Matrix and TTRPG

A couple friends and I who are into TTRPG over discord tried to do some TTRPG over matrix bridged to a discord server.  We used Out of your Element bridge to link a discord server and matrix space together (let's be real, discord servers are not servers).  It's really sleek when it's up and running.  It has an easy mode button that simply replicates a discord server on the matrix and creates and populates the channels as they fill.  Only gotcha on it is the channels only appear matrix side when chatter first happens on them post-bridge, so don't expect the full server to exist matrix side immediately after you bridge.

For the bot I used a maubot which is a bot that can be extended with a wide variety of plugins to do a huge assortment of tasks.  I wrote my own plugin for TTRPG dice mayhem. 

We bridged a discord and matrix server set up the maubot.  While matrix -> discord chat is flagged as app chat and does not trigger bots.  The OOYE bot matrix side makes puppet accounts on the server it has admin access to and uses those accounts to relay discord side chatter.

Since these puppets are technically matrix accounts, they can trigger matrix bots.

Since my bot is deployed matrix side this meant everyone could use one dice bot despite being on two services.

It worked out beautifully.

In a discord server you end up having to use tupperbox or pluralkit to have multiple aliases on the same server, which you generally need if you are doing roleplaying TTRPG stuff.  We got a server with multiple subgroups dedicated to various games going on, each with their IC and OOC bullshit going on.

In matrix I can set per-room nicknames and avatar pictures.  In most clients there's some GUI way of accomplishing this.  But my preferred client doesn't have that coded in.  Fortunately there's the slash commands /myroomnick and /myroomavatar (upload the pictures first, right click it and view source for the event to see the picture's matrix mxc:// url and then feed that into /myroomavatar).  In either case, I have my character identity set up for multiple rooms all on the same matrix account.

IN short it was better then discord.