Creating a rich and immersive role-playing game on RPOL often involves a deal of preparation. One way that I like to prepare is to select appropriate portraits for NPCS and additionally to give them detailed descriptions. I would ideally like to do this ahead of time, so that over the course of running the game I would already have these descriptions to work from.
However, players often seem to (
for better or for worse) take clues from what is on the NPC list. This can manifest in various ways. Sometimes the name of the character is a dead giveaway. Alternatively, if they match the description I've given the character from description in-game, they can put a name to a face that they might not have had. Or perhaps the fact that I've added an NPC to the list means the character
must be important, acting sometimes as an unintentional red herring. While I usually select players who aren't really actively trying to "meta game" the whole thing, at some level it can't be helped. You can't unsee what you've seen. (It's like accidentally flipping a few pages ahead in a book you're reading and getting a spoiler; you aren't trying to, but now that you know, it's going to color your view of the narrative).
There is, to be sure, a workaround but it is unpleasant. I could wait until the last minute, until I am ready in all cases for the players to have the name and/or physical detail of an NPC, and then create the NPC at the very last moment. This unfortunately eliminates or severely handicaps my ability to do advanced preparation for the game.
The solution I propose is that there be an option to Hide NPCs.
User Story: As a Game Master, I would like the option to be able to hide characters in my game from being viewable from players on the Cast page, so that I can establish and maintain substantial character detail in the game without revealing the character until an appropriate point in the game's narrative.
Acceptance Criteria:- Through the GM menu, I would like to be able flag characters to "Hide."
- By default, the "Hide" flag will be unchecked, so all NPCs created will appear on the Cast list as they do under current functionality.
- If the "Hide" flag is set on an character, that character should not appear on the player's Cast list.
- If the "Hide" flag is set on an character, that character should still appear on the GM's Cast list, with some indication that the character is Hidden (a superscript H appended to the character name, for example).
- If the "Hide" flag is removed, the character will appear on the Cast list for players as normal.
- If a post is made for a character with the "Hide" flag, clicking on the Character Name will not show the character description as normal. Instead, it will show a message that denotes that this character's description is hidden.
Thus implemented, this seems like it would not affect people who are perfectly satisfied with the way things are right now, but will allow GMs who do advanced prep work for their games to benefit from the ability to keep some things behind the curtain.
This message was last edited by the user at 13:39, Fri 27 June 2014.