Secrets and hidden information are important elements of an interesting story. In YARPS you can manage with a single click who you want to share certain details with, and when. This way, you can save your big reveals for the right moment, and your players can remain focused on the game.
As a game master, it’s important to be one step ahead of your players at all times. The preparation for your next session, the occasional secret passage, or your concept for the entire campaign, there are many things you might want to keep hidden from the eyes of your players. At the same time, you want to have content that is revealed to the players ready at your disposal in YARPS in that very moment. YARPS presents you with the option to decide individually for each entity whether your players can (already) see it or you want it to (still) be invisible to them. You can later reveal such hidden entities easily one by one with a single click. For instance, your players will learn important background information about a planet the very moment they land on it with their ship. When they scan an alien lifeform all information in their ship’s database on this lifeform will appear in their YARPS instance. As a GM you can comfortably manage when your players gain access to individual entities.
Of course, you don’t have to create and maintain all your entities on your own. Via different user roles you can manage your players’ editing permissions and give them access to whatever you want them to help you out with.
Custom User Roles
YARPS differentiates between three types of users: Instance owners, game masters, and players. These user roles come with different permissions by default. A game master can create new entities, for example, while a player can’t. As this dynamic may not be the right fit for every group, you can adjust these settings at any time.
Maybe you want to allow your players to flesh out the hometowns of their characters on their own. Let them create the locations in YARPS and show them to you. When you’re happy with their creations you can approve them, and the hometowns of their characters are automatically connected to your game world. Maybe one of your players has a lot of knowledge about one particular faction. Give them permission to edit the relevant entity or even delete it.
Detailed Visibility Settings
You’re already familiar with the basic visibility settings for players. Closely connected to the Live Session Tools you’ll find some practical revealing options for the use of YARPS during your game sessions.
When your players arrive in a new city you can decide after the scene to make individual entities visible to them, such as the tavern they visited, the market square, etc., or even show them the entire city with all connected entities.
In case your party splits up and the characters explore the city on their own you can also reveal entities only for individual players instead of the entire party. For example, the secret gambling den could be made visible only to the player of the rogue who stumbled upon it before.
You can also toggle player visibility for certain attributes within an entity. There’s also the option for game masters to keep stats secret. Maybe your players have been outwitted by a clever merchant. Let them believe they have gotten a real bargain with the worthless junk they just bought—you’ve got the true price at hand for the moment they want to sell it again. You can show your players a false value and have the true price in your notes at the same time. This also works for other situations where you want to hide the intelligence of a wizard who is travelling with the group incognito or the alignment of a friendly merchant who is secretly the villain of your campaign, for example.
