It has been a while but as I said last time, this episode will be about exploration and what actually happens in the zones. So let's look at a traditional MMO. Typically you find monsters, usually a couple different kinds, there may be bosses or rare enemies. Of course there could be quest to be gotten or maybe you will encounter some interesting dialogue or a skill-check event. Eventually you will find the zone border to another zone. And maybe, if the game is not dull, you will find something strange, weird and entertaining.
So how can this be transformed to a discord game. Well, we already established that you don't want to move around with spamming a move command, so your best case is an "explore" command which results in an encounter. Obviously an encounter could be a monster, but it just as well might be you talking a stroll. In the end there should be a number of different encounters that can happen either randomly or are slowly unlocked as you go in a form of pseudo randomness. For example, defeating the "goblin scout" encounter 5 times could unlock the goblin chief. This progress during zone exploration can be obvious or hidden. You could come across locked gate which unlocks an encounter to get a key. But an ominous "a new encounter was unlocked" may be even more intriguing and make players wonder what it could be.
Either way, building a story throughout a zone or a collection of zones is what makes a game alive and distinguish it from the discord command spam. Linear progress is just as valid as a scavenger hunt through multiple zones, as long as it is not obnoxious players will want to continue their exploration. The story even can be its own reward, it is not necessary to dangle big rewards at the end, although it is of course an option, depends on the rest of the game of course. A lot depends on the quality of the writing, as it is a text-based medium, but then again, some people will not even read and are just happy about completing quests and collecting rewards. Others may just want to kill monsters, but a progressively increasing variety should also make this more entertaining.
Through unlocks zones change, so each individual player may have a progress, but you can just as well have global changes. There might be a zone where an army needs to be pushed back, requiring a global number of monster encounters to be defeated. Or you have to help a farmer 1000 times with the harvest, then the harvest is done and it switches to defence of the farm from marauders and after 500 defeated it switches back. This allows for further dynamic and allows you to relatively simple introduce group activity, which is generally not easy to do in a discord game.
That is it again and since I talked a lot about monster encounters, lets have a look at monsters and enemies next time.