why discord?

Why do so many people prefer to use discord for voice over the built-in voice server?

I would prefer to use Roll20 but we find that with 3 or more people, at least one will be unable to hear. If we turn on video, it's worse. Lately, dice rolls are not working in Roll20 -- One person can see their own rolls, but they don't appear on the table or in chat for the other players to see. (It's not a specific person, it just happens randomly, to about 1/4th of the die rolls.) But if we have rock-solid audio, they can just tell us the result and we continue playing without missing a beat. But if the audio is flaky... Ugh, we spend time wondering if a player didn't hear the question, or they're still thinking, or we didn't hear their answer. It just all falls apart. I don't always use Discord. Sometimes we use a free dial-up voice conference service. It works for people who have really bad network connections.

I run games with intercontinental players. Discord works in that situation. 

Currently, I think it's mostly habits. Some groups have just used Discord for voice a long time, and haven't just moved back to use Roll20 for voice, even if there have been improvement to voice stability/quality. And if you join a group that uses discord for voice, it's possible you also join in on using it, considering it have gathered a sizable user-base among gamers, over the last couple of years. And I guess if you have a voice channel where you hang out before/after the games as well, it's probably just a smoother transition to keep using the voice channel rather than moving to Roll20, where you spend less time logged in a campaign. This of course is mainly happening with people who play without video chat on Roll20, I'd wager most people who use video chat doesn't split up to use Discord for voice while using Roll20 for video.

Y Wedi Syrthio said: Why do so many people prefer to use discord for voice over the built-in voice server? The last time I looked the bare minimum requirements for it were (# of players - 1) Mbs upload  speed so anyone on ADSL can forget it and if someone has low cost fibre the group would need to be pretty small.  

We have generally reliable connection for up to four people. Any more than that and we wind up playing odd man out. Of course, one of the players has a buzz on Discord that he can't stamp out, so nowadays it's Skype, which has its own problems. When it works, I vastly prefer Roll20 for AV.

Hmmm, Discord provides so much more than is capable in Roll20. Like, Chatting when you aren't in the game is huge. I have built a friendship with people who I play with on Roll20, and I want to be able to chat between games. The Voice is much easier to record in Discord, if you want to do that. Sharing photos is far easier too. Also, we play in primetime on Friday night and Roll20 is laggy already I could only imagine playing using the voice on it as well. 

Many members of my text community use Roll20 for when combat happens in their game and discord for the rest of the RPing as they are able to edit their posts on discord.

Thank you all for your responses. I'e never gotten to properly use roll20 and see that so many of the looking for players posts are using discord - The one occasion that i did manage to get a few people online at the same time to attempt a game we did have communication issues - i just assumed it was user error.  maybe it wasn't after all.

Curiosity, has the forum policy changed? Each time I attempted to create a topic that wasn't focused on Roll20, but had Roll20 particularly in its conversation, it was removed by a moderator. Wonder what makes these particular forum posts stand out as acceptable via there policy.

Speaking as a former moderator, sometimes it comes down to a judgment call. If this post had been about how to use discord in general, I would have warned and then closed if the direction didn't change. This one is asking why the in-game A/V is problematic, causing people to turn to third party solutions. It has value to Roll20 users directly, in that it discusses shortcomings with the built-in system and may lead to workarounds, or suggestions for improvement. That could still change and it could be closed. For instance, if it changed to an in-depth discussion of setting up a Discord call, plug-ins to handle music and so forth, it would be off topic, and likely closed, even though it is still remotely related to Roll20. No one would be in trouble for this, and frankly, moderators don't like telling people "no." But it's the job. A reason should always be given. Did you get no reason for closure in your closed threads?

One thing I like about using Discord while running games is the ease with which you can post a picture to help people visualize the environment around their characters.  I sometimes have several images bookmarked in my browser to link in Discord just for that.  If I am using an image that I might want to draw on, or ping locations (on hills or a mountain, say), then I will make it a map page in Roll20.  But for a quick visual, it is very nice.

This can be done in Roll20, even without AV Chat. Post in chat:  [x](IMAGEURL)  to cause an image to appear in chat. Clicking on the image will open it in a separate browser window at full resolution.

It is still (in my opinion) a lot more convenient to just paste the image into Discord.  If clicking on the image to enlarge it isn't enough for the players, there is a button for people to press to open it in their browser at full resolution.  I believe Discord also offers some other advantages, but that was all I figured I should post as being game specific with Roll20.

keithcurtis said: This can be done in Roll20, even without AV Chat. Post in chat:  [x](IMAGEURL)  to cause an image to appear in chat. Clicking on the image will open it in a separate browser window at full resolution. That's really cool. Thanks for the tip.

Roll20 does handle cards better than a discord bot along with the fact that you can perform limited customization of the dice output display (powercards and templates).

Well i personally use Discord because we use The Roll20 chat as archive of the  rolls. Besides Its annoying  to try find rolls in sea of mindless character waffle and discord gives you beter moding options on chat. Quite frankly the chat in Roll20 is very symplistic which is good for archiving rolls, but bad for seething through it if you have post anything else but the rolls.

We use TeamSpeak, because random visitors from our community ts-server can just hop right in to listen.

I can say that, with the group that I typically play with, we use a lot of the various text channels to further the campaign in between sessions (it's a game in a modern setting, so we have channels for emails and text messages and the like). But the big one for us, I think, is that we often hang out when we're not in session. We even use our one server to coordinate things like our video game tournaments.  Blood Bowl 2, if you're curious.

Because we chat in Discord outside of the game too. It's much easier to discuss and coordinate sessions there.

There are several reasons, but they all primarily revolve around the fact that Discord offers many more features for voice and text communication.  For example, push to talk is available in Discord but not Roll20.  It's also easy to adjust individual players volume levels.  Discord is available as a mobile app as well as desktop app, so it makes it very easy for players to stay connected and interact with each other during downtimes.  Relying on Roll20, you'd have to log in to the game constantly to see chat and there is no channel support. Most importantly, though, Discord simply works.  It's rare there's any issue with it and when there is an issue, it can usually be resolved by simply changing the server region to get around whatever internet routing hiccup is borking things.  Roll20's built in voice chat, in my experience at least, is pretty unreliable.  It's usually a chore to get everyone able to hear each other.  One or more players always seem to be excluded for some reason and there's no easy way to troubleshoot or fix the issue.  It's been reported as an issue for more than a year and the devs still can't eliminate it.  Plus the bandwidth requirements for Roll20 voice chat are much higher than for Discord. And if you have a player on a low bandwidth connection, you can optimize your Discord channel further to better work with limited bandwidth.