With several groups getting well and familiar with chat roleplay on RPGpad, I wanted to take a moment to look at some of the design choices and options available.
The chat allows players to be in multiple rooms simultaneously. Clearly characters can only be in one location at a time, but being in multiple rooms allows you to keep an Out of Character and In Character presence at the same time, or even playing multiple characters at ones — the nature of chat roleplay is that it tends to be a bit slower than tabletop, which often allows for this kind of thing.
However, there are a few other situations in which this can be useful, especially for Storytellers. The first is the split party. With a lone rogue scouting ahead, the storyteller can PM the rogue, but if the party is split into larger groups, this becomes impractical. To keep information flow accurate, without requiring the storyteller to PM everyone the same message, a second room can be created for the other half of the party, with the storyteller present in both.
It also allows for some interesting special case scenario’s. In a futuristic campaign, characters may not only have a presence in the physical realm, but may also have one in cyberspace. Likewise, in a fantasy game, the character may leave their physical body in one location while astral projecting into another — using multiple presence supports this.
All these options can be great fun, and we recommend experimentation (and we’d love to hear your feedback if you do). We already picked up on one situation we haven’t really covered: moving from one location to another. Surely, you can enter a new room and switch back to the mask from the old one, but that is a bit of a workaround for ‘moving’ which might be more accurately represented by leaving the room you came from, entering the one you moved, and keeping the mask you were using. We’ll be looking into that more in the near future.
By the way, if you noticed this weeks blog is a little bit late, you are correct — this was due to some other matters we had to attend to. However, we did manage to release some updates this week, including the option to force the next player in the initiative order (for example, if someone had to go afk a moment). For the exact list of changes, be sure to check the changelog, and of course we’d love to hear any feedback you have in our Forum