Reveal for GM

[AEIOU]

That's the real question, Zaphod.

And ultimately, is this GM function even necessary if we have a way to differentiate which players can see what?

I presume we will need to specify who the players are in our games. We could just make additional "player" accounts for our NPC's. But that just seems wasteful of server resources even though it is very viable.

[pyremius]

Originally Posted by Zaphod Beebledoc

This makes me think about how we are going to differentiate between the revealed information for different players once that feature comes online. Different colours for the reveal button?

That would be very useful, and is a case I hadn't actively thought about previously: One color means revealed to all players, while another color means revealed to some players. My assumption is that the list of who a snippet is revealed to will be a pop-up or in a menu, as it will take up too much space otherwise in larger games. Color-coding the bubble like this means you have at-a-glance knowledge of what can be discussed in front of the whole group, and what cannot.

Cornelius: all of your examples involves the players being aware of what they encountered. What AEIOU originally requested was a way to easily identify snippets the players are not aware they know, but that they have encountered. Much like many movies and novels hide clues in plain sight by burying them in flashier details, the players may not recognize a key piece of information as being distinct from background detail. In these cases it is necessary for the GM to know that the information has been "activated" but that the players are not aware of it. I could see this coming into play heavily with some uses of Pathfinder's Harrow deck or many forms of magical/psychic divination. As the players cast their spells to learn more detail about the plot, they receive a flashback to an earlier encounter (perhaps the entire scene is in greyscale except for the person they overlooked at the time, who turns out to have the information they need.)

Another use for this feature would be for the master villain's long-term plots. If the GM decides that the villain will attempt to gather information about the PCs, he might develop a number of different methods the villain could use, depending on time and opportunity. Flagging the appropriate options as they become usable means the GM will be able to come back later and flesh out the details, and know which ones are currently in play, even though they're currently progressing in the background and directly known to the PCs.

[lifer4700]

I see the use of the word "Player" here an awful lot. I hope that by "Player" you mean "Character"

Individual Reveal is huge. It is what is missing for me to be able let my players access Realm Works. Well, that and player access...

But I certainly hope that the focus is on what a Character knows, not what a Player (RW user account) knows. I hope I'm not the only person out there that might be involved in more than a single roleplaying game at a time.

I already found out - unfortunately - that I'm one of the only GMs that run PbP games. And that I'm only of the only GMs that would reveal information to one PC in my game but not another.

[Silveras]

@lifer4700 .. at the moment, "player" means player, not character.

Individual character revelation was requested earlier, and is "on the radar", but it is not expected to be there when player access is enabled (as far as I recall).

Right now, reveal is "all players" or "no players".

Letting the players access the content independently is the first "big item" the LW team is tackling post initial release. While that will require creating individual player accounts, that does not necessarily mean that player-level revealing of content will be part of it. That is likely to be a "next step" goal of some sort, and they will likely need to make progress on others before it (calendars comes to mind as one that is also in high demand).

As I recall, LW was a bit surprised at how much interest there was for "per-character" revelation.

I would guess that there are some more pieces in the background that need to be added to represent PCs separate from other characters in the content before any character-level revelation could be done, and more work to link those to the appropriate player accounts.

For now, I would advise you to read all references to player access and revelation as being PLAYER not CHARACTER.

EDIT: All advice offered in the spirit of managing expectations.

[rob]

CLARIFICATION:

Access to content in general will be through PLAYER accounts that are tied to each USER of the product.

However, once we get individual reveal control implemented, that will be PER CHARACTER.

Therefore, if a player runs two characters, he'll be able to see what BOTH of those characters know, individually OR (hopefully) collectively.

I hope this eliminates any confusion on the subject...

[lifer4700]

Originally Posted by rob

CLARIFICATION:However, once we get individual reveal control implemented, that will be PER CHARACTER.

Outstanding!

Originally Posted by rob

Therefore, if a player runs two characters, he'll be able to see what BOTH of those characters know, individually OR (hopefully) collectively.

Or perhaps as a player preference or setting? If the two characters happen to be in the same group, then conglomerating the reveals of both characters to the player would make sense. However, if the player controls two characters - one each in two separate groups - then it would help the player to keep track of what this character knows versus what that character knows.

[McGray]

Originally Posted by Silveras

As I recall, LW was a bit surprised at how much interest there was for "per-character" revelation.

Which is surprising on my end, as the level of information between the players (equalt to character in that case) is sometimes enormously different. Last session I GMed, the different players put a lot of attention to many different things. So for example, the whole group encountered a female NPC, happening to be an ancient Being from greek Mythology. Only one player actually was aware enough to note down here name, as it was mentioned in a conversation between her and another NPC. So if in that case, I reveal the NPC by her name, I would provide that information to the whole group instead of just the player who noted it down.

With indivudal reveal per player it would be possible for me to reveal the name of this NPC to the one player who noted it down and combined with the OPs idea I could reveal the general NPC as known to the group as a whole.

Maybe it would be possible in that situation, when you flag such information as being encountered by the group, that RW reveals it (or part of it) without actually showing the content.

So for example, when you flag the NPC "Alecto" as encountered, all players would see in their PE an entry that only shows the tags "Human" and "Female", leaving the actual name blank and only the player who noted her name would also get to see the actual name.

Hope that makes kind of sense

To sum up:

+1 for individual player reveal
+1 for the idea of this topic to flag encountered story elements without actually revealing all of their content

[pyremius]

Currently, it appears that the following information is revealed:

Any Snippet which has been revealed.
What Category the Topic belongs to.
Which other Topic contains the current Topic - if that Topic is also revealed.

For example, in Skulls & Shackles there is an NPC named Owlbear, who serves on the ship Wormwood. I have set Owlbear's Containing topic to be the Wormwood. If I share only the names of both Topics, my players will see the following information:

A Thing, titled Wormwood.
A Person, titled Owlbear.
Owlbear is Contained by the Worrmwood.

This is a problem, because while the characters have heard stories about the Wormwood, and have met Owlbear in a bar, they won't know Owlbear serves aboard the Wormwood until they ask what ship he crews on.

[Chemlak]

Yep, that's an issue regarding containers that I've spotted, too.

My advice is to only use containers for immutable physical relationships (things contained within other things where that does not change), such as the location of Arastavardalan the gold dragon's lair on High Peak Mountain in the Vinu Mountain Range on the continent of Herba (spot the made-up names...).

For anything involving individuals themselves, use relationships. So instead of sticking Arastavardalan inside the container Arastavardalan's Lair, I would use a Residence/Resident relationship.

In other words, people don't belong in containers (unless it's a girlfriend in a fridge).

[AEIOU]

My first forays into RW looked like overladen container ships. Lots and lots of containers. My containers had containers had recursive containers.

Over time I've been weaning myself off of containers in favor of tags. The problem here is that either you plan ahead and set up all the tags and snippets in advance or you spend a LOT of time fixing entries that had been complete in the past.

I still use containers but given the RW PE implementation and the inability to run the RW PE version in a separate window on my computer so I can monitor how things display in quasi-real time due to installation restrictions, containers are suspect.