I searched and the last topic on ttrpgs seems to be a few years old. Any fans? Current games? Funny stories? How you're dealing with running your games during a pandemic? I'm currently DMing a Curse of Strahd campaign which we recently moved onto Discord (which is the first 5e game my group has played. Mostly did 3.5/Pathfinder before this) and in the planning phase for the next chapter in an ongoing homebrew/Amber Diceless game.
I honestly haven't played any tabletop rpgs, but I'm really interested in them. I just don't have a lot of friends that play those games. I'm curious - how do you play them with others over Discord? Don't you have to play them in-person? Or do you have a computer-based game client?
There are a lot of games that are normally run online on platforms like Roll20, which allows you to display visuals and have battle boards and such, but I've never learned how to use it. A lot of them are groups of people who have never even met face to face. So if there's not a good group in your immediate area, checking out online groups could be a good idea if you're interested in trying it out. With Discord, we use both group calls (most of the people I'm in a group with don't have webcams or we'd do video too), and regular text based messaging. As long as everyone is quiet and respectful and not getting off topic (which is easier said than done) I let everyone all talk together at once. But if they're getting distracted, or talking over one another, we use initiative order. Which basically means everyone rolls a number and highest goes first telling me what they'd like to do/asking questions, and we go down the list so that everyone has an individual turn. That's how battles work as well, one person at a time. My party has a terrible habit of splitting up, so if people aren't in the group that I'm currently running, they mute their mics so they aren't distracting. And I post relevant pictures and maps in the group chat. There's probably a better way to do it (like with the dedicated gaming apps), but since Discord is what we're all most familiar with, it's what we use.
Nice. That's pretty cool. Seems like a pretty sweet hobby. I'd like to get into board games more than I do. Maybe not RPGs but I enjoy RTS quite a bit. Catan's a good one to play.
You might want to look into Gloomhaven if you're into the strategy board games and are interested in D&D. It's kind of like a choose your own adventure board game and can be played solo or with other people. Lots of replayability because the scenarios are always different.
