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There are game styles, some subcategories of story games, that are built around the idea that there are no secrets for players. There can be surprises and resolved secrets in play, through play, through creation, but not through revelation.
But in D&D, the way I play it, of course there are secrets, exploration, and discovery.
Thatâs the main reason you even have a DM role at the table instead of playing all coop, going through a dungeon together. One person takes it upon herself to have that map and key and text in front of her, getting spoiled by its secrets, and keeping them from the players and their characters until theyâve turned the appropriate stones and pulled the correct levers.
Thatâs a wonderful tool that goes a long way to maintain a sense of mystery in the game.
There are times when you need to go beyond even that: when only one or some of the characters know something. One character gets a secret vision or dream or goes on ahead and finds something out.
There are two main categories of tools here.
Play as if you didnât know. Youâve spoiled a liâl corner of the gameâs immersion and youâre gonna have to consciously strain to not act on what your character isnât supposed to know.
Make sure the player doesnât know what the character doesnât know. Pass notes, take of your headphones, leave the room, take a player aside etc. This is effective but leads to downtime for that participant taking them out of the mood and flow of the game.
This can also be used for when there is something the players wanna talk about that even the DM doesnât know. The infamous âpoison under nailsâ story that AsIf once posted to Story-Games:
Many years ago I had a Troublesome Player - a real shit-stirrer - who decided that his character hated hated hated one of my NPCs, so bad that he wanted to kill him. This NPC was a staple character in my D&D world, a character I liked to imagine had plot insurance, though only in a de facto way (Players recognized him as a significant part of the setting, found him useful, returned to him for missions and advice, etc).
So TP challenges me to a fight, and everyone is excited. We broke from regular session and actually took a day to prepare ourselves for the big duel.
Next day we assemble at TPâs house, and the battle is played out. Wishing to be as impartial as possible, and also to focus on the fight from an âimmersedâ perspective, I hand over the GM role to one of the other Players. After a few rounds of swapping damage and narrative positioning, TP succeeds in scratching my characterâs face. He begins smiling deviously. The room goes quiet. Everybody else knows something I do not.
I ask whatâs going on. TP reaches into his pocket and pulls out a piece of paper he had written the previous night and had already shared with the other Players. He hands it to me. It reads: âPOISON UNDER NAILS.â
Iâm required to make a saving throw. I fail. My favorite NPC is dead.
Pretty interesting story! This sort of thing also happens all the time in the Knights of the Dinner Table. (Sometimes the KotDT cross the line over into cheating, like reading the DM materials in a way that's not OK. I encourage showing the players the module and monster stats, afterwards, to verify, but reading ahead in the module, for example, is never OK.)
This sort of secrecy can help the DM run some enemy NPCs more fairly, and it can also be fun for the DM to not know how the players are gonna approach the dungeon or what theyâre gonna do.
So whatâve we got there? A technique that adds a lot of value and fun to the game but can come at a significant cost. Conclusion: ya gotta case-by-case it! Information restriction is great, so use it... sometimes! Our group could probably stand to use it a liâl more often, actually. âPretend-that-you-donât-nowâ saves time and energy, so use that sometimes too. I think one of the reasons why this problem isnât that much of a problem is that most of the time, either approach works. Itâs such a small thing that pretending is doable, while also being such a small thing that missing out on it is bearable & quick, too.
So we have a spectrum of secrets from âenh, super easy to pretend aboutâ on to âwhoa thatâs a major mysteryâ, and a huge overlap of âcould go either wayâ in between.
Learn to use both techniques. Learn to pretend you donât know when you know, while also setting up tools and techniques to make information separation easier or at least possible.
The opposite problem is when your character might know more than you through study, lore, etc.
On this capsule, I usually write about things I have figured out the answers to, Iâm writing down stuff that I really wish someone had told me when I was first starting out. But now weâre gonna touch on an area where Iâm not sure of the best approach.
Rolling for it does not feel good, denying the roll doesnât feel good either.
Iâve experimented with using âpassive knowledgeâ stats sort of like passive perception. Everyone is walking around with a constantly rolled ten so if they have a plus seven in ânature loreâ I might say âHey, Alice, you know that the moss on these trees arenât supposed to grow like this. Theyâre on the opposite side of the sun from where theyâre supposed to be.â or whatever. I felt this worked great, it was natural and unintrusive. It was also a lot of work as a DM, trying to keep track of all of their knowledge skills. I donât even use passive perception anymore, let alone these other passives.
So knowledge rolls kind of crept their way back into the game. They had become less and less of an issue as weâve âlived in this settingâ for several hundreds of sessions, but we took in a new player who naturally wanted to know if his character knew things.
IDK, I think this is a problem no-one but me ever complains about, how I think it sorta breaks my relationship with the character if a die roll can suddenly inject knew knowledge into my brain.
Iâm more than happy with some Library Use rolls where your character hits the books, or when you seek out a sage and get a diegetic info dump. Thatâs more than OK, thatâs actively awesome.
The jarring and unsatisfying part is when itâs âDo I already know this? Let me roll. Alright, a 23! So DM, tell me what I know about this!â Am I really the only one who doesnât like that?
There are exceptions, like Fire on the Velvet Horizon or Ruins of the Grendleroot where the writer have provided plenty of lore tidbits that can be recalled or found and as DM youâre so eager to dump âem in that youâre like âOK, any port in a storm, even a behated knowledge rollâ. FotVH is especially good in this regard; it contains tidbits collected diegetically, by scholars. But usually itâs like âUh... Uh.. What do I even tell âem?â
This is where the âlived-in settingâ was so great. The players, over time, grew well-matched expectations of âOK, so everyone in this world knows what an elf is since probably your own school teacher or fruit vendor is elven, but no-one has breached the Gates of Era-Dhum since the age of the old onesâ. Is it just me or is it just so socially awkward to constantly have to go ânope you donât know, nope you donât knowâ to the point that you almost get roped into revealing stuff that they by all accounts actually should not know?
Then thereâs the, and this issue is more widely known and discussed, the question of probability. The game, as ran out of the box, lends it self to âOh, I wanna try to rolling tooâ and dice probability being what it is, the DCs get pretty skewed. And more often that not lead to wonky result, like the jester knowing something the cleric would be more likely to know. My first solution was âOnly one person gets to rollâ, while lately Iâve been trying to math out a solution; for example, if you set the DC to 19, that should be pretty good for four people of average stats to roll. It ignores the âniche protectionâ aspect (so sometimes maybe the jester knows more than the cleric) but compensate for the âfour people are rolling a check that was designed for one person to rollâ. IDK.
This sort of character knowledge is something thatâs still on the drawing table for me.