If you're anything like I was at one point, you would love to host a live Discord game, but you have no idea where to begin. In this three-part series, I'll be giving you my tips and tricks for how to host a Discord Social Game, and, if you're not interested in hosting, you'll at least get a peek behind the curtain into how easy it is to start hosting! In this first part, I'll be demonstrating the logistics of setting up a server for a new game. In the next two parts, I'll be talking about the logistics of what happens DURING a game, and finally, providing a list of challenges you might consider using. I'll update these resources as more information becomes available.
To begin, lets talk about setting up a server for a new game. Starting a server is easy enough. Simply scroll to the bottom of your server list in Discord, and click the "Plus" sign, as shown.
Spoiler: Creating A Server
After you choose to create a server, you'll have the opportunity to name your server and add an icon to it. Don't stress too much about this in the set-up phase--you'll be able to change both the name and icon later.
Spoiler: Finalizing Server Creation
Once you create the server, everything will look rather...bare.
Spoiler: Bare Server :(
Now it's up to you to populate the server. First, you're going to want to add "Roles", then you can add additional "Channels". To start adding roles, just go to the arrow next to your server name, and click on "Server Settings, as shown.
Spoiler: Server Settings
There are a lot of things going on in this screen, but there's really only one tab you need to worry about for a Discord game. Click "Roles", highlighted below:
Spoiler: Settings Screen
By this time in the planning process (which will be discussed in the second part of this series), you should know both what the basic structure of your game is, as well as the different twists you'll be incorporating. You're going to want to create a new role for each tribe, as well as the prejury, the jury, and an "Alive" role. The tribe roles will allow each person with that role to access the tribe Channel (which you'll be creating later). The prejury role, similarly, will let the prejury players see a prejury Channel, and the jury role will allow jurors to see Ponderosa. Finally, if you choose to, you can create a Spectator role to allow people to watch ALL of the goings-on.
Creating roles is fairly intuitive, but there's one primary thing to remember. If the role is for a tribe member, a spectator, or a juror, you want to ensure that the two boxes below are checked:
Spoiler: Checking Boxes
These boxes will ensure that those players display separately from other members in the "memberlist", which, in the rollicking chaos of the game, will let people communicate with each other more effectively.
Finally, if you know your playerlist already, then you can go ahead and create a role for each player, as alluded to in the above screenshot. This step is only necessary if you're going to have "Confessionals" or "Diary Rooms" for each player, which I would strongly encourage if you choose to have spectators. These roles do NOT require any modifications like the tribe roles, they just simply need to exist.
Finally, you should create a "Host" role. You'll give this to yourself later, and any other assistants helping you. This will allow you to silo some things away in your own channel later.
Now that you have all of your roles, it's time to set up the staging area.
Spoiler: Setting The Stage
Click the "plus sign" shown, and create a new channel. The first channel I always create is the #moderating channel. This is where I put the "script" for the game, as well as some different contingency plans.
Spoiler: Creating A Channel
When creating any channel that you want to put specific people into/keep other people out of, you'll want to check the "Private Channel" box shown, and check the roles (which you've already created! Good planning!) that you want to have access to it. In this case, I would check the "Host" role that I created earlier so that only I could access the #moderating channel.
Go ahead and create all of the channels that you need, and if you choose, you can also create private voice chats for all of the tribes that you will have. In the example below, for example, I have a "greeting room" channel where all major announcements and challenges take place, the #moderating channel where my script for the game is located, four tribe channels, one for each tribe in the game, then a dead channel, a Ponderosa channel, and a spectator channel.
Spoiler: Sample Channels
If you want to add confessionals, you'll do that below. To make each confessionals secure, simply add the ROLE of the person whose confessional it is, your Host role, and the Spectator role when creating the channel.
Spoiler: Confessional Example
Finally, you might wonder how you're going to add people to a specific role. Once you invite your players and spectators to the server, simply click on the person you want to change in the memberlist, and click the "plus sign" as shown:
Spoiler: Adding Roles
When you do this, you'll be able to scroll through the list of roles and add any that are applicable to that player. Obviously, be careful not to make a player have the role of another player--it's probably best if players aren't reading each other's confessionals.
Once you've done all this, your Discord server is basically ready to go! That's really all there is to it. In the next part of this series, I'll be talking about the logistics of planning out your game in the first place, so be looking for that in the days to come.