Just for fun, here’s a companion thread to the one about Last Fleet’s putative secrecy mechanic. Here I’m going to give people a chance to discuss the merits of secrecy mechanics in general.
The question I’d like your thoughts on is: when is it desirable to have secrets in a roleplaying game, and when is it not? For the cases where it’s desirable, what are the downsides, if any?
Real life examples of games that use secrecy mechanics well or badly are welcome - equally, hypotheticals are fine.
So I’ll kick off by mentioning the Leaping to Conclusions mechanic in Lovecraftesque. (For those not aware of it, the basic deal is you write down your thoughts about what’s really going on, in between scenes where someone invents a clue of some sort, and use them to help shape your contributions to an emerging mystery.)
The purpose of the mechanic is:
So it seems like it’s not necessary for this to be done in secret, right? But doing it secretly adds some extra benefits:
I don’t think Leaping to Conclusions would work if it wasn’t done secretly. It would become a sort of collaborative writing project instead of (in effect) playing to find out what the true horror is.
The downsides here are, it makes the game a bit less social, because you can’t discuss your thoughts (something which would quite naturally happen in any other mystery game). The need to quietly sit and write creates weird moments where everyone isn’t talking, in what is otherwise a chatty, friendly event. (Though I often break the silence by remarking how my conclusions just got blown out of the water, or similar.) Also, I suppose, it means there’s no scope to lean into each others’ story ideas; the converse of being in suspense is that you aren’t working together to create something coherent. It’s very possible to find your theories suddenly invalidated and what might have been a cool story ended by contradictory clues. (Although on the other hand, in general that means someone else’s cool idea has come to the fore instead.)
I feel like having secrets between players breaks down this meta narrative boundary between the player and the character.
In emergent storytelling, this is terrible: to have five authors at a table, each of which share secrets separately between one another, just gets in the way of actually creating the fiction. And I think moving from a traditional game, where there is one author and then a handful of agents within that author’s narrative, creates this perceived ludonarrative dissonance (“if players KNOW then their characters will know!”).
In a traditional game, perhaps everything should be secret that each agent then needs to communicate to the other agents. But if a player is an author responsible for both the plot and a character in that plot, all coauthors need to know what’s going on — if players do not know the characters’ motivations, they’ll be pulling the plot in multiple, conflicting directions. By refusing to have “secrets” at a meta level, the storytelling can emerge in appropriately dramatic ways and not artificially dramatic ways by keeping information from people at the table.
I’ll mention another one from a game @BeckyA and I ran many years ago. It was a one-shot mystery game and it had a very major twist at the heart of it. In order to make the twist happen it required us to engage in a certain amount of OOC skulduggery. The result was a very satisfying player-driven reveal; we as GMs didn’t do anything to make it happen, and in the end the players accidentally stumbled upon it in an “aha” moment that was just beautiful. (And I can tell you that we were biting our nails throughout as to whether the secret would ever be discovered or not.)
I’m being a bit elliptical here because I’d quite like to run it again one day or perhaps even write up as a scenario for others to run - Mousetrap-like, it requires the secrecy to be maintained even after the game is over.
Now this game would have been ok without the secrecy. If the players had known the twist at the start, it would still have worked, though changes would have been needed to keep things interesting. But the beautiful moment of discovery would have been lost.
Of course the downside in this case is that we can never talk about it, and so this wonderful “let me tell you about my character” type story can only ever be hinted at rather than fully enjoyed.
Leaping to conclusions is definitely one of the best uses of secrets. I think really if they’re present they should be mechanised in some way along those lines. In Lovecraftesque, it’s a soft mechanic which effects your headspace, how you tell the story and then the headspaces of other people as their assumptions are tweaked by how you’re driving things towards yours. I always liken it to a net being drawn tighter.
The character secrets such as ‘I’m secretly a prince’ in a game like D&D where that’s not really much of a thing mechanically, doesn’t matter. In fact keeping the secret means that when it’s revealed then it’s a private moment between you and the DM more often than not. You’ve got to hope the other players are invested enough to think it’s a cool moment. Maybe they are. Still, if they know as players that you’re secretly a prince, you can have fun with that. Take the hidden prince to a noble ball because your character doesn’t know that it’ll cause drama, but we know it’ll cause drama.
I think in non-story games, where there is a stronger asymmetry in roles between GM and players, secrecy plays an essential role in some of the elemental pleasures of that style of play. The basic pleasure on the side of the player is discovery. Where in this sense of discovery you can only discover something that is already a fact. (This is, I think the ordinary sense of discovery.) On the side of the GM the pleasure is in knowing the secrets and seeing how people react in conditions of partial ignorance. This is great fun from both side and builds tension and a sense of accomplishment naturally.
In Lovecraftesque there is no fact of the matter when players are guessing, so although your character discovers the horror in the game, the player doesn’t. That doesn’t mean it’s not fun (of course it is!), it’s just a different kind of thing.
In a sense, a secrecy mechanic is actually one of the core mechanics of (for example) OSR play.
So I agree that one potential benefit of secrecy is discovery - the experience of learning something you didn’t know. I actually think Lovecraftesque does do this - but instead of discovering something that was “true” all along, you discover how another player’s conclusions manifest in play. It’s essentially the same thing as in traditional RPG play, just there isn’t one person who knows the truth.
I think there’s at least two other potential benefits from secrecy:
By making it so that you can never know what another player’s character is really up to, the experience of uncertainty - which is otherwise limited to NPCs’ behaviour - is extended to the players’ characters as well. This experience is the sole purpose of the mechanic. It could even be that the characters’ motives are entirely straightforward and visible in the fiction - but the players can’t be sure that they’re seeing everything there is to see, even when in fact they are.
Clearly creating paranoia in this way is its own downside, since (a) some people don’t enjoy it; (b) it may inhibit certain types of interaction that might otherwise have added to the game. In particular anything that involves trust is lightly compromised. However it’s not like e.g. the BSG board game, because the character roleplaying element will tend to build up trust and friendship even where (technically, mechanically) there should be no trust. There’s no in-game objectives that compel backstabbing, so the level of fear and paranoia ought to be lower. In theory.
I think that a useful purpose of secrets in games can be to increase drama.
My game Starguild: Space Opera Noir gives all characters dark secrets, but there is a mechanical advantage to spilling those secrets at critical moments. In noir style games, secrets are valuable assets, negotiating points and character/scene drivers. A secret in the game that never comes out is pretty pointless in most cases.
Bedlam Hall which is a fun PbtA game of below-stairs shenanigans incorporates secrets (which can inform your play and which other players can weasel out of you) and the opportunity to spread wicked rumours about other people - kind of secrets that are not really true.
My 2cp.
I think secrets are a desire from one player to be uncovered by another and form an ‘agenda’ of sort for discovery.
Played Noir World recently you which had a secret on the playbook and our approach was to have then revealed then play towards them.
So yeah open secrets - with discovery and evolution away from people having deep secret plots and off table whispers and chats.
I would like to play the spy game World of Secrets sometime. Players suggest suspicious things about each other’s characters left and right, and you can get a bonus for confirming any as true. Sounds like a nice way to build genre appropriate paranoia without anybody having to worry about spilling the beans by accident, or frustrating whispers at the table, etc.