Ideas on Individual Character Reveal
 

I got bored and started playing around with how I'd like to see the individual character reveal handled and thought I'd share my ideas.

In Example 1, clicking on a snippet (in this example, the last snippet shown) brings up the popup shown. Choosing either Hidden from All or Revealed to All will have exactly the same result as the current on/off options. Choosing Revealed to Some will bring up a second popup, which brings us to Example 2.

Since I have multiple players in multiple (play by email) games in the same setting, I'd like to be able to easily distinguish between the groups of PCs. This would require a container for adventure groups. In this example, I've only revealed the snippet to one PC in my west coast game.

And in Example 3, we see that hovering the cursor over a yellow snippet bullet shows which PCs have this information (I probably should have added 'click to change reveal status' to the top of this popup).

The end result is that at a glance I know that all my PCs are aware of Khazamon and know that he is an adult human male. I know that some of my PCs know a bit more, and by hovering over the yellow bullets, I can see that Pundgy and Matador are aware that Khazamon is a wizard, and that only Pundgy is aware that he is an advisor to Duke Reginald.

Am I close to what is being planned? ;)

Zogg, I like how you think!!! seems straight forward & follows the base template LWD has already in place. :D:cool:

I would presume this would also cascade into the reveal log the same way with the same color coding and perhaps a tag as to who received info?
Though, thinking, this piece would also have to contain a similar "filter" from the player side so as not to prematurely reveal partial content by color thus tipping off the player that some other info is still present but unknown.

+1

I second that approach! I like the idea and the integration along the current design of RW. But as with a lot of other situations, players should not be able to see, what information is only partially revealed.

One "downside" of RW is the fact, that once something is revealed, its never forgotten any more. Transparency is nice, but sometimes its also nice and important that players interact with each other to synchronize what they know and what not.

With my last game with a very complex background, nearly no fact was equally know to all players. One player noted down the name of a major NPC, while all others did not and remembered only "a woman".

So with the above suggested solution, no player should see the reveal indicator at all. Thus, each player would see different parts of the picture, leaving room for discussion, information exchange etc. between the players. Sometimes they do not all pull in the same direction and there will be situations where a player may want to "use" an information that is only known to himself to his advantage, even against his fellow players...

Edit: just checked playere view in RW and there is currently no color indicator as in GW mode to reveal the reveal state to the player. So I would assume that if such reveal systems as suggested above would be integrated, it would also not be visible for the players, showing only the revealed snippet, but not its "reveal state".

I'm probably pipe-dreaming, here, but some of this perhaps falls under player-defined snippets.

My players are pretty terrible at remembering names (usually people, but places, too). They each have their own way of remembering (usually in very vague terms) who people are.

In this pipe-dream of mine, the players will be able to define their own aliases for topics, and view a list of the aliases they've created, to link through to the "real" topic, but with the topic name replaced by their alias in their own view.

To be quite honest, I think that's probably not worth the effort, and player-defined aliases which function just like normal aliases would be a better solution, though it simplifies things for players by allowing them to easily find the real name of topics using their alias. Which probably isn't a bad thing, since I get a bit frustrated by "let's go ask thingumybob. You know, whatshisname, the fat guy, from that place. The one with the lisp. Who told us about that woman. Shibblewibble, or whatever it was."

My players aren't exactly into deep immersion.

"That guy" is a pretty popular name in many campaigns. ;)

Character names:

Bryony
Noldim mac Nalfyr
Luminryl
Matador
Willard the Adventuring Hero

There's one in every group of players, isn't there?

I thought "that Guy" was canon?:D

Through the years I have tried to alleviate "TG" by utilizing an extensive amount of mini's ... That has had mixed results. Some players are visually attuned and thus remember the NPC of monster name details etc.... while others simply now say "I RECOGNIZE THAT GUY" or "Do I recognize that guy?"when the mini is placed on the table .... [insert face palm emocon here] :D

@Maxsupernova "character names"--- Yep!!! even Gygax also had Melf... because the player couldn't couldn't think of a name so he combined the two boxes (that were then on top of the character sheet) Male & Elf (gender / race)

@ MccrayAh good to know... wondered about that, thanks for followup!

@LWD
+1 in case there is a filter looking for this when compiling a list. (forgot to deploy when commenting LATE last night at airport)

Yes, the revealed snippets absolutely should not show in Player View their "reveal state".

LOL. Shibblewibble killed me. :D

I like the idea of player-defined aliases. I too have players that have trouble with details. Actually, my players run the gamut of immersion, all the way from one guy who 'lives in the moment' (rarely remembers any details about previous sessions) to another guy who is even more detail-oriented than I am (which I didn't think was possible).

"That guy" is absolutely canon. ;) And as for Willard, he started out as a nondescript Fighter NPC, who was played by a succession of visiting players and oddly developed more personality than many of the PCs in the games I've run over the years.

So true so true! This to me is what RW will remove, and enhance game play by players always knowing the info that has been given to them. As stated this does remove the ideals that some may rememebr and others will not, but for my 30ish years at the gaming table, its rarely about who remembers what, but how long it takes the GM to look back in the game notes/module/story/book/etc to find the info.

I also love the OPs idea, really really cool. However it was mentioned about snippet color, would it not be cool if the GM could assign colors to players in the realm, say any that RW does not use now. And when you reveal a snippet to all, its green as it is now, but when it is revealed to a player(s) it shows a colored dot representing the color assigned to the player by the GM.

Example I assigned the following colors:

Player 1 = orange
Player 2 = brown
player 3 = pink (you know thats gonna lead to great jokes)

If I reveal a snippet to say player 1 it shows an orange dot.
If I reveal a snippet to player 2 and 3, it shows a brown and pink dot.

Also make it changable, so if player 1 shares the info to all, I can then go in and make it reveal to all, and a green dot.

@ Exmortis>
Interesting approach, on the surface would be easy to tell who got what (like that) as to the "pink" since I have 3 ladies at the table all preferring pink that would pose a different battle at my table.... :P

But am curious how you would handle "colorizations" for partial reveals, like 1/2 the party? its not one color, nor is it green? Maybe a predetermined partial?

Anything over 2 should probably be a generic "multiply-revealed" color so it doesn't become too hard to see (especially on laptop or tablet screens). Not sure if a popup listing the reveal status would be beneficial enough to justify the effort.

I was pondering this over dinner with my better half... and she to was intrigued by the idea, but brought back out a valid point I had forgotten.....

"what if the player has more than one character?"

In our campaign, I run one world (realm) but the world is vast and wide and there are 3 groups of PCs that explore it (based on who is available for table time is what determines which PC group runs that weekend).

So it would be very possible from a player perspective like hers that if the colors were defined by player, she could get three differing reveals mish-mashed together from the collection of what her 3 different PCs know all marked with the same color assigned to her.

This is why I brought this up to Rob early on about reveal levels and he confirmed it was indeed the plan to go down to the character level, not just the Player Level.

see here>
http://forums.wolflair.com/showthrea...469#post198469

So if that holds true (and I hope that it does) not quite sure how the "filter" will respond unless there are ALOT more color variables....

As Rob is often fond of saying ... it is easy to imagine something .. quite a bit different to bring those imaginings to reality at times, especially not knowing the intricacies of how the code would respond.

It is also why having a pulldown as suggested earlier in this thread may be the better approach. Then it could be filtered by the PC selected.

The Dark Lord has hit the nail on the head. I currently have five active players in email games. Once I find a group for live games (recently having moved), the number of players will jump to nine or ten. If some of those players want to play another character in an email game, the number of characters could jump again, not to mention if some of my current players decide to run a second character. At this rate, it won't take very long for the colour option to become unfeasible. That's why I went with my original suggestion of one colour to indicate it is revealed to one or more (but not all). Hovering your cursor over the bullet will show a pop-up indicating to which characters the info has been revealed. Clicking on the bullet allows you to edit that.

I would solve this whole player vs character issue by simply making it by character. You cannot control how many players, or how may characters each player plays, but we have one true static rule, you must have a character to play, thus we begin at the foundation for the game system it self, the character.

Also, players are to play the character based on what they the character knows, not others, so to support that idealism, we must reveal by character so the player knows what the character knows. After that, tweak player version to allow more than one character for a player in a window or tab. Most games I have been in, have one player, one PC character, though I am sure its not uncommon to have it otherwise, one to one is the norm I am aware of.

As far as multi character reveal to color, I would simply say once a snippet has past more than on character reveal, it goes "black" or some other reserved color, maybe darker grey. Then if you hover over it, a pop up window appears and it shows color and character the snippet has been revealed too. Make it a right click on the reveal icon for a snippet bring this as a pop up menu and allow the choosing of character for the reveals, with the "reveal to all" button that turns the snippet the standard green.

That's the plan (as noted above by Rob link)

Here, here!! As you imply, this is "root" logic to how the game (regardless of version or genre) is structured.

Yep.
And this was the concern leveraged by my wife. "If I use this RW, will I STILL have to sift through what my paladin vs, my barbarian, vs my bard knows because it only "Filters" down to the player level?"
Simplified answer.... no, it will be at the character level, as per Rob.

I agree, though would add, when I played bulletin board versions (now Play-by-Email) this was less so since there was long turnarounds between actions. Some as I have seen here, are playing "post" style gaming, and may not have that 1 to 1.

+1

The question then still ist, how do you transition from Character to Player level?

If I have one player who has three characters, wether in the same game or not doesnt matter atm, how do you link his characters from RWGME through to RWPE to support that individual reveal?

In other words: you would need to be able to asign one or several different characters in the settings to one player and then during editing your realm and revealing stuff select the correct character for the reveal action. This then needs to be synchronized like anything lese to RWPE to ensure consistency. I think of that as some not so small hurdle to take, but maybe its an easy one from a programmers perspective.

Picking up from disparate sources, what will happen is that the GM will assign "ownership" of characters to players, so that the players can create their own journals/notes/whatever for those characters. The player will (pure guesswork, here) select "Playing As..." (defaulting to the last character selected), and be able to dynamically switch between their assigned characters so that the realm only shows that character's revealed info.

The logic is already in place for this, I believe, since it was always intended as a feature, it's just (heh, just) UI and implementation that need to be ironed out.

I just wanted to throw this tidbit out there....

I'm about to start another campaign using the same game world which will make at least 10 different characters flitting about my creations. I don't know how many characters Rob and his peeps were considering for this feature but I hope situations like this are accounted for.

I would hope the answer to that is something along the lines of, "limited only by memory," which would easily be hundreds, or thousands these days.

I find I am less tolerant of things with arbitrarily hard-capped limits these days. 8)

I'm certainly not a database person, but the limit may be much less than we think it should be due to the number of links and interlinks possible. And with each edit those links can change. LWD does a nice job of making the data accessible and easy to understand. But I would imagine there's a lot of sorcery happening behind the scenes....

I'm hoping the limits are great enough to allow for a persistent campaign setting with multiple generations of characters. A world that the players can shape and which different groups of players can see.

I'm hoping the limits are great enough to allow for dungeons like Rappun Athuk which can have a tendency towards party attrition and character replacement. I'd like to see a party rebuild it's ranks and move forward.

I'm hoping the limits are great enough to allow for multiple clones in Paranoia.

If the limits are finite, I'm hoping we can remove characters from the reveal list to open new slots if necessary. I don't know why I'd want to keep the history of dead characters but it may be useful.

I'm hoping we can click which characters are in play and only see the reveals for that particular group of characters.

And I'm idly wondering how I want to handle amnesia or mind wipes or memory manipulation.

Yup, I totally expect that, that's why I asked.

I also bet that when Rob reads the rest of your post, he will be shaking his head and adding more notes to whatever project planning system they use for that feature as you raised some very salient points.

I'd be dangerous on the beta team. :) But I also suspect I'm probably stating what the LWD team has already been planning for more often than not. They're smart cookies.

Totally agree; but smart or not, the Kickstarters and other end users have already found a number of things (bugs, techniques, etc) that the beta team didn't and we've also asked for things that hadn't been considered. It's just the nature of the beast; the more peeps that do things, the bigger the variety of the 'how'. :D

One way of doing this which is already available is GM directions. Simply note, that this was known prior to the episode we do not talk about and it is no longer remembered.
After that you could "un-reveal" the information, so that it disappears from the players' view and you will know, why it isn't revealed anymore.

I really like this approach and the suggested UI looks like very useful and like something I could easily work with.

+1

When individual reveals are implemented, could a tag automatically be created for each character that knows the topic so we can sort on them and identify the specific information known by each character? :)

OMG - Yes pls :)

I think it's more likely that "Enter Player Mode" will have a way for you to select Everyone or a specific character.

Sorry, more likely than what specifically?

Than choosing to put a Tag on everything. Tags have UI requirements and limitations that the developers may not want to fulfill; they clog up the Tags section of the Transitions Pane, you have to write exceptions for things revealed to the whole party, and other things I'm sure I don't know about their implementation.

The Player mechanisms will have to be updated anyway to support individual reveal; piggybacking on that seems easier to me than adding an entirely new Tag system.

Ah ok. Well, yes, that could one way to do it but I can easily see that when I'm working on my content, constantly having to check PV to see who was flagged for what would be detrimental to my workflow. Perhaps substantially so.

YMMV of course.

I'm not sure I understand why PC tags would require an entirely new tag system. Tags are already in place and the tag lists are user extensible. My suggestion simply leverages what already exists. Rob loves tags!

What doesn't exist is a way to attach tags to other mechanics like the reveal button. I'd recommend left click reveal all (green button like we have already); right click open multi-tag list (blue button).

With tags we could see exactly which NPCs a PC (or PCs) have spoken to, or the locales they have knowledge of, or, or, or...and we could edit those topics immediately.

With tags we could see whether John + Jim + The Villain are a valid search. If nothing comes up, then those two PCs don't have information about The Villain in common.

With tags we could see whether John has been active in any Frog God Games content.

With tags and some LWD witchery, we could look for patterns across multiple realms! Ok, getting carried away. This would take a little more work and I don't know what the gain would be.... But it's theoretically possible and might be good for looking for content in your multi-realm library to find that NPC that you really think would work well in this instance so you could export/import her.

I have to admit, I did a little happydance when I found out that Individual Character Reveal was the #2 item to be worked on from the survey. :D

As to tags working with this, I'm not sure how that would be done, as tags are pretty much binary. A topic either has a tag or it doesn't.

Going back to my example images in the first post, if there was a 'Revealed to Matador' tag, then a search on that tag would bring up Khazamon, but you'd still have to spend some time looking to see which snippets about Khazamon were revealed to Matador.

I'm assuming that 'Enter Player Mode' will be changed to 'Enter Character Mode' and there will be a drop-down menu that will allow you to see what each individual character sees, in which case you could see precisely what Matador sees.

If the tag was applied to the topic title (as to whether the topic itself was revealed to a character), you could do a search for 'Revealed to Matador + 'Revealed to Pundgy' + 'Wizard' to see which wizards are known to Matador and Pundgy. In this case, Khazamon would appear in the search as he has been revealed to both characters and he is a wizard. However, if you did a search for 'Revealed to Matador + 'Revealed to Bryony' + 'Wizard', Khazamon would still appear because he has been revealed to both characters and he is a wizard. Except the fact that he *is* a wizard has not been revealed to Bryony.

Sorry if this is a bit rambling and disjointed. Haven't reached my coffee quota yet.

Hi guys, has there been any update about the feature discussed in this thread -Individual Character Reveal? I've been trying to follow where its up to but it seems to keep getting bumped. Apparently it was number 2 in a workflow survey in 2015. Is anyone able to shed any light on if its still happening or likely to happen?

At this stage the next thing we know they are working on currently is the Content Market. There's been no hints as to when this will make it in.

I'd be shocked if this was in the top 20, to be honest. The amount of reworking of this would be huge as the 'toggle' type thing they have now for 'reveal/not reveal' would have to expand to an array. I'm sure there are other deeper considerations in the code to ensure they don't break anything else.

Possibly, but it also adds a massive amount to what can be done. Currently we have no way to treat a party other than as a single entity. Players deserve more than that in my opinion, and it is already becoming industry standard...

I don't think anyone disputes how much it could improve things.

However, let's put an essential fact and a strong opinion on the table here:

* LWD conducted a survey of what order to work on features after content market and I've seen nothing to indicate they're going to discard that.
* When it comes to campaign management, I think Realm Works redefined industry standard.

Individual reveal is another of the features, like character journals, that while it doesn't directly add anything to the world building features of RW it would greatly enhance the usability of RW.

I'd like to see individual reveal, character journals and custom calendars given the highest priority after the CM goes live. The precise order is up the LWD but IMO these three should be the big three features to add.

I think web view will take priority to be honest. Web view will open up to a larger market of users and be core in the future of the product from a technology perspective upon which everything else will rely on.