Visibility and player knowledge

Every entity, score, and relation in Bondsmith can be shown or hidden per player. You hold the full picture; players see only what you have shared. This page covers the visibility dialog, the global score-hiding setting, and per-player relation sharing.

The visibility dialog

Open the visibility dialog from the eye icon on an actor, faction, or location detail panel, or from the Visibility… entry in an entity’s context menu. The dialog is GM-only.

The dialog holds three controls and a relation summary.

Hide an entity

The Visible to players checkbox controls whether the entity exists for players at all. When you turn it off, the entity is hidden everywhere a player would otherwise see it: the navigator, token badges, relations, and graphs.

Hide just the score

The Hide score from players checkbox keeps the entity visible but replaces its numeric reputation with the tier name. A player sees the tier label where the number would be. The entry itself stays in the navigator and on the entity’s panel.

When the world-wide score-hiding setting is on, the dialog notes that scores are already hidden for everyone, and this per-entity toggle adds nothing. See Settings for that toggle. Read how tiers map to scores in Reputation and tiers.

Set a masked name

For actors, the dialog adds a Masked Name field. Type a name here and players see it in place of the real one. A player who has not yet identified an NPC can be shown a placeholder instead of the true name. Leave the field empty to show the real name. The field is shown only for actors; factions and locations have no masked name.

Review hidden relations

The dialog footer reports how many of the entity’s outgoing relations are hidden from players. This is a read-only count. You set per-relation and per-player sharing on each relation row, not in this dialog.

Hiding reputation numbers for everyone

A single world setting hides all reputation numbers from every player at once. When it is on, players see only the tier name on reputation bars and relation rows; the numeric value is withheld. You always see both the number and the tier. This setting is global and does not depend on any per-entity toggle. Configure it on the Settings page.

Per-player relation sharing

Each relation carries its own visibility, and you can override it for individual players.

The eye toggle on a relation row sets the default for everyone: Known means players see the relation, Hidden means they do not.

For finer control, open the per-player share dialog from the relation row. The dialog lists every non-GM player in the world with a Known and a Hidden cell each. Click a cell to set that player’s view of the relation. A player with no explicit choice inherits the relation’s default and is marked as inheriting. Setting a player back to the default clears the override. The footer shows the current default for everyone.

The dialog lists only non-GM players. In a world with none, it says so. Relations and how they appear are covered in Relationships and graphs.

Hide all or show all on a section

A faction section’s context menu carries Show All to Players and Hide All from Players. Each acts on every faction in that section, including nested child factions, in one step. Use this to reveal or conceal a whole branch of the hierarchy at once.

What players can write back

Players never edit visibility. When a player saves a change, Bondsmith accepts only relations and history they own: their own outgoing relations and the matching change history. Everything else in the incoming write is dropped, so a player cannot alter another entity’s reputation, another player’s relations, or any visibility state. Changes a player makes are recorded the same way yours are; see Changelog and history.