thread: 2009-06-17 : Secrets
On 2009-06-17, Simon C wrote:
Cool.
But! (and?)
There's a disfunctional thing that happens when a player's dedication to their plan goes a little too far, where they're more interested in keeping the plan secret for the big reveal than they are in making the game fun, right now (that goes for GMs and players).
For example, in the Burning Wheel game I'm running right now, the first two sessions were kind of sucky. There was a whole lot of political crap going on in the background, and I was trying very hard to have that stuff come out in a series of shocking revelations - making it play out in a cool way in the fiction. What that resulted in was kind of blocking, asshole play from me, where the game kind of didn't go anywhere because I was more interested in having the information come out "right" than having it come out the way it was going to.
The last two sessions of play have been heaps better because I relaxed about how the information would be revealed, and just let it come out as a response to the characters' actions. It came out fine anyway, but now it feels like the game is going somewhere.
Of course the classic example of this is the "Secret Evil" character that someone (usually someone 15 or so) tries to play, where the secret is more about having power over the other players than about some big reveal planned to make the game more exciting. It never works out that way.
Also, it's reliably ass to have lots of note passing and secret GM/player conferences.
Games that are designed to accommodate secrets are the best. Mountain Witch is great like that because it forces you to think of your secret as a plan, to think about how you're going to reveal your secret, rather than how you're going to keep it.
