Hello,
I would like to kindly request certain features for the forum, primarily with the intent to improve the possibilities of play-by-post, as well as posting Pathfinder Society characters into the character sheets. I really love the means that the system already provides, but in comparison to other forum systems I find other features that would make a lot of things simpler and easier to read.
In my personally perceived order of importance:
- Tables
Obviously helpful for inventory lists and arranging stats such as ability scores. It is helpful to somehow discern between header cells and normal cells. I've seen different systems, some of which use a syntax close to HTML, other which lean towards Mediawiki syntax.
A relatively simple alternative would be to allow people to use blocks with a monospaced font in which multiple white spaces are not omitted, similar to a <pre></pre> block. However, not exactly like a pre-block because inside it further formatting (such as bold characters) must not be ignored and it must not exceed its boundaries, when a line becomes to long it must be broken into the next.
- Horizontal rulers
The can be mimiced by several dashes etc. to split a single one post into logical groups (i.e. one in character, one out of character, or to indicate a change of scene), but that looks a bit awkward compared to actual horizontal rulers.
- Footnotes
Can be helpful to keep ooc comments out of the floating text as well as offer "translations" for text spoken in elven, infernal, ulfen and what not. Those things don't really have to be spoilers, just need to be kept separate. (Some players like to provide such text as a google translation into a real life language none of the other players speaks.)
Possible example: "I humbly thank you for your welcome, milady. Might I request that our caravan might be permitted passage through your lands?"[fn][dice=Diplomacy|1d20+2[/dice|[/fn]
- Multiple gameplay threads in a single one game
If the story breaks down into several threads, some players whish to continue a conversation of their characters that actually happened the night before and so forth the result is multiple time line in a single one thread which can get messy and notoriously difficult to understand. Thus it is helpful to have multiple gameplay threads in one game.
Beyond that a few additions the the dice rolling mechanism would be nice. Many forum systems have a mechanic to automatically omit the lowest roll from a set. For example "4d6dl1" might mean to discard the lowest one and thus sum up the three highest from the set.
If you forgive me for advertising an idea I once programmed myself for a different forum system: Progress bars to indicate health point levels and checkboxes to indicate the amount of available resources of a limited kind, such as arrows. See here for an example:
http://games.dnd-gate.de/index.php?topic=7858.0
Basically it adds: [bar]15/19[/bar] tags which allow one to have a hit point bar and [uses]18/20[/uses] which allow one to have a number of (Unicode, not HTML) checkboxes of which two would be checked in the given example. The prior can deal with negative quantifiers and qualifiers, but not currently with quantifiers that exceed the qualifier (even though that has been requested).
(This is based linear gradients from CSS 2, however, if someone comes around with Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6 it won't work)
And finally a a reversible "language garbler" for fictional languages would be nice. E.g. [elven]May the light shine on your path.[/elven] rearranges everything somehow to indicate that it is an actual strange language, but the result can, at least theoretically, be reversed into the origal, no information gets lost.
