If I understand it right, Mods already have an option that lets them stop being Mods for a while while they go into the games they're playing in. But I seem to remember once that they were saying it wasn't letting them step back up afterwards, so I don't know if they actually use it...
grin Could be a worry for setting this kind of thing up for GMs, though - if it glitches, the glitch is likely to be bad.
bigbadron:
It'll also mean specifying which player he needs to be able to see as. For example, if the GM wants to check that all the PL's to the Elven Group are set up correctly, there's no sense switching to a player view that won't let him see those PLs, and if the player view can see all PLs anyway, then it's no different from the GM view.
As I understand the reason people want this kind of thing, psychologically, they probably mostly
do want to go to a player that won't let them see the Elven Group - a lot of times you just kind of want to make sure that only the right people are seeing things in the right way. I've, um, heard, from...a friend, that sometimes, this friend of mine, has missed a letter or something in someone's name setting up a Private Line, and then the person that I...er, my friend...was sending it to, couldn't see it. If the Preview button had a quick dropdown so that I could have said, "Preview as...", I could have checked that and noticed that.
Um, if, you know, I had been looking over my friend's shoulder. Or she could have done it herself, even. She's very independent like that. Makes her own peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, too.
I don't know. I'm not at all sure I'd take the time to review every post from every player's perspective, but I can think of times it'd be nice to double-check how it looked for someone in particular. If it's doable, I'd give it a +1.
So +1, for the drop-down, single-message Preview-from-a-Player's-View option.
Being able to step back and look at the whole
game from a specific Player's View... would be helpful, both psychologically and practically, for GMs running a PC, especially if they're doing it secretly. It might even, as a side-effect, be a way for the GM to simulate said PC "logging in" in the Cast List without having to make a post for them, since I do know players sometimes do that. But it sounds like lots more trouble, not just from the programming standpoint, but as the GM - a much bigger "step back", and with more potential for errors and complexity. So I'm a +0 there. Maybe even a -0. (Which is still a zero, but, you know, leaning the other way.)