Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Requirements

I'm not sure if this has been posted before or if it's possible, but the idea is a new type of collapse text, where you'd have to either be a certain player or character to see the text, or you'd need to have a certain result of dice roll in order to see the text.

Assuming there'd even be a reasonable way to incorporate something like that, what would be the value of it? If only certain characters are supposed to know a thing and you want to ensure there's no metagaming, why not just send a PM or something?

I think what they're getting at is the mechanics that RPR Crossing uses. It's very useful for people DMing games, and very valuable. Imagine getting everyone to roll and then sending out individual results to each person and then not having that organized in your main game thread, and forcing players to have to reference their PMs for additional information, especially trying to recall a piece of information they learned way back, and trying to align those timestamps with the main game thread... It's confusing and tedious as heck.

RPG Crossing (or DnD Online Games, as it used to go by when I was active on there) lets you put player-specific spoiler-tags in each post. As I recall (or at least back in my day), there were no 'roll-specific cutoffs' or anything of THAT sort, but definitely you could organize a bunch of player-specific spoilers all into one post, which was fantastic for results to say perception-checks, knowledge-rolls, etc.

I think if it's implemented it should be restricted to groups.

I believe this already exists.
https://www.rprepository.com/help/bbcode
GM-Only

This special tag works inside of groups only. It prevents any text inside of the gm-only tag from being read by anyone but the members of the group who have been promoted to have GM (Game Master) privileges and the member who posted the information to the group's profile. It works equally well in the forums and in other group areas such as comments on an announcement or event.

I think one issue a player-specific thing might me problematic shares some reasoning with why we don't have a player tagging system. What happens when a player changes their name? What if two players have similar names, and you accidentally input the wrong one?

And as Claine pointed out, there's the potential of abuse, although I assume mods would still be able to see.

And then with dice, it'd have to be able to identify a roll the person made, and which roll to count. That seems like it'd be a heck of a mess.

I'm not totally against it, mind you. I just get the feeling this would be high cost to low benefit. But it's very much not my decision.

The whole concept goes over my head because I don't use dice or groups at all, so I have no comment on that part of it. But I just wanted to say that...

This response made me laugh because of the cleverness.

Makes sense. I can see uses for it in main-forum RP threads, but that tradeoff doesn't feel worth it. Keeping it as a Game-GM Tool might be best (only Group Leaders/GMs/Related Ranks can use the bbcode, at least cutting back on 'potential harassers'), although that would suck for, say, characters 'whispering' things to each other that you want to keep grouped within the context of a single post but don't want to OOCly spoil to other players yet (and I guess don't trust people not to click spoilers).
Only allows GMs to talk to each other, not for a GM to give private information to a specific player.
Many forums just seem to accept that the complications of constantly changing your username should just fall on you, the user and not fall to the administrative team. But I get wanting to keep SOME consistency. It may instead become a system of, instead of typed BBCode into the post itself, there is included a dropdown to 'encode' the entire post to one person (allowing the back-end to use the user's unique identifier instead of relying on a user not changing their name and the GM spelling it correctly). But it would then require that GM have to make a few posts in a row if they have to get a lot of info out. A trade-off, I guess. I don't see 'similar names' as much of an issue only because typos are typos and user error is user error. If I were the GM in that case I would respond with "lol WHOOPS pretend you didn't see that ahahah that was meant for <blank> ahwell 💦".

I don't really see the use of adding 'dice limits'; it really takes the control out of the GM's hands on whether or not to let something through on a whim, but. I've seen the 'name tagging' system work wonders before.

I think it would be a benefit; RPR advertises more for freeform over tabletop, but that doesn't mean the site can't have the means, for those interested who maybe felt RPR wasn't the best place for them.

Well if the GM BBCode is already a thing, I don't think it would be a huge stretch to have the same thing but for players.

Edit: What if the GM code was edited to apply to any group rank or title of the owner's choosing? You could just give players/characters individual titles and address the message to their title instead of their name, that way it doesn't break if their name changes.

I'm not worried about something like this being abused because it's really no different from PMs or the GM code - both of which could be abused in the same way, yet haven't been a major issue. If anything, it's more public than PMs and may be easier to moderate because of it. Doesn't matter what I think though. Discussions like that are the moderators' territory, lol.

The dice feature is intriguing and probably the most complex part. I imagine that would be much more difficult to add than plain ol GM-to-player messages. I think it could be a useful and fun mechanic for unlocking things like, say, secret loot. You could even lock characters out of seeing dialogue from other people's characters who speak a language that they don't understand.

All of that said, I do have one issue with this kind of suggestion. There's really no need for something like this because it can already be done with PMs and such. That's not to say it wouldn't be nice to have, I really love quirky BBCode and features, but I'd rather have our resources go towards something that can't be done any other way.

This is a very interesting discussion. I will certainly consider it as a future possibility.

While I like the dice threshold idea, simply being able to restrict a collapse section to specific players would be great!

Why the argument for only groups though?

Real life example where I could have used it on a forum thread: (About halfway down the page)

https://www.rprepository.com/community/forumthread.php?t=62825&p=19

Maybe my players were better at resisting temptation than I would have been. But I probably would have peeked...