We make RP Nowz, so read this with that in mind. We have also spent years roleplaying on Discord, and most of the people who use our app still have a server. This page is about the difference between a place to talk and a place to play.
What Discord is good at
- Community. Servers with thousands of members, channels for every topic, voice chat, events, and a search bar that finds a group for almost any fandom or genre.
- Everywhere. Desktop, web and mobile apps, all free.
- Bots. A large ecosystem of add-ons. Roleplayers typically stack a proxy bot to post as characters, a dice bot to roll, and a scheduling bot to keep the group together.
Where roleplay on Discord gets awkward
Every roleplay feature on Discord is a workaround built on top of a general chat app. Characters are webhooks pretending to be users. Dice are a bot you summon with a prefix and hope it is online. In-character and out-of-character messages live in separate channels, so a scene and the players' chatter about it are never in one place. There is no notion of a story: no premise, no cast, no recap, and nothing that helps a stranger find your table specifically because it is a roleplay.
None of this stops good groups from playing well there. It just means a lot of the table's energy goes into managing the tools.
What RP Nowz does differently
RP Nowz starts from the story. A chat has a premise, a cast and settings for how the table runs. The things Discord groups bolt on are built in:
| Discord | RP Nowz | |
|---|---|---|
| Posting as a character | Proxy bot and webhooks | Built in. Characters have profiles with relationships, timelines, facts and secrets, and travel between chats. |
| In character vs out of character | Separate channels or bracket conventions | Three message modes in one thread: IC, OOC and narrator, each clearly marked. |
| Dice | Dice bot | Built in, rolled on the server, shown in 3D, with custom dice sets. |
| Finding a group | Server discovery, LFG channels | World: public roleplay chats by genre and language, with a preview and owner-approved joining. |
| Catching up | Scroll | Optional AI recap of the story so far, and questions answered from the chat history. |
| Offline | Read cached messages; sending waits | Read and write offline; posts send in order when you reconnect. |
| Voice chat | Yes | No |
| On a computer | Desktop and web apps | In any browser at app.rpnowz.com, plus apps for iOS and Android phones and tablets. |
| Price | Free, with Nitro extras | Free, with optional credits for extras |
Use both
The pattern that works for most groups we talk to: keep the Discord server for the community, announcements, memes and voice, and run the actual scenes in RP Nowz, where the characters, the dice and the story tools are. Share the chat's invite link in your Discord and the whole group is at the table in a minute. Our guide to starting a group roleplay covers how to set up a session zero either way.
When Discord alone is the right call
If your group is mostly voice, if you need a desktop client, or if the community around the roleplay matters more than the roleplay itself, Discord is the better home and a roleplay app will feel like an extra thing to check. RP Nowz is for the groups whose problem is the play, not the community.
Bring your group to a table built for the story. RP Nowz is free on iOS, Android and the web.