OK, does RPG talk actually happen outside of Discord? I don’t want to go there. I just gave their terms another read through and users must submit to *arbitration* instead of a jury trial and they may not join a *class suit*. I thought these were good things to have? I think I prefer simple IRC. I’m not a lawyer, though. Perhaps using IRC is worse? In general, though, I’m operating under the assumption that anybody trying to provide a free service and making a profit at the same time is bound to do things I wouldn’t like.
So where does one go on IRC? @ohyran asked about it. I started thinking about some IRC networks I remembered and connected to them:
I suspect the days of IRC gaming might be gone. But perhaps there’s still space for the “small Internet”. You know the one:
In this spirit – if you bring your own community, there’s an empty IRC server here:
#IRC #RPG
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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I use Discord to run my digital games, but I’m not happy about it for the usual reasons (ToS, proprietary, closed, etc). But it’s *so easy*. I’m fairly tech savvy, but I know (because I’ve done it before) it would take me a solid hour or so to figure out (again) how to work IRC and what all the implications are.
Now, I may do just that (because I dig old school tools, and open tools), but I don’t really expect my players in my digital game to do it too. So Discord it is unless I find an alternative.
What I need is a self-hosted, persistent, easy-to-sign-up chat server, with clients for every OS including mobile.
Any ideas? 🙂
– acodispo 2019-02-05 16:06 UTC
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I wish I had something to offer! 😢
As I was talking with @ohyran, @ovidius offered to do “some kind of FLOSS for Pen&Paper writeup as a blog post”. And here it is: Pen and Paper RPG with FLOSS.
For communications we used Nextcloud Talk and as a Virtual Tabletop (VTT) we used Maptool. We did not use in the calendar functionality of Nextcloud or the ability to make a Doodle like poll, but the use of Nextcloud as filesharing service was helpful in other campaigns.
It sounds like an interesting start. Personally, I ran a short seven-session audio-chat only campaign via Skype or Teamspeak at the time. So I’m even less interested in dice rolls, tokens and shared maps. Perhaps the suggestions made in that blog post would be good enough for me.
– Alex Schroeder 2019-02-05 17:40 UTC
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Ah, good link! I may get around to pursuing a FLOSS solution at some point. If I have any luck I’ll let you know!
– acodispo 2019-02-05 22:16 UTC
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Thanks. 🙂
– Alex Schroeder 2019-02-05 22:47 UTC
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@lskh noted that there’s also Otherworlders, and added “just a few idlers hanging out there, though.”
– Alex Schroeder 2019-02-14 06:44 UTC
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@acodispo Best one I’ve found so far is Rocket Chat. Desktop and mobile clients, and an easy server install using Docker or any number of install methods.
We used it at my job for months, until IT effectively shut it down and told us all to use Google Chat.... :-\
– Klaatu 2019-03-24 19:09 UTC
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– Alex Schroeder 2020-06-09 06:43 UTC
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I’m running an IRC server on campaignwiki.org, and it has a web front-end.
You can chat on this site if Discord ever goes down or becomes unbearable. Create rooms for your group! – Chat
Here’s how:
Enjoy. ♥
– Alex 2023-06-03 20:17 UTC