thread: 2009-06-17 : Secrets
On 2009-06-18, Marc Majcher wrote:
I think I'm still unclear about your secrets/plans distinction, so I'm going to nudge you a little bit more to see if I can get behind what you're saying, because I feel like I get the angle you're coming from, and I think it's interesting.
So we're playing this game, and part of the setup is something like "choose a number between one and ten, and assign that to your Sorcery skill, and for the love of God, don't ever reveal that number to anyone but the GM until the Revelation phase in Act Four", or whatever. It is a real world secret piece of information about a player's character that has a direct effect on how the fiction unfolds. This really seems like a "secret" to me instead of a "plan". It also seems very similar to the Inquisitor/Dark Fate thing, as above.
To me, a "plan" seems to be something that has potential to affect the fiction, but may or may not actually bear fruit, depending on how play goes, and how the players feel about the situation, and how they react, and so on. Whereas the secrets I'm describing are *facts*, as real within the fiction as any other mechanical bit in the system. (Which surely may be altered by the players upon consensus, but still forms as sturdy a skeleton as you're going to find in tabletop gaming.) They are not ambiguous, or unknowns waiting to be developed in discovery, but part of the foundation of the story that you're building.
I think that the part of me that is revolting at this is the part that is saying inside my brain, "Wait! If there can be no secrets in roleplaying, then there can be no solid facts! Everything is mutable and nothing matters! Augh!" Which is not an entirely accurate representation of what I really think, because I feel like I have a good handle on the mutability of fiction backwards and forwards, but I think that it leans in the right direction.
