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

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.

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.


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

M. J. Young wrote: 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.


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.

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.

beingfrank wrote: 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.