DUNGEON MASTER’S GUIDE TO ROLEPLAYING

This month we discuss whether it’s worth keeping secrets from your party

Shh… it’s a secret!

This is a little hard for a long-term GM to admit, but there are a handful of RPG tropes that I simply don’t like to include in my games. Some of these are because I think they’re obnoxious, such as meaningless player-vsplayer violence, while others are because I simply can’t be bothered (looking at you, encumbrance rules and ammo tracking).

Until very recently, one of the highest entries on my things-to-avoid list was making players keep secrets from one another. I had a loathing for those moments when the GM hands out a folded-over note to one play and gives them a sly wink, or when there would be vague allusions to situations, backstory, and general rigmarole that not everybody was privy to. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, I think, was a healthy distrust of notepassing born from one-too-many public games with rogues who just loved to slip a piece of paper to the GM every time the party went to sleep, and who would always wear a thumpably smug grim when the heroes awoke to find that “Oh no! All your purses were mysteriously emptied in the night!”

(I never quite understood why having the rest of the heroes beat the rogue with table legs until the cash fell out was considered ruder than robbing your buddies blind in the first place. But I digress.)

Secondly, I’ve both played in and GM’d a handful of campaigns where at least one player had a major secret buried in the backstory, and which was vital to the plot of the adventure. This is much easier to gel with than antagonistic note-passing, but as the weeks and months dragged on, I always came to the same conclusion: the story would be much more enjoyable if everybody were in on the secret.

Yes, having everyone know the bit twist from the start would almost certainly diminish the power of the big reveal when you eventually get to it, but is that really such a big problem?

I’m pretty certain that most people born after 1990 knew perfectly well who Luke’s father was before they watched Star Wars, but that doesn’t suddenly render the movies unwatchable.

The nature of life and RPGs also means that you really don’t have any way of guaranteeing that your campaign is ever going to reach that point before someone gets a job in another part of the country, has a baby, or moves to night shifts. Spending countless sessions floundering through a story you don’t really understand doesn’t seem like it’s always worth the tradeoff, especially if the nature of the secret (“I’m secretly the heir to the throne/the subject of an ancient prophecy/a dragon!”)

makes your hero feel like they’ve just been a side-character in someone else’s story.

For these reasons, I’ve always shied away from allowing – and definitely avoided enforcing – secrets in my campaigns. Everyone plays with their cards on the table, and if one character would reasonably be keeping something from the rest of the party inuniverse, you just roleplay your way through it.

And then I ran The Darkest House.

FOR YOUR SCREEN ONLY

As with many of the systems, modules, and accessories I inflict on my gaming groups, The Darkest House was a review product. You can read the resulting article on page 64 of this very magazine if you want the details, but the gist of it is that the heroes of your existing RPG campaign are pulled into a malevolent haunted house.

As with a lot of psychologically inclined horror stories, The Darkest House just loves to screw with its victims. Sometimes this takes the form of literally ripping important rooms from their backstory and jamming them into a weird helldimension, and sometimes it means that one character in particular is temporarily possessed, under an illusion or otherwise being messed with. When the latter kind of thing happens, the game (if that’s the right term for it… go read the

review) has little pre-prepared notes to copy and paste over to the player in question.

Whenever I ran into these I would roll my eyes and consider just posting the message in the /all chat, but as I was playing it for review purposes I felt honour-bound to stick to the rules. And, as the game drew on, I started to come round to it.

The occasional slip of a secret here and these helped to get the players feeling jumpy and paranoid – exactly what you want for a horror game – and they very rarely overstayed their welcome. Only one secret – that a character was possessed by a weird, evil spirit – really lasted more than a single session, and that ended up with a spectacular betrayal that made the night feel truly horrifying.

In a good way.

KEEPING SECRETS SPECIAL

Of course, The Darkest House is rather wellsuited to secrets. It’s a horror experience, after all, and horror thrives on paranoia and surprise.

However, it’s been a good few weeks since we played The Darkest House, and that means I’ve had a chance to experiment with using the occasional secret more conventional games. The results have been surprisingly positive, though there have been a handful of times when they’ve flopped rather than thrilled.

There seem to be a few factors that play into making sure the whole idea of secret information stays exciting, rather than frustrating. Here’s my quickfire tips.

Keep Your Secrets Secret

What people don’t know can’t hurt them. Seeing the GM passing slips of paper back and forth to a grinning player can be frustrating as all hell and feeling like you have to roleplay your way into a horrible betrayal is frustrating. If you’re going to use secrets, find a way to make the entire thing private until it’s revealed.

Keep Secrets Short-Term

Like a firework, the best part of a secret it watching it explode. It doesn’t have to happen in the next five minutes, but if you’re going to give someone something to keep under their hat, try and ensure the reveal isn’t going to be months and months down the road.

Would it Be More Fun If Everyone Knew? When you share a secret with just one player, ask yourself if it would be more enjoyable if the entire party knew. This is especially true of plot-based secrets rather than more mechanical ones. Note that the true identity of a hero’s mother can still be a secret in-universe, but that doesn’t mean it has to be one in reality.

Sow Mistrust Between Characters, Not Players

If you are looking to set up some kind of betrayal or mystery, keep it in-game. It’s fine for the heroes to start getting a bit wary of Northarka the Shrewd after finding she’s been chatting with an archdevil, but your players shouldn’t feel suspicious of Jo because the GM is sending her private notes.

If you’re going to use secrets, find a way to make the entire thing private until it’s revealed.