On Secrets

Originally published October 15, 2014

A few weeks back I read this blog on group trust by Matt Smith and I feel the need to provide a short defense of secrets in gaming.

Disclaimer

So before we begin, I want to be clear that I agree with Matt Smith on his points. Secrets do not help engender trust within a group and trust is a really important resource in a roleplaying game. My argument is that secrets are necessary for the purposes of certain styles of play and that trust building must thus be comprised to do so.

In the Defense of Secrets

I believe that secrets do have a useful place in games. Their value however depends on the genre of the game, how they are implemented, and how much trust already exists within the group.

Definitions

By secrets, I'm not talking about gamemaster (GM) secrets. Clearly the GM will have some secrets, especially in a mystery or horror game. Without secrets you can't have the reveal, when the truth of the mystery or the identity of the monster comes out. This is a crucial component of the genres such games are attempting to emulate.

This is about player character secrets, specifically those that have been planned out ahead of time. If someone improvises a secret in the middle of play, I don't think that would count as a secret, at least by Matt Smith's criterion. This assumes that the group accepts the new detail the player has added as part of a group collaboration.

The Purpose of Secrets

So in his blog, Matt rightfully rejects the premise that secrets create "epic story twists." Any story can have epic story twists and it has nothing to do with secrets. Twists happen because the players and GM take the game in a direction none could imagine before the session started. They occur because your fellow players are the best random number generators around. Improvised games are especially prone to this and they intrinsically lack predetermined secrets.

He also correctly points out that secrets create feelings of "exclusion and suspicion." Keeping a secret from your fellow players means that you have excluded them from a part of the story you are building together. And once they learn that there is a secret, it will breed suspicion that you are holding back other secrets. This can in turn lead to antagonistic relationships between characters and even players.

So why would you use secrets in a game?

There are three answers that come to mind. The first is that this a game not based on trust between characters. Like so many board games, you could play a game of player character verses player character where a secret become an edge can tip the balance in the struggle for victory. While I don't support such types of gameplay in general, you occasionally see this in roleplaying games that have some limited resource that everyone seeks to gain. For example, a throne war in Amber or a very cut throat game of Apocalypse World.

In these cases though, you do want the players to know that secrets exist (even if they don't know what they are) and you also need to ensure your group has a high degree of established trust. Characters may lack trust between them but the players should not. Antagonistic games erode such trust quickly though. Play them at your own (and your group's) risk.

The second case where secrets are justified is where you are attempting to emulate a specific genre. A spy story where everyone knows each other's secrets and trusts each other is not a spy story we would recognize. The same can be said of a Noir-style game without dark pasts, political intrigue without skeletons in the closet, or games of body horror where you automatically knew who had been infected by the Thing.

In these cases the suspicion that secrets create is exactly the effect you are aiming for.

Now one can make the argument that you could still handle these secrets openly. In other words, we could all know that Adam has 'secretly' contracted lycanthropy and then go about the game attempting to track down the monster. But that then places us in a different position mentally and emotionally. Now we do not share the viewpoint of the characters (who don't know who is the werewolf and thus trust Adam), we the players are now the audience who have already seen the scene where Adam transforms. Thus we have a different kind of experience. Rather than facing the unknown, we have the tension of waiting for the truth to be revealed. Neither sort of play is better, but they are different.

It should be pointed out that placing the players in the position of the audience actually requires a lot of trust as well. Since we know who is the monster, you need to be able trust your fellow players not to act on that information, to restrain themselves to the information that their characters know.

This leads us to the final reason for including secrets: immersion. To truly feel what your character feels, you need to limit your knowledge to what they know. Some people can compartmentalized this and can still enjoy the game while knowing a "secret" out-of-character. But there is a particular class of player who hates to see behind the curtain, for whom knowing a secret, even if it is something happening off-screen with a split party, takes them out of their immersive experience.

For those sorts of players there really isn't any other recourse. Even if the rest of the group is fine sharing secret information, for their own enjoyment they may tune it out. Luckily they are also among the most trusting of players and so if you do include secrets the degradation of trust is much less of an issue.

Proper Care of Secrets

So those are the reasons for using secrets. Now a few rules for best practices.

First, share all your secrets with the game master. He or she needs to know what you have up your sleeve, what you hope to accomplish and what interesting clues to throw out during the game. If your character is a murderer, the game master needs to establish the existence and importance of that murder victim. If no one knows your secret, it adds nothing to the game.

Second, the game master needs to approve of your secret. It must make sense in the game world and add to the story.

Third, information want to be free. Expect your secrets to be revealed. Again if the secret remains secret it adds nothing to the game. Unyielded secrets do not move the plot forward. If you successfully hide you are the killer so that it never gets revealed, then what has that secret added? Nothing.

Finally, as I said before, keeping secrets will erode trust in a group. Everyone needs to be on board that player secrets will exist in the game. They should also have a chance to veto such a feature. Or to put it differently you are spending the pre-existing trust you've built up in your group for this feature (player secrets). Make sure you have a high level to begin with.