Wandering Adventure Party

@NullNowhere Adding voice isn't too hard with mumble. The big limiting factor is that it's just a lot to maintain as the group size increases, and folks are _used_ to doing things all in one app. Telling them "You need to download these two pieces of software to participate" when previously they had to have _zero_ extra pieces of software (since they already have a browser) could be a hard sell.

If you need to do it for a gaming group of, say, a couple dozen people, it's probably doable by one person. Source: I've done it, and I've set things up for folks who are _not_ computer literate to manage, too. The "maintenance" is really a form of light IT work; people will need help setting up the software on new computers as they get them, stuff like that. A solid PDF on how to set things up will work wonders here.

If you have a community that has a couple hundred people, my recommendation is definitely to pay for something, and it'll likely be web based, which is a plus, obviously.

I'd love to see foundry's builtin services get better, though. I think the problem historically has been that they've leaned on the fact that discord existed to not have to work on it, but I suspect they're going to need to address the quality pretty soon.

@NullNowhere I have a suggestion, but it depends on a couple things:

You could just use IRC.

Setting up an IRC server is pretty straightforward these days, and they're light in terms of hardware requirements. Depending on how you're hosting foundry, you could even have the IRC server on the same device.

Obviously this doesn't account for the actual _time_ it takes to install and manage the software, which is not without value, but it would save you potentially hundreds of dollars a year on hosting fees.

I dunno how much of your post was soliciting options and how much of it was (very justified) venting, so I'll leave it at that. I will say that I greatly sympathize.