I changed course after I published this month’s roadmap to follow the priorities I laid out in my Updated long-term roadmap. This “Allow players to join without an account” work was a decent chunk of that updated roadmap and I’m glad to have it ready for ya’ll.
I’ve been excited for this change for awhile. It’s silly that Shmeppy requires players to have an account. Especially since Shmeppy’s eventual monetization strategy only requires GMs to be subscribed.
Well now players don’t have to have an account! You can just give them a link and they can hop into your game immediately.
Display Names
When a player joins without an account, they’re assigned a randomly generated name in the form “Anonymous Bard”, “Anonymous Kobold”, or some other “Anonymous”-plus-fantasy-noun name. However, this name isn’t displayed to the anonymous player. Take a look at this screenshot showing a GM account and an anonymous player in the same game.
It’s confusing (though hopefully not horribly so). I think my decision to not show the current user in the peer list is even more confusing with this addition of anonymous users.
I’ll work on an improvement to the situation next week, though I’m not exactly sure what form that will take.
In the meantime, I think think this anonymous player support already feels quite good, so I’m happy to have it out in front of ya’ll 
.
Happy Shmepping ya’ll.
P.S. if you’d like to add fantasy nouns to the name generator, I have a google sheet up that ya’ll are welcome to add things to. I’ll check it every once in awhile for a bit.