So you can the some of the best of all worlds- the anonymity of play by post and the opportunity to have more interactivity- are there sites set for text-based online roleplaying or do people just use something  like discord?

Lots.

Depending on your pref there are the following...

Website chats: Theres quite a few of these out there. Some have dice rolling, some dont.
MUCKS and MUDs: Before chat clients there were, and still are these. MUDs came first and while some are combat heavy, others are RP heavy, a few to the point they should not have been MUDs in the first place and just gone with a MUCK base. MUCKs are RP only. And that varies alot from one to the next. I've been doing a weekly ongoing Spelljammer one on a MUCK for many many many a year now.
RP designed clients: Theres a few of these now. Some with mapping features and all the rest.
Chat clients: Discord, Skype, MSM, and so on. These tend to have about zero funcionality so no dice rollers, etc.

This is Rolegate's specialty. Its got some nice functions, but some stuff is behind a paywall.

Quote from: Slambo;1119655This is Rolegate's specialty. Its got some nice functions, but some stuff is behind a paywall.

I really wanted to like Rolegate, but I had a hard time starting up a game successfully and my players had tons of problems. Has anyone had a good experience? Or have any tips for using it effectively?

To OP: IRC is also an option. I am in an IRC-based game with a dice roller and some of my friends use IRC for play-by-chat as well.

Another of my games uses Slack and https://www.webwhiteboard.com/

Quote from: Omega;1119652Chat clients: Discord... These tend to have about zero funcionality so no dice rollers, etc.

What are you talking about.  I have a dice bot in my discord server that rolls dice all the time.  Here is a github link so you can download it to your discord server.  Not to mention you can if you have zero money make a category and make each text room into PC character page.  Then have a secret category where you have text channels where you keep your notes.

Quote from: Snowman0147;1119685What are you talking about.  I have a dice bot in my discord server that rolls dice all the time.  Here is a github link so you can download it to your discord server.  Not to mention you can if you have zero money make a category and make each text room into PC character page.  Then have a secret category where you have text channels where you keep your notes.

Is the dice roller a part of Discord? Or is it something you have running on the side that connects to Discord because Im not seeing any such thing? Thats not to say Im not just missing seeing a dice roller function. But on a quick glance through Im seeing no such thing?

Saying "well you can plug this widget in and that makes it functional" does not mean it is functional without outside widgets.
Same with my tablet. It did not come with a dice roller. But one of my players installed one on it. That is very different from having the systems built in from the start. If the system though is built with a bunch of pre-existing widgets you can plug in. That is a different story. Tabletop Simulator for example. You start out with a table and have to select the elements from the menu to add in. Or select from some basic presets.

All that said. What widgets are there to add RPG functionality to Discord? Dice you mention? On the fly Mapping? Obviously you can share character sheets and predrawn maps with the file function.

Okay the dice roller isn't built in and the link has a easy install so you can add the bot to your server.  That said every thing else is I had mention is a function of discord.  The point I was making is that discord allows you to fix those issues easily.

Quote from: insubordinate polyhedral;1119681I really wanted to like Rolegate, but I had a hard time starting up a game successfully and my players had tons of problems. Has anyone had a good experience? Or have any tips for using it effectively?

To OP: IRC is also an option. I am in an IRC-based game with a dice roller and some of my friends use IRC for play-by-chat as well.

Another of my games uses Slack and https://www.webwhiteboard.com/

What kind problems with the players and starting the game? I've had pretty good expirences with the site. The occsional whiner sure but usually good.

Quote from: Slambo;1119703What kind problems with the players and starting the game? I've had pretty good expirences with the site. The occsional whiner sure but usually good.

(Possibly my fault) -- players were having trouble with the game UI / rolling characters. They also said it was hard to tell the state of the game, whose character sheets were done, who had joined, etc.

Thinking back, I wonder if enthusiasm for the campaign wasn't above the threshold to actually get the game started, which is not RoleGate's fault. Though having RoleGate's UI annoy people probably didn't help.

I'm trying to think if there was anything else... it might just be the complexity from trying to model all these games in one site. And these were all players coming to RoleGate to play, not people who had found RoleGate independently.

Maybe I should try again. I like the idea of the site quite a lot. If I can get more familiar, it'll be easier to help out players.

Its alright, but the discord is full of storygames who are always saying systems other than PBTA dont work in pbp and stuff like that (i just had an argument that 5e needs mechanics to flee from battle when charcters have feet and not everything has to take place in initiative time)

The GUI has changed once not sure if you used the site before or after the change though.

I recently ran a PBP TFT game for about a year, and found it pretty functional, particularly if the server has a nice dice-roller plugin added, and if you use a nice export tool that converts a whole channel into HTML for lookup/archive purposes.

The GURPS Discord server has many really great plugins for GURPS, with a great rules index, and even several that do GURPS mechanics and rolling for you - like you can tell it to resolve a Slam attack, automatically generating critical hit and miss results, random hit location, generating encumbrance tables for your character's strength, range penalty and other table lookups, value to coin weight conversions, resolving long-term attempts to gather magical energy... oh, and listing the scripts:

Announce, BasicLift, BrokenBlade, ChangePrefix, CriticalHit, CriticalMiss, DollarsToCoins, DontSueMe, DumpLog, DungeonFantasySlam, DungeonFantasyThrow, Explosion, Feedback, Fnord, FrightCheck, GatherEnergy, GenerateCharacter, GenerateWorld, GrandUnifiedHitLocationExplosion, GrandUnifiedHitLocationTable, GrapplingEncumbranceTable, Help, HeroicBackground, HitLocation, IronGURPS, Jump, LastGasp, LastGaspHighResolution, LastGaspNonPlayerCharacter,  LiftingStrength, LongDistance, Lookup, LookupRefresh, Malfunction, ManageAnnouncements, ManageBlocks, NormalizeToDice, Probability, QuickContest, QuickContestABunch, QuickContestABunchIdentical, Range, RateOfFireBonus, Reaction, RegularContest, RobustnessThreshold, Roll, RollABunch, RollABunchAgainst, RollAgainst, RollStats, SizeModifier, Slam, Statistics, StrikingStrength, Throw, Timer

Quote from: Skarg;1119725I recently ran a PBP TFT game for about a year, and found it pretty functional, particularly if the server has a nice dice-roller plugin added, and if you use a nice export tool that converts a whole channel into HTML for lookup/archive purposes.

The GURPS Discord server has many really great plugins for GURPS, with a great rules index, and even several that do GURPS mechanics and rolling for you - like you can tell it to resolve a Slam attack, automatically generating critical hit and miss results, random hit location, generating encumbrance tables for your character's strength, range penalty and other table lookups, value to coin weight conversions, resolving long-term attempts to gather magical energy... oh, and listing the scripts:

Announce, BasicLift, BrokenBlade, ChangePrefix, CriticalHit, CriticalMiss, DollarsToCoins, DontSueMe, DumpLog, DungeonFantasySlam, DungeonFantasyThrow, Explosion, Feedback, Fnord, FrightCheck, GatherEnergy, GenerateCharacter, GenerateWorld, GrandUnifiedHitLocationExplosion, GrandUnifiedHitLocationTable, GrapplingEncumbranceTable, Help, HeroicBackground, HitLocation, IronGURPS, Jump, LastGasp, LastGaspHighResolution, LastGaspNonPlayerCharacter,  LiftingStrength, LongDistance, Lookup, LookupRefresh, Malfunction, ManageAnnouncements, ManageBlocks, NormalizeToDice, Probability, QuickContest, QuickContestABunch, QuickContestABunchIdentical, Range, RateOfFireBonus, Reaction, RegularContest, RobustnessThreshold, Roll, RollABunch, RollABunchAgainst, RollAgainst, RollStats, SizeModifier, Slam, Statistics, StrikingStrength, Throw, Timer

Yes, the GURPS Discord bot is amazing.

Quote from: Slambo;1119724Its alright, but the discord is full of storygames who are always saying systems other than PBTA dont work in pbp and stuff like that (i just had an argument that 5e needs mechanics to flee from battle when charcters have feet and not everything has to take place in initiative time)

The GUI has changed once not sure if you used the site before or after the change though.

Where have you encountered this?  In all my years of discord I only seen people bash PBTA.  What groups do you run with?

Quote from: Snowman0147;1119755Where have you encountered this?  In all my years of discord I only seen people bash PBTA.  What groups do you run with?

Im talking speficially about rolegate's discord. The actual site is full if pbta game that went nowhere and 5e games that more or less are going strong so id say its self evident they're wrong. For a long long time the top rated game was Dark Heresy lol.

We have a dice roller in my Friday night online game, which runs out of a Slack group. The Slack dice roller tends to crash a lot, though.

We've taken to using Roll20 to get most of our combat done in, since we can easily have maps, and the dice roller is much more robust.