Why Discord is the Best Platform to Play TRPGs

One of the best (and few) positive surprises during the COVID-19 pandemic was seeing the tabletop role-playing game (TRPG) community continue to grow.  It was a real threat that the lockdown would’ve really hurt the popularity of a game traditionally done in person, but the virus couldn’t slow down the rise of nerds gathering to save the world. Between 2014 and 2022, Wizards of the Coast (the company who brings us Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) and Magic:  The Gathering) reported eight straight years of increased profits, according to Max Ufberg, which is a good sign of the strength of the community overall. There are many reasons for that growth, including the rise of Actual Play podcasts that show viewers how fun TRPGs can be, along with the release of Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition and Pathfinder 2nd Edition that both include more simplified rules to help new players jump right into the adventure.  That being said, I think the most important reason overall (only further proved in my opinion by the continued growth of the community during the pandemic) is the increase in digital platforms that let people play online.  It’s reasonable to assume that many campaigns running before the world was locked down were forced to stop meeting in person for large stretches; the game I ran only kept going during the first year because we moved our weekly sessions to Zoom to let us keep playing safely.  

I know that this story isn’t unique to me because I did a study between 2021 and 2022 where I spoke with campaign groups, asking about the digital media that the individuals used and if it changed how they played the game.  A lot of the answers were content people watched or read for fun:  watching Critical Role and Dimension 20, Reddit meme pages, or online forums to look up fun character builds.  In that study, however, three of the five most commonly used media were a category that I called “Tools media,” media that let parties play together or helped individual people play more easily.  Out of all of these different media that people used, Tool or entertainment, one stood out by a wide margin as the most used media by these tabletop players.  Our topic for today, Discord was used by 24 of my 35 participants to host their game sessions and keep track of important campaign notes.  

Now, for the 10 people reading this article who haven’t heard of Discord, it’s an online platform where users can make  and join “servers,” a type of digital private space.  Written by Delfino in Business Insider, these servers are very customizable and users can make separate “text channels (where you can type to talk to other people) and voice channels (where you can voice-chat with others). You can also share videos, images, internet links, music, and more.”  In general, there were three main reasons why most of my participants told me that Discord was their go-to platform for hosting TRPG sessions:  the high quality of the audio/video call, the ability to record and organize information in the different channels, and built-in features like bots that improve gameplay.  By looking at these three core features of Discord, looking at its use for tabletop players and how it compares to its competition online, I hope to better explain why the platform stands as the most used media tool in my study. 

While this first reason may feel a bit too obvious to go into detail on, the fact remains that the single most important element needed for many TRPG games to work online is for everyone to be able to hear one another.  Yes, battle maps are important and I won’t ignore the place that text-based campaigns have in the community as a different way to play and an inviting option for the hearing impaired; but for many groups, the narration of the Dungeon Master (DM) and the responses of party members are enough to keep gameplay going.  For these groups, having a high-quality audio call feature was essential to playing during COVID-19.  After all, how can a player make an informed decision on their turn if the DM cuts out part way through explaining the layout of a battlefield, or the nuance of an NPC explaining lore to the group?  Discord has become one of the most popular platforms used by many gamers, tabletop and digital, for talking as a group while playing online together.  The platform is relatively easy to use, can run in the background without slowing down your PC or internet connection, and its success has led to many companies building Discord compatibility into their software (just like how Playstation has officially integrated Discord onto its console settings in 2023). 

An interesting observation about Discord came from my study in relation to the fourth most used media and a common name in the TRPG community:  Roll20.  Roll20 is a digital tabletop simulator, meaning that a DM can create maps on the website and then have the group move characters and monsters around during gameplay.  In terms of trying to recreate a 2-D battle map that replicates what a group would be looking at during an in-person session, Roll20 delivers. It’s incredibly customizable and some of the options available (like having different lighting shown on screen for each player depending on their character’s POV) are crazy cool.  That being said, the site does have its issues.  All of the people I spoke to in my study who used Roll20 had one important thing in common, that they used Roll20 for the digital map but used Discord to handle the audio call during sessions.  According to one DM, the reason for Discord’s use alongside Roll20’s comes down to the virtual tabletop’s audio quality:  “It’s pretty garbage.”  A pretty good summary of the service, as other people’s testimony had the same general message.  Roll20 was perfect as a gameboard to virtually play on and use as a visual guide, but the quality of audio was so poor that even users with weaker computers were willing to run both Roll20 and Discord together in an attempt to fix the issue.  

As discussed, D&D is a game that relies almost completely on the transfer of information from DM to players; anything that disrupts this flow of information, such as audio cutting in and out mid-sentence, is a huge hindrance to gameplay.  It’s clear that the main attractions to Roll20, the virtual tabletop and ability to add immersion to combat, makes the site an appealing one to players.  It’s just as clear, however, that the poor audio quality is just as defining in its use, or rather in how it must be supported with other media objects to fulfill its purpose.  Discord was originally marketed towards groups playing video games together, playing multiplayer games that require communication but are on platforms without a quality voice chat.  Seeing it pop up as a popular option for TRPG players shows how its audio/video quality is high enough to beat options online intended for groups playing D&D together.  And yet, I still found Discord to be used more frequently than Zoom, a platform whose popularity sky-rocketed during COVID-19.  So what made Discord the more attractive option to players than the world’s most used video call software at the time?  

The answer is the text channels that can be made in Discord channels, and their ability to store information once a voice call is finished.  Looking at Zoom, the platform does have a chat option where people in the call can share text, pictures, even files; but everything shared there will disappear when the call ends, so you better make sure to save anything important before the session is over.  Any RPG player will tell you how much there is to remember while playing in a long-term campaign.  So instead of taking notes on every little thing, why not just throw it into the Discord to keep for later?  This core attribute of Discord to save and organize information seems to be what makes it so overwhelmingly popular with TRPG players.  One participant told me how important Discord had been when running a campaign during the pandemic, saying that 

I use Discord to share excerpts, content with the players, and a way to communicate through role play especially if we are out of game.  Discord itself can be managed into various “channels” that you can edit however you like. They’re simply sections on discord that I use to share important information, relevant quests and knowledge, keep track of what the players decide to do, etc.  It helps to note what occurs so we can review the archive later on. It may hold old rules or items we’ve forgotten, etc.

What draws many players and DMs to Discord over other platforms is its ability to record and share information during and in-between sessions.    

Due to the nature of tabletop campaigns, games can run from anywhere between a few months to years.  That’s a ton of info for a player to remember, especially with a game that is so dense with narrative.  Sure, you can take notes, but it’s 2023 and paper notes are so 1923.  With Discord servers, anything posted stays in the channel it was posted in, which is great for recording and organizing game information.  Whether it’s conversations held, treasure earned, the amount of gold the party is holding, or even the name of a Queen met months ago, it’s the small details that are so important in-game but are so difficult for a player to remember once the session ends.  Not only does this allow a DM or players to keep records of important events within the game, but with separate channels within the server (similar to separate tabs open in an internet browser) this information can be organized.  As one player described it, 

everything that we put on there…we can find it again, we can pin messages on there. Anything that we've typed in, the loot that we've picked up, we can all access that at any time. So it's just a lot easier than something like Zoom, where you pretty much lose things unless you save it to a different system.

Here they make a direct comparison to Zoom, which we discussed as excellent for transmitting audio and video but bad for keeping records.  With its ability to store information and enable video calls, Discord showcases why it attracts more TRPG players than other similar platforms.  

Finally, the last reason why most participants in my study chose to use Discord was because of all of the built in features that can add to a player’s experience or make it easier on Dungeon Masters.  One participant spoke about these by saying the platform “has a lot of really cool features, it has some dice roller mods on it so you can just type in any dice rolling command.”  Discord has a tool for users called “bots,” where small, simple code can be used within a server; they usually do small, automated tasks like alerting a server to new members joining, sending out alerts when a server host is online, or playing music.  If you look around online, there are hundreds of thousands of these bots available for use, official ones created by the Discord staff and just as many shared by users.  You can even make them yourself if you have the time and the know-how.  It’s fairly easy to add a bot to your own server once you’ve found one that does the task you need filled, and you can bring as many into a server as you need.

Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of bots that really help out TRPG players.  As the quote above (and many of my participants) mentioned, one of the most common bots used are dice-rollers.  When a user types the appropriate code into a channel, generally something akin to “ !roll 1d20+13,” the bot will automatically post the results of the die roll directly underneath.  Not only do some players enjoy this for the simplicity, especially when rolling a dozen dice at once and the math gets more complicated, many DMs also appreciate how this verifies that players are being honest about their rolls.  Players lying about their rolls is a point of anxiety for some virtual DMs, but it’s impossible to lie about one’s results when your failure is digitally recorded within a second of you entering the command.  Showing how this and the text channels work together to make Discord so attractive, I played in a Discord-based game over the last couple years; we had a whole channel dedicated to rolling dice so that the constant stream of numbers wouldn’t drown out other text, making it easy to roll and keep the results separate.  Another nice feature for DMs, there are bots that play music with a simple command, a task difficult to do normally in a virtual call without ruining everyone’s audio.  Some bots are even connected to third-party platforms such as Roll20 and D&D Beyond and are clearly designed for tabletop players, while others help the party schedule their next session.  While Discord already offers plenty of great features, most of which were basic elements of the platform, the steps taken to make it better for tabletop games (like the addition of TRPG-specific bots) has really shown how great of an option it is for hosting weekly games.   

There’s a concept from Media Studies called Medium Theory, which judges any media or platform people use based on “the particular characteristics of each individual medium or of each particular type of media.”  The idea is that by seeing how that specific media is different from its competition, and what attributes of that medium make it worth using for a specific task.  Looking at these “particular characteristics” of Discord, and judging them against its competition, it’s pretty obvious why so many RPG players are moving their online games to Discord.  Its audio quality pushes it above sites like Roll20 and other platforms designed for D&D players, while the text channels and bot feature make it a more attractive alternative to other digital call software.  Sure, all that’s required to play TRPGs virtually for most groups is a call feature with audio; but in 2023, players know that their platform can be better suited for the specific task of playing together, so why not use the best?  With characteristics that make it well-suited to the task of enabling game sessions, a relatively low level of knowledge and processing power necessary to use it, and a wide range of uses besides just playing TRPGs, it’s unsurprising that I found Discord as the single most used media object among the groups I talked to.  Wizards of The Coast has been working on their own official virtual tabletop software for a few years now, and it sounds like it still needs some polish before its release.  Unless they want it to follow the same route as Roll20 and have their users going to other platforms for their audio, I suggest they take a long look to see everything that Discord has been doing right.