jase:
There's so many ways for GMs to dupe, deceive and just downright abuse players that I personally can't see how hiding an NPC from the cast list even registers on the scale.
Will it only apply for NPCs? I have no problem with that at
all; they can hide all the NPCs if they want. It's having all the PCs hidden that I wouldn't like, and that I'm worried a lot of GMs will do because of.. well, as I've said, just the way they
worry about what players are `finding out'. There's a certain psychology when you're setting things up that, if you're trying to keep anything secret, pushes you to keep
everything secret. It's not a rational thing.
And it's not the GMs duping, deceiving, or abusing us that bothers me, because that's all wonderful. It's just the Cast List. I like it, I use it, and it has a lot of reasons to be there. LoreGuard is right that a lot of its functions can now be reached through back-doors (especially alongside people's posts), but Skald is totally, totally right that that is a
great deal less convenient than the Cast List. There's a reason the Cast List is one of our Dice Links. Those are important things.
willvr:
I think it's also a matter of trust. If you don't feel you can trust that GM to not take advantage of their power?
You could just as well say GMs shouldn't allow players that they don't trust not to metagame like that. Except, here's the thing -- I don't think such GMs would be abusing their power. I think they would be
using this power in a totally reasonable way, that would remove an RPoL feature that I like. What it really comes down to is, when I read the description of this feature, as we're talking about implementing it, I immediately thought, "Hey, cool, I could Hide
everybody, and then no one could see anyth-- oh, hey, wait." Because I'm totally susceptible to that super-secretive psychology that GMs fall into, and I know I'm not the only one.
I don't have any problem at all with this feature in its intended use: Hiding a not-yet-introduced NPC is something I would probably use. Hiding an incoming PC certainly has its place. (Though as I understand the tags now, I do believe there is nothing stopping you from tagging a character owned by a player as an NPC, or vice-versa, if you just want to sow some metagame-confusion.)
I just don't see anything in it that stops a GM from slapping "Hide" on everybody and turning the whole Cast List off, and that does bother me, because... well, I think I've already mentioned this, but I like and use the Cast List.
If it only applies to NPCs, then that solves my worry, though it doesn't do everything people are asking for it to do (specifically, also hiding a not-yet-introduced PC). Group Z would have, but I can see where it conflicts with other possible uses of Group Z, so maybe that's not so good.
Is there a way to make it only apply to a character
until they have a post? That should mean they've been "Revealed" anyway. So you could totally set up an NPC, or even an incoming PC, without giving them away in the Cast List... the GM can introduce them in a descriptive post... people can react naturally... and they don't show up on the List (as PC or NPC) until there is a direct post from that character? (Even if that direct post turns out to be, "Oof. Erk. Arrrrrrrrrgh...
thud") An incoming PC would have to hold off on posting even in an OOC thread, but if you're trying to hide them until after they're introduced, they have to do that anyway.
I'm not sure about the programming, but that seems to me to do everything people want to do here, without circumventing the Cast List as-a-feature.
I'm a +1 if we can give it some kind of limit like that, but, for what it's worth, a -1 without it.