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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8994154" data-attributes="member: 4937">Really?That seems to me to be a rather parochial view of the role of secrets in gaming, one that you'd think you'd immediately question given the origin I outlined in wargaming - which is neither investigative horror nor a murder mystery.  If I'm playing a traditional dungeon crawl, the PC's encounter a door.  The door hides what is on the other side.  They encounter a chest.  The chest hides its contents.  Magical effects and traps may lurk hidden in the scene.  You play to find out.  Are you claiming the secrets here don't matter to the player?If I'm playing a Super Hero RPG, then the Evil Mastermind has some plot afoot which I have to thwart.  His lair.  His resources.  The dastardly deeds he is planning, the means of stopping him, his strengths and weaknesses as an opponent will all be initially unknown to me.  Are you claiming that the secrets here don't matter to the player?  Are you claiming that the story is the same whether or not Lex Luthor can't outwit you because you have perfect information?If I'm playing a Spy RPG, then does it matter if I know ahead of time who the double agents are?  Does it matter if know the dastardly plan of Goldfinger before I begin to play?  And so on and so forth? For myself I'm struggling to find a genre that doesn't depend on secrets.  We have this notion of "spoilers" where the hidden information about the situation is revealed, and the concept is not only universally applicable to all stories but also to video games (Nethack, for example) and table top RPGs.  And again, this seems to me to be a rather parochial view of the role of limited information.  You yourself in your real life do not have perfect information.  Do you feel that the fact that much of life is secret from you and undiscovered means that you are in real life on a plot railroad?Suppose you had perfect information.  Then you could look at the state of things and see that there was one optimal path through the situation.  Rather than taking the story through twists and turns, you could plot the straight or straightest line to whatever it was you desired.  Would having perfect knowledge of the situation - the map of the dungeon, the evil Master Mind's lair and plot - make you experience of play more or less of a railroad?  Perfect information by all parties arguably makes the actions of the participants more predictable and not less predictable.  I can't predict what the players will do precisely because they don't know everything that I know, and so I can't know how they will react to or deal with the imperfect knowledge that they have.That may well be true but this is a much more limited claim than you are making.  You claim that the role of secrets is narrow.  Now you are just claiming that you can enjoy a game without secrets, something I have no need to deny.What's your point?  It is you that have defined a narrow style of play with narrow aesthetics of play.  Aside from the fact that you lost me with "John Wick", the truth of the matter is that collaborative narrative games like that where you work out what the story is going to be like a team of screen writers producing the next Disney franchise movie appeal to a fairly narrow audience.  I grant people can enjoy them, and more power to them.  I don't deny that there is more than one way to play.  I just don't think that "Oh yeah, well GMs don't have to be secret keepers" is much of a retort to what I wrote.  I mean I even explicitly discussed what happens when the GM isn't a secret keeper, which just goes to show how "narrow minded" I am I guess.</blockquote>

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