Remote Tabletop RPG Tools

I've been playing in a fully remote home game for about 6 years now, with the same folks for getting close to 20 years now, and I semi-frequently get asked what tools we're using to facilitate the game. So, I figured I'd take the time to walk through some tools we've been using to make playing over the internet a tolerable experience.

I'll also take a bit of time to discuss some concerns I have related to private companies holding our data with no way to get it back out.

The Active Tools List

So, for the current series of games I've been running, these are the tools that I currently have running / we are using:

• Foundry VTT (Self Hosted)
  • Including Tons of Modules and custom Worlds
• Outline (Self Hosted)
• Discourse (Self Hosted)
• Discord
• Syrinscape (Experimental)

Foundry VTT

Now, not every group needs a Virtual Table Top (VTT), and my group is frequently one of those because we usually do theatre of the mind over discrete boards. That said, we still need to roll dice, and I've found that Foundry's extensibility makes it a great supplement to games that don't use tokens. It has a lot of features for tokens, but we rarely use those. Likewise, it's got a bunch of nice little atmosphere features we use a lot too.

One thing that's still thwarting me, however, is the sound effects / music. For a reason I have yet to discern - sometimes Foundry just refuses to start a new track, even when the window is focused. No errors, nothing. Haven't been able to debug it. Which is why I'm trying out Syrinscape, but I'm still not totally sold on the idea. I've got a bunch of atmospheric music from various Humble Bundles that I can use, but because it is unreliable, I'm not currently using it.

I'm reasonably sure I'll figure it out, eventually. One day....

This I'm running on a rented server from Racknerd. They regularly do sales on their VPSes and you can get a good-enough server for this purpose relatively easily. All the work to secure the server, run a firewall, do patches, etc. is all on you - though, even more so than some other VPS providers, but it's hard to beat the price.

The other option if this is something you want to do is running it on a specialized provider, Foundry's got a list of them: https://foundryvtt.com/article/partnerships/

You'll need to buy a onetime Foundry license (I love onetime purchases), and then the cost for the hosting. This'll run you a range from $2 to $20 a month depending on your needs (Self-hosted to higher-end managed hosting).

Outline

I love Outline, it's probably the best self-hosted Notion-like that I've found. Ultimately, it's just a collaborative wiki with some good editing features.

I'm running this one on the same VPS as Foundry, and its resource requirements are very low.

Two main issues I had to deal with: I had to write an automated backup script to back all the contents up to S3 (that's on you), and I had to wire up an SSO provider. I went with Auth0's free tier, but you can use a bunch of different providers (I have a personal Outline instance running on a Raspberry Pi, and it uses Cognito for auth).

Otherwise, it's great. I encourage you to go check out the features list and experiment with it locally. Their cloud hosting pricing is reasonable too, $10 gets you up to 10 users. Compare that to Notion's $8 per user per month once you outgrow the free tier.

Discourse

There's not a lot to say here, other than I run a Discourse server to house our longer, more durable, conversations. Largely, that's been supplanted by Outline in the more recent games, but it still serves as a nice archive of things from our prior games.

It's got a ton of nice features, and one I like the most is it manages its own backups. You can just give it AWS API keys, and it'll run a nightly job to back everything up to S3. It has a configurable number of backups to keep for space reasons, and it can alert you if there's a problem. Love it.

The other great thing it does is web-based updates that are really robust. No need to SSH into the box to run an update. The security minded part of me is wary about allowing a web interface to run low level-commands, but it doesn't allow any free execution, just click a button and get an update. It's very nice.

So, about Discord

I think Discord is becoming the most common way for relatively recently formed communities (within the last 5 years) to come together. This isn't based on any data I have, just an observation on where I see communities forming when I encounter them in other places.

Contrast that to the prior decade where Google Plus, other social media sites, or good-old-fashioned forums were the most common places to do asynchronous communication and some other solution was used for voice conferencing (TeamSpeak anyone?).

Discord started out as a mostly pure synchronous communication mechanism, positioned as a "Slack for gamers" and added a lot of the features you might have used TeamSpeak for in the past. Since then, it's grown into a more holistic "community" solution - complete with moderation, "forums", and several other features for more persistent communication.

All of those features make it very attractive for community building, so I think folks are partly coming in for ease of use and the robust feature set. I also think this is a problem waiting to happen, but we'll get there in a second.

So, my group uses Discord for real-time communication and sharing of one-off information. Largely, our interactions are limited to using the Voice chat for the game, and some one-off interactions during the week. We don't really use the forum feature, which mostly takes place in the Wiki (Outline) or the actual forum (Discourse).

Part of this is just inertia. We have other tools for some of those features in Discord. But it's also a bit of a resistance to using Discord for "everything", which would be plausible, but there's a key problem I worry about:

Getting Data out of Discord and Restoring that Data is very difficult

Remember that mention of Google Plus? Well, one thing that happened when Google killed it (see also the Google Graveyard) was a lot of RPG history was lost to the ether. Gone forever like sands on the wind. The Internet Archive tried to archive as much as they could, but it's both incomplete and difficult to access.

I'm kinda concerned that Discord is going to go the same way, but worse. Discord can't be archived by web scrapers or the internet archive. There are some tools to export chats, but as far as I can tell (at the time of this writing) there is no way to export the data from the forums. I cannot find an API to access them, and I haven't seen any cli tools that can grab the forums. Only chats.

Discord is in the middle of trying to become profitable. They're still apparently working out the full business model. They've added Nitro, perks, server boosts, and a smattering of other things, but it looks like they're still not turning a profit. Plus, they just announced they're adding ads.

So, one path is they become profitable, go public, and everything goes well. We get to keep our communities, features are added, everyone wins.

Another path is that they cannot please their investors fast enough and then the enshittification begins. If that comes to pass, we're going to be hard pressed to save a lot of RPG history. That makes me sad. 😔

I don't really know what to do about this. The friction of building new communities in other, more open software is difficult. Discord has been a great help to many groups, small and large, and so many people are using it. That's the same reason Google+ facilitated the loss of so much history, but at least it was on the web and we could save something. I don't think everyone running their own forums is exactly a solution either. I've personally seen forum history blow up in private forums - moderators can always go rogue. But at least you can have backups.

So yeah, I dunno what to do here. It just makes me sad.