple places at once or participate in channels they normally can't. Perhaps they're a useful way players can pilot NPCs and spare their gamemaster a little bandwidth. Can a proxy be destroyed by a bad roll or a clock running out? Can a player forcibly change another player's proxy——their name, their avatar, the places they're permitted to be——as a punishment or a reward? Can a proxy be stolen——deleted from one person's account and remade on someone else's——as that character's allegiance is won over?

An interesting exercise: every time your character undergoes a major change——advancement, a near-death experience, upgrading their lifestyle, joining a new faction——delete their proxy and make it again. Keep a list of names and avatars they've used; you can't use them again. Every name and every avatar must be unique. How does it change the way you play——the way the character thinks and feels? When you strip away a title or add one, how does their bearing change? When you give them a new face, how is their self-image warped? All interesting hooks you could attach mechanics to and yank until they bleed.

Other Interesting Tidbits

Reactions

You can right-click on a user's message to react to it with an emoji; reactions with the same emoji stack together. This is an interesting way to chip in on a conversation, even one you aren't present for, and show how it makes you——or your character——feel without interrupting the flow by speaking. In a recent game, my character established a routine with another character of reacting with a camera or an eye emoji when they were watching something happen over surveillance feeds. Each time it appeared, there was a quiet shock of self-awareness——"Whatever I'm saying will make it back to her, and I should be aware of that." That would be a difficult dynamic to convey in person without interjecting and derailing the scene.

Reactions can also serve a more mechanical purpose. You could establish that reacting with a specific emoji triggers certain moves during play, conveys how you intend to use your turn, or corresponds to a resource you're spending. Take it a step further: Discord lets you upload custom emojis, opening the door to system-specific (hell, even player-specific) symbols.

Voice Chats

I skipped over these in the Channels section because they don't interest me and I can't use them. But PbP doesn't need to be purely written: you can mix voice chats and written messages as you see fit, absorbing the best qualities from both styles of play. You might use written PbP to cover long montages and scenes where characters have time to think, then switch to voice chats to bang out fast-paced action scenes or mechanics that require ample back-and-forth. You can even use this dividing line to switch systems entirely, playing a writing-friendly system during PbP and something snappier and more action-heavy for intense voice-only moments.

How might this be gamified? Perhaps secret meetings can only happen over voice chat, where there is no written record of their passage. Maybe, for occult reasons, some types of information are forbidden to write——like true names, or maps——and can only be spoken aloud, or vice versa. A particularly strenuous or complicated task might require you to converse over voice and play by writing at the same time, juggling multiple threads of attention in the same way your character does.

Text Formatting

This is actually something I feel strongly about; a sudden blast of header text to convey a burst of emotion or the use of miniature text to suggest a small, uncertain tone underlines a character's voice in the same way a player might don an accent or change the pace or pitch they speak with. But it's been spoken on quite comprehensively elsewhere, and I have nothing new to add. The short version: get silly with formatting. Have a character that only speaks in intense bold text or frequently lilts into italics to show their vocal range. Highlight your message, see what buttons pop up, and fuck with them until you get something weird and new. Set a rule and then rarely, purposefully, depart from that rule for emphasis.

But that's a personal practice. How might it be utilized in a game? Perhaps different formats of text obey different rules: italicized text is always true; anything spoken in gigantic text can be heard by anyone, but small text can only be heard by those in the same thread as you; underlined words represent weaknesses to be exploited, while bolded words represent attacks against those vulnerabilities. Perhaps a format could be imposed, forcing a character to whisper fearfully or speak in aggressive header text——a visual version of "conditions" as they appear in other games.

Conclusion

When I have to do things that chronic illness makes difficult, it takes more time, more energy, and has worse results. PbP games are like that, too: systems designed around instant conversation and physical components can be simulated over Discord, but the result is often a slow and frustrating slog. But it's possible to design a game with the specific needs of PbP in mind——they already exist——and such a game would benefit from the tools and toys Discord provides.

Is that enough? To design a game compatible with PbP? Personally, I don't think so. I won't be happy until my hard drive is full of games impossible to play in person——inconceivable outside of the digital confines of my local doll-infested server——nonsensical without channels to hold it and roles to shape it and proxies, lovely and ephemeral, to populate it. I speak by writing, and I want to chatter and rave until my battery dwindles and my friends one by one log off like stars winking out at morn's approach.

Until then, I guess I'll keep playing Girl Frame.