One of my fellow players has expressed the sentiment that, "If the DM didn't want the info to be known by the entire party, he wouldn't have told any of the party members." Do you find this to be true? What about for info given to a player behind closed doors or in notes?
Do you have any entertaining stories involving revealing secrets at the wrong time, or a PC lying about privy information?
Pic related.It's my ability as a player to keep a secret.
>we are searching for a very specific item for at least a month in-game and out of game time
>we are running out of leads
>get into a bad situation
>one of our players desperately goes "I pull out a random item in my bag to help"
>it is the item
>he didn't know it was in there despite having a paragraph on his character sheet written by him about it
>he had gotten it 2 months ago on a solo adventure
it was unintentionally a secret because the player was just forgetful/stupid
We have no hidden information OOC. Ingame characters know what they know and we just try to avoid metagaming.
It keeps people engaged and it's very entertaining to witness how somebody tries (and possibly fails) to conspire against your character, or to watch how your character just walks into a setup you perfectly know of.
>>46786146
I give my players secrets on notes, and I leave it up to them whether or not to share the info. Even the best RPer can let meta-gaming slips happen from time to time, and they know that, so most of the time they keep it to themselves.I also like to tell them useless private information throughout the game, so they're unsure if I'm pulling them toward something or not. Shit like "a tall, angry man locks eyes with you before leaving the tavern". I want them to think critically about what's relevant and what's not.
It's usually not relevant, we just say everything in the open, then characters act as if they don't know the info.
Only time I kept something hidden from the rest of the party was an indirect betrayal. Namely, we were trapped in another world, and looking for a way out. I made a deal with an evil deity to give him the info to go to my world when we find it in exchange for power, giving him access to over a billion souls that weren't being contested by other deities.
The party was a bit suspicious when a small army of devils arrived to help us fight an evil king who held the secret, but I was able to shrug it off.
Said betrayal would have been a post-game epilogue thing, so it wouldn't impact the game itself.
As a GM if something is a secret that only some of the PCs know, their players are the only people I tell it to. If they choose to share it OOC, that's their choice. When we have a player who can't separate OOC and IC knowledge, they will learn not to tell that player anything OOC.
When I'm playing I prefer to not be told things my character doesn't know. Sure, I can keep the knowledge separate, but it's much more fun if I don't have to think about how if character knows something.
I had some real fun with secrets one time with a lovecraftian styled campaign as anytime a players character wasn't there they left the room. This lead to one player who was a mob boss desperately trying to keep the other players away from a body he had buried in the woods, while the other players desperately wanted to know what was in the forest as they thought it had something to do with the spooky goings ons. Having secrets kept from players OOC is a great way to build intrigue instead of players having to feign fake intrigue when their character learns something the player already knew.
>>46786146
My players are cooperative and the default presumption is that the characters will share any important things with each other at earliest opportunity, so I just give them in the open.
>>46786755
Exactly. Why would you ask your players to act surprised and amazed when you could instead actually surprise and amaze then?
>Notice another character is acting strangely, eventually realize she's being possessed
>Spill the beans to the other characters, but they dismiss it completely
>DM giddy that someone realizes, but is one of the characters that can't do anything, and the others don't believe it
Fuck em, they're making their bed with this.
>Eberron
>Our Part consists of a Gnoll, Half Elf Paladin, Half Elf Mage, Dragonborn Paladin, and a Human Monk
>All of our characters are pretty rational/normal
>The Human is the only character that's not really "normal"
>Basically acts like a crazy person most of the time and spouts inane nonsense
>Fast forward through most of our campaign
>Get to a point where we have to go into someone's dreams to figure out what's going on
>The dream starts to turn into a hurricane, and we can't really figure out what's going on
>Guy who plays the Monk speaks up IC
>Basically calls the fucking twist 100% dead on
>DM's jaw agape
>"That's...that's exactly what's happening actually"
It's gotten to the point where I can't even take a guess at what he's going to do half the time.
>>46786146
My DM is actually very active about keeping secrets between players. It helps to build a dramatic story in her opinion. Frankly, the rest of us are rather enjoying it.
>>46786231
Actually had something similar happen to me recently. My character had one of those evil uncle figures.
-Dominated her into killing her parents
-Changed her memories to convince her her brother did it
-Kidnapped her for years
-Taught her necromancy
-Abandoned her
-Turned out to be one of the heads of the big bad evil organization.
Turns out, when another player was caught alone with evil brain in a jar in a recent dungeon, he got dominated and that was the Uncle figure. I didn't find out till nearly a month later OOC. He had totally forgotten the Uncle figure's name.
If the PCs choose to share information IC, that's entirely their choice. If the PCs DON'T share the information IC, I'd prefer the players not to share it either, but that's their choice as well and there isn't really anything wrong with it so long as they don't start metagaming.
>>46786146
So I'm currently running a witcher campaign based on pic related. And the witcher in the party has a nasty tendency of making really long lectures about monsters in the worst possible moment.
Say it's combat, something suddenly grabbed one of the horses from below the water level, I handle the witcher a note explaining possibilities and he instantly starts to voice them aloud, instead of... you know, act! Nobody gives a damn what just attacked them, they want to get the fuck out of the water, since the horse just was ripped apart and the water is going from murky brown to burgundy in no time at all.
On the other hand, in the very same party is a guy that NEVER shares informations that he gathered for himself or while being alone. Never, ever. Which often means he's the only person with some vital informations to solve the quest or understand what the hell is going around.
Still, it's a blast to play with those people, as they are really good at role-playing their characters. I mean how often you have a bard that actually improvises songs on a fly?
