thread: 2009-06-17 : Secrets
On 2009-06-19, Vincent wrote:
Ralph: let me make a new post about that sometime. I'm going to bring this thread back around to secrets.
Ben: Well, you have a collaborative fiction between the GM and the one player, which then informs the whole group's collaborative fiction, insofar as it contributes and they assent to its contributions. Seems straightforward to me.
In the old days I used to do a lot of that, 1-on-1 scenes within the larger game. The fiction I took part in, as GM, was bigger than the fiction any other individual player got to take part in; there was, however, a core fiction that all the group collaborated on together.
The stuff from the 1-on-1 scenes wasn't ever, like, socially problematic - all the details from those scenes were either irrelevant to the core fiction and so never came before the group, or else they were adopted seamlessly into the core fiction when they did come before the group - so there were never any breakdowns in it. It was an irritating way to do collaboration, though, overall. It wouldn't've done us any harm to have all those scenes at the table.
Another way to think of it, though, is like this. We're playing and you go up to the can - "no don't stop playing, catch me up when I come back" - and when you come back down you say "what'd I miss?" We tell you everything that we think matters, everything that requires your assent for the game to go forward. Now's your chance to object, like, "no way that happened! I didn't know you were going to do that while I was gone, it's DO OVERS." Maybe you'll say something like that. However, also, when you left the room, you kind of left it in our hands, right? Demanding do overs will be socially costly, it'll likely lead to a fight, and you'll do it only if you really mean it.
Look at it that way, and when you let the GM go out of the room with another player, you're kind of agreeing to assent to whatever they say when they come back. You're letting go your right to object, your right to oversee. (You can still reassert that right later, if they come back and start saying genuine crap, but like I say that'll probably mean a fight.)
Make sense?
