impersonation, whispering and emotes in chat

[dLANbandit]

As a Fantasy Grounds user I really liked the ability to whisper to the DM in chat and additionally enjoyed that the DM could talk/impersonate any NPC they wanted to. The everyone also had the ability to emote things and do /ooc for out of character things to be said in chat.

All of these combined to give the campaign a feeling of us telling a story in the chat box with the map being the actors on the stage. I think the Map tool could benefit from these ideas and even improve on them.


/w sends this text to the GM

/w CHARACTERNAME sends this text to the character and the GM as a whisper

It also bolds and changes the color of the text to purple. (purple being the ancient color for royalty)

/e sighs heavily.
outputs
CharacterName sighs heavily.
in italics and in another color. Would like to be able to select the color but default it to something other than white.

/ooc or /o causes you to talk in yet another color and in itallics, to indicate any chat that isn't relevant to the story, coming from your character, or other wise.

/i or /impersonate NPCname makes this text come out as.
NPCname says, "makes this text come out as."

All of these selections or options would be useful to have in a drop down list right in front of the text type area so you could use the GUI to switch if you didn't want to type the commands every time or you wanted to leave it in that state for a while with multiple lines of text.

[Phergus]

/w sends this text to the GM

/w CHARACTERNAME sends this text to the character and the GM as a whisper

Already there. You specify who you want to send to but you could easily make a macro that sent it to the GM by default.


It also has /emote but it is just /me. As in /me is sleepy outputs "Phergus is sleepy".

/e sighs heavily.
outputs
CharacterName sighs heavily.
in italics and in another color. Would like to be able to select the color but default it to something other than white.

Also there as /me.

It would be nice to be able to automatically differentiate emotes and whispers with italic and bold.

/i or /impersonate NPCname makes this text come out as.
NPCname says, "makes this text come out as."

Commonly requested and I believe there is a tracker for that.

I don't pay much attention to the chat stuff because I only use MT for face-to-face gaming but I think there was some chat overall planned for the next version.

[Phergus]

Trevor - /me and /whisper doesn't use the players chosen color. Bug or intentional?

[dLANbandit]

thanks.

We have found that the format controls and emotes in chat, cause us to role play more things than we normally would in a face to face session.

When face to face, we generally don't add too many descriptors to what our characters say, and it comes across sounding strange when we say it.

However by text we end up writing things like what we are used to reading in novels.

[trevor]

Trevor - /me and /whisper doesn't use the players chosen color. Bug or intentional?

It was intended, so that there was a distinction between spoken text and actions. dLANBandit has some good comments about possibly making them italic or bold.

There's a tracker to add in the ability to change the style sheet so that you can change the way the different text is displayed to your liking.

[Warderbrad]

I run a couple of online games sessions and we utilize two chat windows (mostly for script saving purposes so we don't have to edit out the OOC stuff). Is there any movement or desire to have more than one chat room available?

[trevor]

I am certainly open to the idea if it would be useful to the community

[dLANbandit]

I don't mind the idea of mutliple chat rooms but as a player and sometimes GM I don't want my players communicating things about the game in an area I can't see or hear.

So I would want to be certain that all communication in other chats were visible to me.

Additionally I might get annoyed if I was reading the main chat, and others were talking in yet another and I didn't notice it. Then it also brings up the idea of who typed what in what order, which could be important in some campaigns.

[RPTroll]

Typing stuff the DM can't see is common in our group. Sometimes in face to face we make the DM leave the room so we can discuss tactics.

The side bar might be a good place for private messages vs. having another window created when a message comes in. It might be nice to have a separate, collapsible window for each private. You'd want a blinky bar to let the receiver know they have an unread message.

While dLAN is correct that this could cause confusion about what statement came in first, it would help the DM not 'miss' a private that scrolled off the chat screen.

[trevor]

We could make a server option for "Private chats allowed".

We could timestamp the comments, and make the timestamps visible on demand.

[dLANbandit]

sounds agreeable to me.

[Phergus]

Seems like tabbed chat windows ala the various MMOs would do the trick. Especially if you could select which chats went where. Send whispers to one and OOC comments to another and then keep the regular chat and emotes in the main chat window.

[dLANbandit]

I like the MMO example. That is exactly what I was imagining, but it didn't dawn on me from where.

[Dalna]

Well...why not have 2 special commands like /o or /ooc that when a files is saved...the save program quicky automatically deletes this so when it is read back they are not there. /o Can you play tomorrow at 5pm?
{Name:Can you play tyomorrow at 5PM?}

The other would be for information. these are left in for things like asking the DM for more information and the DMs response. this could be as simple as /i It would be displayed like /i What is the color of joes eyes? (Name:What is the color of joes eyes?)

Ofcoarse formating should be flexible as is other type of texts.

This would also help since you can filter things you say by using these commands and since you have different formating for each you can tell the intent of the non RP portion of the read.

Also no need to worry about Tabed windows for OOC stuff. And since you would probably only save the main window for history of the game..if you still had multiple chat windows for groups or single whispers...these would be considered OOC anyways...no saving.

[RPTroll]

On the silly end of chat

There's /click where you only chat with those in the special list
/exclude to send chat to everyone but one person
/schitz where only you see your chat but it appears as different people and the other players just get something like /emote is mumbling to himself again