The prompt message left me scratching my head. I don’t want to talk about having a message to your game; we get enough of that through every other media, right now. Play by Message or Email? Never done it, so I don’t really have anything to say there. Using message apps to contact the players in secret…?

I like that idea. In some games, you may want to keep player specific information compartmentalized. Maybe your players have a hard time with out-of-character knowledge and would use it whether their characters would know it or not. Maybe you have a character with a secret agenda or identity that even the players shouldn’t know; for example, a player character who is a Cylon in a Battlestar Galactica campaign, or a mole in the group in an espionage game, or a undercover synthetic trying to manipulate the crew in Alien — the surprise revelation that a trusted PC is actually a bad guy can be a lot of fun. Passing messages on scraps of paper was a time-honored tradition, but when everyone has a smartphone (minus one of my players…damned Luddite!), you can up the game and send not just messages, but pictures (this is what you saw…) or maps snippets (you explored this area alone, look at all the treasure!)

I’m a fan.