Some people --me and my players included-- will be running games with Roll20 mainly using text, not webcams and voice.
Roll20 already supports some chat features. But if it wants to support this sort of usgage --people with Fantasy Grounds 2 is often used to it, and I find it innapreciable--, at the bare minimum, then, I'd suggest more Roll20 chat modalities and features: for instance, besides supporting certain macro dice rolls, allow for a sort of /alias command for chosing a name-personality without needing to create a new NPC inside Roll20 --this will be useful for GMs, and for very casual or brief NPCs; also, as it was suggested in another thread, a sort of way for entering *narrative* text would be extremely useful.
I think that other text chat modalities different than the default one would be indispensable for running text chat based games, like "Out of Character Chat" (displaying your Roll20 account name instead your character's name), and "In Character/Action Chat".
Text Chat Modalities wouldn't be difficult to implement, and could be activated just by pushing the enter key, along with another specific key (such as ALT, CTRL or whatever), while submitting the written text into the chatbox. Different Chat Modalities can use different colors as well, and even font types --narrative text can be bold or italic, for instance. This make all the text chat content more readable.
Example of "Out of Character Chat":
Brian (player name in parenthesis): AFK, someone is calling at my door.
or
Brian (player name in parenthesis): Sorry, but you are doing it wrong. The rules say otherwise and my Spot check should have been successful; please, check the manual, page 132.
Example of "In Character/Action Chat":
/me walks quietly towards the deer, readying an arrow.
resulting in
Wyrloc walks quietly towards the deer, readying an arrow.
Example of "Narrative text" --for the GM:
Suddenly you are awake, on a sort of uncomfortable bed. It is dark, and you don't remember how did you end in this place. You only can see small metalic highlights around you, and the irregular sound of water drops failing to the floor.
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While many of us would be happy with "Out of Character", "Alias function (speak as)", "Narrative Text", "Emote Text", "Action/In Character" and "Default" chat modalities, here is a rather exhaustive set of chat features --agreed, some of them are already included in Roll20, which is great! while some of them seem not completely applicable here, but they can be inspirational nonetheless-- written by a friend mine as a set of suggestions for a VTT. Since they are very good ideas to my mind, and indeed I run games mainly via text --mic. voice is reserved for "Out of Character chat", when we actually use it--, I have decided to post them here as a quote in the following post: