Apps for playing games with scattered group?

[Pipeline]

I had a student at my school ask me about roleplaying games the other day, and I lacked a good answer for one question. It seems they want a way to play classic tabletop RPGs on their phones, with text, while not together. Is there an app for that?

Most could just be a standard text app (don't ask me for names, I am ancient), so they can write to each other. But things like dice rolls are trickier. Is there a good app that is not directly shackled to one gaming system and allows stuff like the GM checking that dice rolls were not cheating and the like??

[johndallman]

I've played RPGs via an IRC server that had a dice roller integrated into it. You typed "roll 3d6" and it replied with the result. That was someone's homebrew, but it shouldn't be hard for someone enterprising to recreate.

[Bengt]

We use roll20.net, it's a website so can be run on phones, but I don't know how well behaved it is on smaller screens. It has shared maps where you can move tokens around and various macros and tools for rolling dice and so on. There are character sheets and related macros for various systems, not just D20 ones as the name may imply.

It also has built in VOIP but we have found Discord to be more reliable.

[(E)]

I have run a couple of games from my phone through the Gurps Discord server. Dice rollers are there and pictures can be posted etc.