Hidden Lines in Emotes

[Kinaed]

A code [a or something like that which will display a hidden line if a player makes a skillcheck or stat check required to see it. Mostly used mid-emote to hide social feedback, such as perhaps subtle hints that someone is lying or obfuscating how they really feel.

They may be able to 'trust' certain players who will always see through the hidden aspect as they are intended to?

[Empheba]

Not sure I follow exactly how it'll work, you mean something like this:

emote /self smiles to /tall[a, Closing his fist in his pocket[x.
1>> He smiles to Tall man.
2>> He smiles to Tall man, closing his fist in his pocket.

So you'd "allow" people who you feel can handle the ooc info or something like that? Maybe cool. I do think the hidden text must be marked with colour so people know this is something not everyone might be seeing.

More advanced version would be to offer conditional in a closed-type tag:

emote /self smiles to /tall[a=int>40],Closing his fist in his pocket[x.
emote /self smiles to /tall[a=name==Tom], Closing his fist in his pocket[x.

While powerful, this is probably too advanced to be used much though.
.
Empheba

[Vaelius]

Passing secret messages (your underlaying feelings/intents) implies there is secondary communication. Communication of any form leaves room for others to interpret or intercept the message. Therefor leaving it opaque to some and clear to others seems wrong to me... so, for the 'trust' aspect I'd suggest maybe lowering whatever the target value to see the hidden message may be... but, still allowing anyone the potential to see the hidden part of the emote.

Also, it seems to me like you and Empheba are talking about different things, Kinaed. Which is awesome! Have the difficulty for what your talking about (social queus) be based on Cha, and what Empheba is talking about (slieght of hand) be Dex. :)

My final addition if you end up throwing this in would be in line 'thinks'.

emote /self #think I am so tired of this.# |looks exhasperated, but| smiles dimly at /man, "Of course." |She looks at /friend desperately, 'save me!' her expression says.| She shuffles around a bit, keeping her arms beneath her cloak. +She tries to slip the sekret! map into her satchel without being noticed.+

Normal Result: A young Lady smiles dimly at an emaciated man, "Of course." She shuffles around a bit, keepiner her arms beneath her cloak.

Wis vs. Cha Success: A young Lady looks exhasperated, but smiles dimly at an emaciated man, "Of course." She looks at a darling older man desperately, 'save me!' her expression says. She shuffles around a bit, keeping her arms beneath her cloak.

Wis vs. Dex Success: A young Lady smiles dimly at an emaciated man, "Of course." She shuffles around a bit, keepiner her arms beneath her cloak. She tries to slip the sekret! map into her satchel without being noticed.

Total Success: A young Lady looks exhasperated, but smiles dimly at an emaciated man, "Of course." She looks at a darling older man desperately, 'save me!' her expression says. She shuffles around a bit, keeping her arms beneath her cloak. She tries to slip the sekret! map into her satchel without being noticed.

Like that, right? :) In fact, with hashtags or whatever could we do any inline commands? #sit on couch#, #harm roger light arm#, etc? Mm.... might make a problem with nesting emotes, but that shouldn't be too tough to prevent.

[Temi]

Looks very interesting, lots of promise. Though I worry about the commands becoming unwieldy and just not getting used due to putting too much in. Dynamic targeting is cool, but how many people use the options beyond /, |, # and occasionally *? Who uses even that many?

Would you use all these options in an inline function, or could you get the same result with just as much happiness by breaking it up into a regular emote and hemote?

emote /self |looks exasperated, but| smiles dimly at /man, "Of course." |She looks at /friend desperately, 'save me!' her expression says.| She shuffles around a bit, keeping her arms beneath her cloak.

vs

emote /self smiles dimly at /man, "Of course." She shuffles around a bit, keeping her arms beneath her cloak.
hemote /self looks at /friend desperately, 'save me!' her expression says.

For the trusted people concept, I sort of suggested it, but I more meant less as people you trust and always want to see them, and more as 'the people in the scene I am trying to express these things to'. It does occur to me though: hemoteto - who puts something in that they want no one to see? They may not ICly want people to see, but when people know the staff (or someone else) are watching their thoughts, they think more, not less! Hemoteto would be more fun as a way of secret message passing instead of just those things 'I'm trying to be legit here and express everything, but I really hope no one sees this.'

[Vaelius]

I would use inline think more often than the current command (I'm the sort that thinks redundancy in commands is better than removing user-friendliness in favor of bandwidth saving... of course, I'm also the one who isn't paying for it.) Just because, to me, it seems more natural. 'This is where I think this...' rather than '...I do a bunch of stuff; barely related to that here is my thought.' Also, I hate having two seperate echo lines for what should be one thing.

emote/hemote - As above, I prefer one line echo to several. It looks better, it keeps all the ideas in the order presented and it encourages a better flow. Also, if the potential hemote is in the middle of an emote... then it's three lines. In my example above that's actually six different commands/six different echoes/etc. all condenced into one neat little package.

trust - If this is implemented (I think it's a pretty good idea) it should be treated like whisper. What do they call it? A 'moue'? If you moue at your friend while you're talking to some other guy... honestly, you're engaged in conversation with Guy A. Friend B is really less likely to notice than Guy A. That's just mho.

[Amdair]

Gotta be honest, I don't use any targeting besides /, unless an item is SUPER important--I don't even know what the dynamic target for an item IS, off the top of my head.

All of this in-emote stuff is cool, but I like to get my posts out faster and like to receive them faster, so this sort of thing doesn't appeal to me. Furthermore, I enjoy sometimes letting vague, ambiguous secondary communication slip so that people can either misunderstand it or properly understand it at their own leisure, which can lead to very interesting situations.

[Vaelius]

Gotta be honest, I don't use any targeting besides /, unless an item is SUPER important--I don't even know what the dynamic target for an item IS, off the top of my head.

All of this in-emote stuff is cool, but I like to get my posts out faster and like to receive them faster, so this sort of thing doesn't appeal to me. Furthermore, I enjoy sometimes letting vague, ambiguous secondary communication slip so that people can either misunderstand it or properly understand it at their own leisure, which can lead to very interesting situations.

Adjust the length of your posts to be a happy medium between your preferred length and that expressed by your RP partners. Try not to post significantly faster or slower than they do either. Essentially, if they're posting a mile a minute, and you can't keep up, just speed up a little bit and expect them to slow down a little bit. You'll find people who are happy to engage you no matter where you sit on this spectrum.

I hope no one takes this the wrong way... but, I type at nearly 100wpm. I have, when carried away, been known to throw out three to five emotes of moderate length before I remember to let someone else have their turn. Targeting items, the covert emotes, and inline thoughts slow me down... If I am taking too long and RPing with someone who can keep up with my pace, I can stop using inline commands/targeting. If I am RPing too quickly, I can increase my use of those features to slow myself down. :)

Concerning using regular emotes to slip vauge, ambiguous, secondary communication - it is usually quite effective. While deciding whether or not to implement this, that should be taken into consideration. The effort required to effectively code this so it does not break suspension of disbelief and is also supported by a robust system... may be inneficient.

[Kinaed]

I like using think because it can keep me RPing and in the zone when I'm waiting on RP partners or am in a hugely crowded room.

With things like ambiguity being left off for people to interpret, I have to admit that bugs me a bit because it doesn't feel "IC" to me. It's not about how my character relates to another character in the IC world, but about how someone is OOCly relating to my story. And, let's face it, I tend to play a lot of bold faced liars. If I'm getting up to that kind of shennanigans, I'd like to think I'm being fair to the other party and always attempt to leave clues lying around - but there's no good way of leaving them and knowing that the code will arbitrate for me if I was caught instead of me making the assumption.

With regards to adding think and hidden codes to the emote command - I'm for it. I'd probably use it. Often? Probably about 10% of my RP would include them, I'm guessing, so I'd say yes.

[Clockwork]

Major concern: it's easy to typo the tag, leading to accidental exposure.

Not an argument pro or con; just a thought.

[Rabek]

I think this adds needless complexity and work for our already overworked coder for too little benefit. There is already Thieves Cant, I believe, for secret messages. Perception-based emotes might add interesting flavor, but it really seems like too much work for too little gain when someone can just type 'if one's looking carefully, they may notice blah'.