thread: 2009-06-17 : Secrets
On 2009-06-18, Vincent wrote:
Nope! At best, that's another case where the difference doesn't matter.
But more, I think that's like whether Deckard's "really" a replicant. Ridley Scott has his opinion on the matter, but should we take it as anything but an opinion? Does his opinion somehow expand the fiction of the film to include itself? Pf. No.
Same with a GM "knowing" what's going on behind the scenes.
Or let's say a novelist does the thing where she tapes notecards all over her walls and draws lines and arrows between them. Maybe there's a whole branch of her planning for her novel that (a) shapes the novel in her mind, but (b) doesn't make it into the novel after all. Whole episodes of the protagonist's past, cut for space, let's say. Are they somehow part of the novel anyway? No! They're part of the author's experience, and the author's plan, but the novel itself doesn't include them.
Oh! Here's a good example. Maurice Sendak modeled the Wild Things after his own uncles and aunts, and named them after them. I have no doubt that the fiction is the way it is because of those associations in his head. In the book itself, though, is the one with the horns secretly named Moishe? No! In the book the one with the horns isn't named anything.
Same thing with Call of Cthulhu.
We played Psi*Run recently, I was the GM, and in my opinion the chasers were an insectoid hive mind that live on the blood-moon behind the Earth's real moon. I never said it to the players, though, and it never came out in play. Is it somehow secretly true of our game? No! It's just what I was thinking about while I was planning and playing.
If it had come out in play, we'd know whether it was true. Since I was the GM, they'd've almost certainly gone along with it; I'd set it up well enough. "Oh," They'd've probably said. "The blood-moon behind the Earth's real moon. That's cool."
Well, maybe they'd've gone along with it. "The what? What's a 'blood-moon'? Vincent that makes no sense. Even if it's true, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't explain anything. This game is BORKED and I'm the GM next time, not YOU."
But it never came out in play, so we'll never know.
