(my keyboard broke and i am currently using a backup with a broke v key. everytime i need to use that letter i have to stop writing and paste in a copy. and i can't just use the ctrl command- i gotta right click then do it... so its entirely possible my flow might get interrupted while writing this or that the spelling might be all over the damn place)
I frequently find myself talking TTRPG theory with friends, and I often wind up feeling like I'm on the wrong side of things. Or if not wrong, simply that my tastes run counter to a lot of my friends. I got the itch to write something and thought "well, what do I know I do well with rpgs? what can I talk about to both psych myself up and give some useful advice?"
The word of the day, is Secrets.
Next month will be the three year anniversary of my ongoing arc of campaigns. I have secrets that I won't reveal to my players for another year or two that I've been sitting on for that same length of time. Things I know to be true about our story that I continually build towards. A secret is, after all, just information your players don't know yet. I want to share some experiences and advice for what's worked at my table, both to help me condense this down but, hopefully, to get you thinking about how you withhold information from players.
1. Respecting Player Agency: Whenever I am planning on doing any sort of twist or secret that is going to directly effect a player or their immediate story, I will have a conversation with them. At this point in my campaign I've got a good level of trust with my players and they mostly let me run wild- but I think talks like this are how you build that foundation. Ask them if they are cool with you throwing in some twists and secrets in their story- most players will love that shit but give them a chance to say directions they aren't interested in. I can usually be vague and talk around the plot beats I have in mind or mention the particular threads I want to explore there, i.e. what did happen to their friend who died in that ritual? what mysteriously happened to their parents. Players generally are putting these hooks into their backstory in the hopes the GM will pick them up- but you can work with them to make sure it's a story they wanna take part in. If things are thorny or you need to be specific- I highly recommend the following the next bit.
2. Bring Players Behind the Screen: This is maybe the advice I give the most because it changed the whole vibe of my table. You can let players in on your secrets. If they want in on the secret plots you have for them, that's great. Now you aren't working to surprise them, you are working together to surprise everybody else! You get the play with dramatic irony and be screaming at each other in dms because someone just nearly figured it out before getting distracted by something else. This is also something I really want to encourage letting your players know is an option, and that if they've got an idea where someone else's story thread is going, talk to you rather than just shouting it out at the table. If someone else figures out your rival is actually your best friend back from the dead and they shout that out- then it's going to make that fall flat for you. Because you didn't get to figure it out, the ride gets cut short. My players will just DM me if they think they've figured something out and if they have then let them know. They get to come behind the screen. It's also more fun for a player to know "oh someone figured something out- there are pieces here I can put together" than being handed the conclusion by someone else. This flows into my next bit of advice.
3. Let Your Players Cut The Line: You ever watch a tv show where they are leading to a big twist and you've known forever? You just want them to do the reveal so you can move on to where that leads. Your secrets shouldn't be on a timer, waiting for some big epic scene. When players can get that information, or they manage to piece things together- let them have it. The reveal will make the moment fill epic on its own and the players will feel great having made unexpected progress. I have a secret in my campaign I don't expect my players to get to until the very last act. But one of the players managed to get in a scene where it felt RIGHT for them to find out there. So we jumped into a different voice channel and I told them. No one else in the group knows, but heard them rejoin the chat somewhere between manic laughter and tears. Don't be precious about perceived story structure or when is the right time for players to know. When they figure it out, let them know. Most of my big regrets in campaigns come from trying to plan stories or do things the way I felt they should go and I always feel best when I don't think about that shit and just hit the gas.
4. Don't Be Westworld: A bit of a corollary to the last one. Famously, Westworld's writers starting changing their storylines because the fans were figuring out where things were going. When you hold the cards as a GM and the players immediately figure out "the butler did it", it can be tempting to say, no he didn't, in the vain hope of appearing clever. Most of my favorite twists are ones I figure out right before I turn the page. You can see how they lead here and the outcome feels inevitable. The issue here comes from panic, I've had players jokingly say answers to upcoming mysteries and I laugh it off with them- that would be ridiculous. Even if the rest of your adventure doesn't make them look in another direction and they keep a dogged grip on the right answer, that just makes them seem so much cooler when they do reveal that they had it right from the jump. It's equally funny when you remind a player they joked about an outcome 5 sessions ago. Be a fan of your players, y'all.
5. A Garden of Secrets: Almost every good secret I've come up with comes from disparate elements of your story and having a notion on how to connect them. You can look at two characters written down during session 0, ask "what if they were the same person?", and then you and your players are sobbing 10 sessions later. But how do you get there?
Have a good sense of your foundation. What are the rules of your setting, the underlying metaphysics of your story. What feels true here and what feels right? When a player asks me how something works in my games I generally want to have a good enough grasp on my setting to be able to find the answer I want, even if I don't have one prepared. Knowing how things work will let you build up story beats and get an idea of how they will progress and know how they can't.
Raising/Razing a notion. I like to think of my nascent secrets/beats as notions more than ideas because they are easy to discard. The Westworld example above is bad because you have already laid down clues and are leading the story towards that conclusion- twisting it to fit a new shape is sloppy and will just derail the whole thing. But, you can have a notion for where things might go, the shape of things- and can further alter it based on how things proceed. Until you start putting the story on screen, it's just something you are thinking over. This means you can change it as you see fit, adding to it... or just discard the idea wholly if you realize it won't fit. Maybe you've had too many "this villain is my secret family member" reveals and you decide to go with a different origin for your big bad, because you hadn't even started showing the party that path yet.
6. Not All Secrets are Serious: For one game, two of my players were goblins and they decided that their character names would be Pokemon names reversed (Tikcin and Nettil). Every goblin I introduced after that followed the same naming convention. It was just a dumb moment of joy for half the group and the others got told when that campaign ended and got to join in with the laughter and call us all bastards.
Remember the joy of secrets is in finding folk to share them with, not keeping them forever.
