This topic has been discussed, I'm aware, as part of other related topics, but I couldn't find any threads that were dedicated to this. If you have references please provide links so we don't hash things out unneccessarily.

Lately I've begun to wonder about PC secrets, and their viability in the mode of play that I want to see happen in my games. I play basically narrativism with lots of sim support. Now, it would work simply to say that no player should have secrets from other players about their characters. Which facilitates the narrativism in terms of making it a collaborative environment. And I'm not for secrets at all as a way to match player and character perceptions - if that were the only motivation for secrets, I'd ban them outright.

But it occurs to me that it's a valid and interesting storytelling technique to use secrets. The question becomes can they be used in a collaborative game, without creating a competitive environment, or without their use allowing one player to steal control from another player. The latter is a substantial danger. Basically, the player playing across from the player with a character with a secret, can have the context of their decisions altered significantly by a surprise.

That said, I do it as GM all the time. That is, I don't telegraph what's about to happen in terms of Bangs, unless there's a very good reason. And it seems to work fine. OTOH, these are designed to bring out the qualities of the characters in question. So perhaps it's not a valid comparison.

Thoughts? Can PC secrets work in a collaborative environment? What if players were informed about the ramifications?

Mike

Mike, what do you think about Fates in the Mountain Witch? Players hide which Fate they, personally, are holding. So far, they seem to work without the environment becoming competitive or whatnot.

But this may be something different from what you're thinking. The thing with Fates is that all the players know that all the other players are holding a Fate, so when the Fates are revealed, it's not neccesarily that big of a shock (especially if the players foreshadow their Fate).

Funnily enough, Universalis has the strongest mechanics for this: challenge an assertation that conflicts with what you've got in mind for your secret. Let the coins & dice decide.

Pace a mechanism for narrative control, though, you'd need pretty confident players to say "WOAH! That jibes with something really cool that I can't tell you yet!" But GM's do it all the time.

So it depends who has the authority over the SiS, I guess, and we twist the Lumpley Principle again. I guess as long as you make it clear form the outset that this kind of thing is okay then, no problem. If some players are runnign on different expectations, it could get tricky I guess.

Yeah, not quite the same thing. The players even know the range of fates available, so they can be "careful" if they want to do so. More likely they feel comfortable in not being careful, given that they know that the result of what comes from the fates probably can't "deprotagonize" their character.

Consider: Player has their male PC fall in love with a female PC, only to have the player reveal that the female is actually a male in disguise. Certainly an interesting plot twist, but does it mess too much with the concepts that the first player was trying to get into?

Again, if the GM springs something like this on the player, he's likely to have done so because the PC has something like a "Homophobic" trait just asking to be messed with. With the player, it's likely a lot more random. Unless the player is using the same tactics as the GM.

Mike

Hmm. With the caveat right off the bat that using another person's PC as part of premise addressing is inherently risky, I'd say that adding secrets in doesn't change that much.

By inherently risky, I mean that if someone else's PC is important to your addressing of Premise (cf your falling in love example) then there is both the straightforward risk (aka: the inherent risk of playing Nar) of situation fallout (death being the most straightforward example) changing things on you, but there's also a subtler risk of you deprotagonizing them. If they know your premise involves their PC, it affects their control of that character; for example they might want to explore the 'man in disguise' thing, but are now prevented (in a social pressure kind of way, not an actual mechanics stop) from doing so because that will mess with your thing.

The other thing that comes immediately to mind is that part of addressing Premise is a cranking up of the pressure in Situation. If my Premise is something like "How strong is my love" then having the object die or be a male in disguise, or hating your guts is all just turning up the heat, and it shouldn't matter who it comes from, or even why or how. If someone is getting their nose bent out of shape by having secrets revealed that change the Situation, I would suspect that person of trying (consciously or otherwise) to build to a specific outcome instead of letting the Premise fall where it may.

James

Blankshield wrote: By inherently risky, I mean that if someone else's PC is important to your addressing of Premise (cf your falling in love example) then there is both the straightforward risk (aka: the inherent risk of playing Nar) of situation fallout (death being the most straightforward example) changing things on you, but there's also a subtler risk of you deprotagonizing them. If they know your premise involves their PC, it affects their control of that character; for example they might want to explore the 'man in disguise' thing, but are now prevented (in a social pressure kind of way, not an actual mechanics stop) from doing so because that will mess with your thing.

The other thing that comes immediately to mind is that part of addressing Premise is a cranking up of the pressure in Situation. If my Premise is something like "How strong is my love" then having the object die or be a male in disguise, or hating your guts is all just turning up the heat, and it shouldn't matter who it comes from, or even why or how. If someone is getting their nose bent out of shape by having secrets revealed that change the Situation, I would suspect that person of trying (consciously or otherwise) to build to a specific outcome instead of letting the Premise fall where it may.

At the risk of following on the heels of the post just above...

Yeah, Pete, I'm a little spoiled on Universalis this way. Perhaps why I see this as problematic. I want to have my cake and eat it too...

pete_darby wrote: I guess as long as you make it clear form the outset that this kind of thing is okay then, no problem. If some players are runnign on different expectations, it could get tricky I guess.

Mike Holmes wrote:

Blankshield wrote: By inherently risky, I mean that if someone else's PC is important to your addressing of Premise (cf your falling in love example) then there is both the straightforward risk (aka: the inherent risk of playing Nar) of situation fallout (death being the most straightforward example) changing things on you, but there's also a subtler risk of you deprotagonizing them. If they know your premise involves their PC, it affects their control of that character; for example they might want to explore the 'man in disguise' thing, but are now prevented (in a social pressure kind of way, not an actual mechanics stop) from doing so because that will mess with your thing.

I want to be sure I'm getting what you're saying. You're saying that any time you try to address premise via character, you're limiting the premise options available to the other players? Well, that's why I do group chargen, and why I think secrets might be problematic. If someone jumps on your premise, if this happens during an open chargen, you can talk it over with them, bargain for it, or try to settle on a way to look at slightly different aspects. Or even to collaborate on a single premise. Secrets make this impossible - I can imagine two players selecting the same secret and unknowingly stomping on each other's protagonism.

I'm not personally worried about death. To be specific, the game that I'm wondering about is Hero Quest, and I've got it rigged so that systemic deprotagonization can't happen. It can only be situational.

The other thing that comes immediately to mind is that part of addressing Premise is a cranking up of the pressure in Situation. If my Premise is something like "How strong is my love" then having the object die or be a male in disguise, or hating your guts is all just turning up the heat, and it shouldn't matter who it comes from, or even why or how. If someone is getting their nose bent out of shape by having secrets revealed that change the Situation, I would suspect that person of trying (consciously or otherwise) to build to a specific outcome instead of letting the Premise fall where it may.

I agree that it doesn't matter where the heat comes from, but what I'm worried about is not the source of heat, but of cold. I don't think that most players make secrets considering the premises of other characters. As such, they're not likely to turn up the heat, but to be a splash of cold water.

For instance, my premise is whether or not my character will join a secret organization he's heard about - he has moral quandires about some of their appoarent goals. Your character's secret is that there is no organization at all, he's just been spreading rumor of the existence of the organization. Once it's revealed that there is no organization, my premise is shot. Now what's the interesting question for my character?

I don't know where you get the idea that premise or theme should "fall where it may," that's not part of any theory that I know of. In fact, the definition of theme is the player making a choice regarding a premise. And premises are selected by the other choices about the character. Now, if you're talking about a player forcing a theme, yeah, that's problematic. But having your selected premise evaporate is not in and of itself a new premise. It might be, but unless someone's aiming it to be, it's not particularly likely.

Moreover, I'm not so much concerned with this specific example, as the larger idea of scene stealing. That is, most systems are balanced in terms of what makes the character a protagonist. Reserving background as a secret seems to me to be a way to leverage things to gain more protagonism. Because, indeed, secrets are interesting. So I think allowing secrets can be unbalancing. In fact, I've seen games where secrets have lead to everyone wanting to have secret backgrounds.

What I've been thinking is limiting secrets in chargen. This is explicitly handled in Over the Edge - each character must have one and only one dark secret. I think this might be a good rule. I'm also thinking that they might be required to have some sort of a "telltale" to steal from Sorcerer. See where I'm going with this?

The key aspect to this seems to me to be understanding what a "secret" is in this context. If someone has a "secret", that means that there is some aspect of the shared imagined space which is agreed by all the players but not known to all the players.

As Mike has observed, this is pretty bog standard when we're looking at the referee; he always has secrets, bits he recognizes as being part of the shared imagined space which are known only to him, even if it's only that there's a bang coming up.

This also explains why Universalis is not an example of this. In Universalis, no player has a secret which is an agreed part of the shared imagined space to be revealed at a later point in play. Rather, players have ideas about aspects of the shared imagined space that they wish to introduce at a later point, but which are not agreed until they are introduced.

From this perspective, every player in every game may have something like a secret, in that we all tend to plan some ideas of what we're going to do in the future of the game; that's not so fixed as the referee's secrets might be, but it is as fixed as those in Universalis--subject to change according to what happens.

The question then is the degree to which assigning credibility to players to establish facts that are true within the shared imagined space but not known to the other players is a viable technique.

The hazard here is that players might have contradictory secrets. In the case of the gender swapped lover, there was nothing in the secret love that prevented that from being true. It would be different if, perhaps, the Jonah had as a secret that he was betrothed at birth to Miriam, and so was trying to win her affections, only to discover that he was a she. In that case, it can't possibly be the case that Miriam is both the character to whom Jonah is betrothed and actually a man. The conflict would have to be reconciled. The real Miriam died, but her brother Michael took her place for the inheritance. The real Miriam is safe at home, but this imposter was using her identity to gain the support of her family's friends. The imposter was sent by the family to determine whether Jonah is truly worthy of Miriam's hand. Something would have to be done to reconcile the two secrets, and in some way one of those players is going to feel that his character has been compromised, that someone else has just made major decisions about who he is and what he is about.

Similarly with the secret organization, Nick's secret is that he invented this secret organization and spread rumors of its existence to further some goal of his; Tug's secret is that he's a member of that secret organization. How do you reconcile these? Perhaps at some point in the past Nick heard mention of the secret organization, forgot where he heard about it, and then thought he invented it and started spreading rumors. Perhaps someone bought into Nick's rumors and duped Tug into joining a non-existent organization. Perhaps someone who heard Nick's rumors determined that this organization did not exist, but thought that it should, and so created it and recruited Tug to join it, so Nick really did make the whole thing up, but now it's real. But however you do it, again you've got this conflict of secrets.

Traditionally in games which allow player secrets, the referee acts as a gatekeeper: all players may have secrets, but the referee must be informed of any such secrets and has the power to disapprove them without explanation. Thus if there is a serious potential for two secrets to clash, the second one is always nixed and so doesn't become part of the shared imagined space. In some cases, the referee looks at those conflicting secrets and then modifies them, creating the "real truth" that causes the secrets to fit together. This, though, imposes the referee-as-gatekeeper concept on play, which might not fit what you're after. Can players have secrets which are unknown to the referee?

Of course, if players are permitted to have secrets without verification anywhere, it opens the possibility for abuse by a player who just wants to mess with the other players.

"I have been longing so long to tell you how much I love you; I'm your betrothed."

"That's ridiculous; I'm not even a woman!"

-----
"It's all right; I'm a member of the Secret Order of the Iron Hand."

"You can't be; I made that up--it doesn't exist."


Thus it seems that some means of establishing a secret as legitimately determined in advance rather than invented on the spot needs to be created, to prevent players from inventing "secrets" as it suits them at the moment.

On the other hand, such invented secrets are not much more than director stance applied in strong measure. If the rule is that no player can invent a fact that contradicts another player's invented facts, then the corrolary is that any secret not yet revealed in play is cancelled by the invention by any player of a fact that contradicts it. Either that, or everyone acts as gatekeepers to prevent anything from being introduced to the shared imagined space that contradicts anything that is held in secret, as the referee would sometimes do in play when a player states something that can't be true for reasons not yet revealed in play.

I think I'm wandering a bit; I hope this has been helpful.

--M. J. Young

M. J. Young wrote: Traditionally in games which allow player secrets, the referee acts as a gatekeeper: all players may have secrets, but the referee must be informed of any such secrets and has the power to disapprove them without explanation. Thus if there is a serious potential for two secrets to clash, the second one is always nixed and so doesn't become part of the shared imagined space. In some cases, the referee looks at those conflicting secrets and then modifies them, creating the "real truth" that causes the secrets to fit together. This, though, imposes the referee-as-gatekeeper concept on play, which might not fit what you're after. Can players have secrets which are unknown to the referee?

Hey Mike,

One of the things about secrets is that people like to keep the fact that they have a secret, secret.

SOAP forces the player to repeatedly hint at the nature of his secret during play. In my mind, the ideal secrets dynamic is that hinting is to your advantage in some way, as long as the secret isn't totally found out, and that a well-kept secret is to your detriment. The Valedictorian's Death allocates points according to this same aesthetic. To win the game, you want to be a strong candidate for the murderer, but not so much that everyone votes for you.

Your concept of telltales for secrets, in its simplest form, would be a hint at the nature of the secret during chargen.

Paul

Consider the case of the character disguising their sex; if this secret is NEVER revealed, then it never really existed.

That is, the entire SIS would have treated that character as their false sex, consistently and correctly. Even if the character was compelled to undertake elaborate precautions to bathe and use the toilet (although these bodily functions are pretty universally off screen in RPG), but these precautions succeeded in concealing the secret, then for all intents and purposes the secret might as well not exist at all.

A secret is only ever relevant when it enters actual play and causes some change in the SIS. All secrets in drama, absolutely all of them, are intended to be revealed to the audience; that is the purpose of their existance. No secret should ever be developed without consideration of how and when it WILL be revealed.

I'm aware that in the RPG there is an argument to the self-satisfaction of the player in regards their character that may indicate a secret need not be revealed, but I think the discussion above about the impact of conflicting secrets indicates why this is dubious at best. At the very least, I take the absolute hard line that if the GM doesn't know it - or whoever performs that function - it is not true.

I think the solution to "secret management" is necessarily a System problem because at root it is about the credibility to establish the contents of the SIS. Pauls approach, requiring that secrets be hinted at, is exactly what happens in drama, and making that a systematic requirement is the appropriate translation of this device into RPG, IMO.

Secrets in drama are also almost always about the developement of the character or the answer to the premise, so I'd suspect that they must either exist as part of a premise-laden setup, or must be contained within whatever devices exist to manage character growth and change.

Mike Holmes wrote:

timfire wrote: Mike, what do you think about Fates in the Mountain Witch?

Yeah, not quite the same thing. The players even know the range of fates available, so they can be "careful" if they want to do so. More likely they feel comfortable in not being careful, given that they know that the result of what comes from the fates probably can't "deprotagonize" their character.

Superlative comments by all. Many thanks.

Definition of Secret: a secret is a fact established outside the SIS (and as such not part of it until revealed), but which cannot be contradicted by other introductions into the SIS. As though the SIS were a real world, and the secret was just an unknown fact.

The reason this is not part of the SIS is that some secrets are known to only one individual. Basically, a secret is the right to pre-empt anything introduced into the SIS that does not conform to the secret.

(In fact, I think there's a whole nother thread here looking at the idea of authority to establish things this way that are not secrets, but simply as yet "undiscovered" information. That is, secrets are a sub-set of a much larger area of authority.)

The examples that I gave were to display situations where it would be very dangerous in terms of secrets. I don't think that anyone would disagree with Gareth that a secret doesn't exist unless it's shared with the GM who can rectify it with the other secrets (in his role as chief of secrets). Same with the decentralized method that John mentions for Troupe play. I don't want to indicate that I think it's problematic at that level. As such, my examples were bad - again I was just trying to make the obvious examples.

So I'll go back to my first example. The transvestite love. In this case, I the GM doesn't have to see it coming. Even if he knows that the character has a secret at the beginning of the game, he might not know that the players will have their characters fall in love during play. So there's nothing he can do there.

So, is allowing a secret a risk to the other players in their efforts to make protagonits of their characters? If so is it one that's worth the risk?

Again, there's a deeper point that I'm trying to get at. I'm not really so much worried about the question of whether such "deprotagonization" will occur. What I'm worried about is the player reaction to the revelation of secrets. Will they feel that it's "fair" or not? Again, a lot of this seems to depend on whether or not each player has an understanding of whether or not the other players have secrets, and what these secrets can possibly entail. For instance, it's probably true that secrets would have to be relegated to the background that could otherwise have been established by the player. That is, if he can say that he had an evil uncle as part of chargen, then it seems legitamate to keep such a thing a secret. What wouldn't be legitimate would be the player having a secret that the whole world is an illusion or somesuch.

That seems obvious, too, but it points out that there are limitations. Another is that your secret can't infringe on another player's background. You can't say that you had an evil uncle, and he's also been secretly trying to destroy another PC. Or can you?

It's these sorts of guidelines that I'm interested in. I have a feeling that I could just use common sense and "wing" it, and get away with it. But, again it goes deeper than this. Again, I think that as soon as it becomes known that the other players have secrets, then I think that the CA changes in a subtle way. The players are no longer in on the entire author side of the process, and are being, I don't want to say relegated, but shunted off into the role of audience waiting for the other player to make his reveal. One thing that I've seen a lot is that the other players will start looking for the secret - on a metagame level, not on an actor stance level. This isn't collaborative narrativism, this is gamism. Of the "Aha, I've figured it out!" variety.

In fact, I'm tempted to say that the urge to have a secret in the first place might in some cases be a form of latent gamism. Again, at the very least, an attempt to create a larger dose of protagonism for the character than the chargen system would otherwise allow. Basically, I'm worried that it puts the players at odds in potentially dangerous ways.

There are probably lots of interesting mechanical ways to make this functional. For now, however, I'd like to stay away from that discussion, and focus on the use of secrets as ephemera. In a game that says nothing about secrets, is it good policy to allow them? Under what circumstances.

To be clear, the practical example here is my Shadow World game using the Hero Quest rules. Without revealing anything at this point to the players who may be reading this, there's a character with a big secret in that game. They're probably quite aware of who it is, only because of the enigmatic way in which he's presented. It seemed to work just fine, but there were moments when there was this "funny vibe" going on around it. Might have been my sole perception, but people were treading lightly, IMO.

I also agree that there has to be movement towards revelation of a secret to make it legitimate for a number of reasons. But at what rate? It seems to me that the player has the imperative to keep it secret as long as possible, because after the reveal they've lost the "edge" that it gives them. Also it seems to me that there's potentially a feeling of superiority (or at least interest) that having a secret gives in that you're seeing the whole picture - I know that GMs relish this. So, I think players, too, have this feeling. So why should they give this up? What's the incentive to reveal?

Yeah, the reveal is fun itself, but I think that the player will just wait for the GM to force their hand. Given the "investment" of a secret, what's the guideline on a GM doing this? What's the expiration date on a secret?

Still lots of questions.

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote: But it occurs to me that it's a valid and interesting storytelling technique to use secrets. The question becomes can they be used in a collaborative game, without creating a competitive environment, or without their use allowing one player to steal control from another player. The latter is a substantial danger. Basically, the player playing across from the player with a character with a secret, can have the context of their decisions altered significantly by a surprise.

Hello,

Along the same lines as Shreyas, I'll cop to studying this thread very closely as an aid in developing Zero at the Bone into a full game.

Thanks, Mike, for kicking it off and shepherding it.

Best,
Ron

What previous thread are Ron and Shreyas referring to?

Hello,

You're reading too fast, Alan. Neither Shreyas nor I have mentioned an earlier thread. Shreyas did mention Soap, which is one of the seminal games for much design at the Forge. You can read about a bezillion play threads from about three years ago.

Best,
Ron

Shreyas, thanks for putting your otherwise functional group at risk with this experiment. Given the choices you've made, I think It'll work fine (in fact, I think that the overall "threat" level from secrets isn't large). But there is a slight chance that things'll get messed up. Nice of you to take that chance in the name of research.

Mike