Filing Edges: Secret Knowledge

[komradebob]

First, apologies for borrowing domeone else's title for this post ( but I thought it was such a great heading, I couldn't resist).

I've been thinking about this subject ever since encountering Universalis and Chris Engle's Matrix Game.

Basically, it seems like one of the cultural artifacts of rpging is the idea that there should be some sort of secret knowledge, generally in the form of an adventure that the character players aren't allowed to see, or sections of some sort of setting supplement that are for the GM player only.

What might the effect of working with a more open knowledge style be both for game design and for actual play? Does anyone else think that a major step in design progress might be exploring a less secrecy oriented play style?

As an aside, part of what got me thinking about this was watching young kids play. They pretend, but they only seem to add info, rather than work from some sort of secret knowledge basis. Could this be a factor in the limited appeal of the hobby?

Robert

[TonyLB]

I've done open gaming (where the GM fully discloses everything he's thinking about the game, and expects players to do much the same).  My experience has been that something is gained and something is lost.

The obvious gain is that all players are far more empowered to create story without fear of invalidating the secret expectations of anyone else at the table.

But the revelation of secret knowledge that uniquely completes what has gone before is as fundamental as knock-knock jokes.  It is entertaining.  People do miss it, even as they enjoy the knowledge to be gained by openness.

And those are my two cents.  I'm real interested to hear what other people have to say on the subject.  Somebody's got to talk about InSpectres, but since I haven't yet gotten people together to play it's not gonna be me.

[M. J. Young]

In a sense, what you're seeing in the play of young kids could be called "lack of preparation"--but not in a negative sense.

One of the things Multiverser ultimately encourages its referees to do is to improvise situation and setting. You can't possibly stay ahead of all of your players, because you can't know where any of them are going to go--after all, if a player character dies, you're obliged to begin describing the new world in which he finds himself, whether or not you expected him to die at that moment. Thus you do a lot of improvisation, whether it's creating a world from the description of a starting point, or devising a starting point for the next adventure when you didn't expect the character to survive the last one.

What we remind our referees is that there is absolutely no way the player can distinguish the material you read in some book from the material you made up on the spot. Here are some tools to help decide how to make up new things, but always make it seem like it was there all along, and they only now discovered it.

So I'm going to distinguish at least three kinds of play:

[*]Play in which the majority of situation and setting is pre-planned, "written in stone" by the referee, waiting to be given to the players when they discover it.[*]Play in which those pre-planned elements exist, but have been given to the players as the parameters within which play will proceed.[*]Play in which pre-planning is minimal, and the referee creates in response to the players.[/list:u]
It's not really secret if it hasn't been decided yet, but it has the same impact in play.

I think a good referee does all three of these things to some degree, nearly all the time.

--M. J. Young

[beingfrank]

So I'm going to distinguish at least three kinds of play:

[*]Play in which the majority of situation and setting is pre-planned, "written in stone" by the referee, waiting to be given to the players when they discover it.[*]Play in which those pre-planned elements exist, but have been given to the players as the parameters within which play will proceed.[*]Play in which pre-planning is minimal, and the referee creates in response to the players.[/list:u]
It's not really secret if it hasn't been decided yet, but it has the same impact in play.

I think a good referee does all three of these things to some degree, nearly all the time.

Would you say that a referee needs to do all three at least some of the time for the players to have fun?  Because this is an issue I'm confronting in my own attempts to learn to GM.

I much prefer to go with some 2, bucket loads of 3 on your list, and with little if any of 1.  One of my players has told me that she won't be able to enjoy a game I run unless it has a fair amount of 1 in it, because part of what she likes in a game is working within the boundaries set by a GM specifically including stuff she doesn't know.  I had been thinking that it was just her personal preference, and something that meant that her style and mine wouldn't mesh very satisfactorily, but your comments make me wonder whether it's a more general need, and thus a problem I will encounter when GMing regardless of the particular players.

[ethan_greer]

I think GM secretiveness has its place in certain games and/or styles of play. It's all a matter of group preference and the game in question. In D&D, GM secrets are part of the fun. In Universalis, any secret knowledge kept by any of the players is counterproductive. I think it depends on both the game and the social contract what amount of GM or player secrets are appropriate.

Often in games that emphasize GM secrecy, there's also an emphasis on player ingenuity. So, GMs are on call to surprise and impress the players with their cool story elements, and the players are on call to surprise and impress the GM with their cool solutions to problems.

So, I think the knock-knock joke factor that Tony mentions (excellent analogy, by the way) still comes into play in the "secretless" styles of play; it's just that the GM (if there is one) now is applauded for much the same sorts of things the players are applauded for in secret-based play. Perhaps the knock-knock factor is diminished, but I think it's always there.

[M. J. Young]

Would you say that a referee needs to do all three at least some of the time for the players to have fun?  Because this is an issue I'm confronting in my own attempts to learn to GM.

I much prefer to go with some 2, bucket loads of 3 on your list, and with little if any of 1.  One of my players has told me that she won't be able to enjoy a game I run unless it has a fair amount of 1 in it, because part of what she likes in a game is working within the boundaries set by a GM specifically including stuff she doesn't know.  I had been thinking that it was just her personal preference, and something that meant that her style and mine wouldn't mesh very satisfactorily, but your comments make me wonder whether it's a more general need, and thus a problem I will encounter when GMing regardless of the particular players.

Actually, Claire, the irony of it all is that if you're really good at number three your players can't know that you're not actually really good at number one, unless you tell them.

The problem is that it's very difficult to be that good at number three, and sometimes to carry off the illusion you have to pretend you're checking notes and maps that don't actually exist, so the players have the feeling it's all written in stone.

Among the referee advice I give:

If anyone asks what's on the north wall, put something on the north wall immediately, and describe it as if you're getting it from your notes. Don't stop to think about it, just invent something appropriate to the setting, whether that's a tapestry or a painting or a window. You want the players to feel like this place exists, and that means you have to be seen as presenting what you've already created even while you're creating it.

Gloss over details until players ask for them. Saying that a room contains "bedroom furniture" is probably sufficient. You can decide whether there are pictures on the dresser, or a lamp on the nightstand, or whatever other details you need, if the players bother to look more closely.

I often get asked how much preparation is necessary to run a world; I always answer that every world needs exactly the amount of preparation that it needs, and that will depend very much on what you expect of the world. If you're planning on having mazes, you'd better draw them, because it's extremely difficult to improvise a maze. If you're going to have characters engaged in battles, write up their combat skills. I publish worlds for game play; every one of them has a different amount of detail to it, and a different selection of what details are deemed important. Prepare the things that you expect are going to matter most, to the degree that these can be prepared. Improvise the rest, and make notes on your improvisations so that they will remain consistent thereafter.[/list:u]
So I don't think that whether or not you prepare something in advance is as much the issue as whether or not your players feel as if the world is fully real before they explore it.

Seriously, what difference is there between the world that you made up tonight while we were playing and the one which you made up ten years ago and wrote on paper for use tonight when we were playing? The only difference is what you convey to us as players, whether your demeanor says that this didn't exist but I just thought of it now or whether your demeanor says of course this has always been exactly that way and you're just now noticing it. In that, you can deliver either world either way. It's just easier to make the pre-written material sound like it already existed, because you don't have to think it up as quickly.


I hope this helps.

--M. J. Young