# RPG a Day 2026 - 10: Secret tags: #thoughts #thoughts/RPGaDay/2026 ![[RPG a Day 2026 (illo).jpg]] It may come as a shock, but this one should at least be shorter than we've been going recently. *"Secret."* Secrets are a real problem in tabletop RPGs because of one simple and core issue: you can't react to what you don't know. That includes everybody at the table, whether it be players or your optional GM. If no one knows about something, they cannot react to it. They can't make choices that take that into account or that pointedly do not take that into account. They are in many ways the bane of good RPG play. Now, I am very aware that this flies in the face of everything you've been told by anyone who enjoys mystery scenarios. That is, investigatory experiences in which you are supposed to be discovering the world through the proxy of your character, whatever shenanigans they are locked into. There are entire games that hinge on every session being a mystery scenario, to be correct. These largely come in two varieties. In the first, the player's ability to figure out the mystery is far more important than any trait of the characters. All the character does is act like a character-shaped key to open a lock with perhaps the addition of a convenient die roll. You can liken this to an escape room. You either get out within the time limit or you don't. You either figure out what the GM or scenario author had in mind before you sat down, using your incredible mind reading or their obvious story writing capabilities, or you don't figure it out and nothing really happens. So of course they're going to give you all the hints and nudges, sometimes outright *informing* you of what you should do to get you through to that last scene of the mystery so you can put on your surprised face. Secondarily, by way of much more modern design, you can play a game in which character skills and abilities allow you to uncover and unlock bits and pieces, some of which may not have even existed before you looked to find them and then specified what you found with the success. Then at the end, the players take the bits that they figured out, no matter where they came from, and assemble them into an explanation of the mystery. At which point, the game mechanics jump in and, with some variation, either tell you, *"No, that's not the answer, you haven't figured it out yet,"* or, *"Yes, you've got it. Congratulations, you are mystery solvers."* Of these two methodologies, I must say that I far prefer the second. You can see it in games like **[[Public Access]]** or **Brindlewood Bay**. Unfortunately for all of us, the former methodology is the one that is classic and traditional, which you can find in everything from **Dungeons and Dragons** to **Call of Cthulhu**. Pretty much, you name it, everybody's got a mystery. I don't want you to get the idea that I don't enjoy solving mysteries, or that I don't enjoy puzzles, because I *do*. I just find that role-playing games are a terrible venue for putting them out there. The secret keeps you from enjoying the secret. The necessity of the secret means that you have to find the secret. In order to find the secret, you either have to figure it out using your squishy human brain or get lucky with a die roll. There are platforms that have worked very hard at reducing the impact of this sort of play, aside from the aforementioned fiction-forward, player-assembled mysteries. There are systems like **[[Gumshoe]]** and its inheritors, which are all about discovering clues simply by having the right kind of skill at the right kind of time. This is an okay solution, but it still feels as though the job of the player is to channel the spirits of the dead in order to read the mind of whoever wrote the situation or just have the right number written down on their character sheet. But that's just mysteries. We can go further than that, and some have. There is a tradition in Japanese RPGs of secret handouts, and this takes the idea of pre-generated characters to the next level. You come up to play, they hand you a pre-generated character, and on the back of the sheet are the secrets that your character knows and is responsible for. You had no input into deciding what those were, and there's not much you can really do about them — sort of like discovering that you're the secret Cylon when playing a game of **Battlestar Galactica**.[^1] This is what you're doing now. Now proceed through the rest of the scenario, knowing what you have in secret, which often involves a secret goal or secret motivation, while everyone else is doing the same thing. What's the problem with this, you might ask? Well, in moderation, I suppose it's not bad. But as a linchpin mechanism for approaching a shared experience at the table, it takes all the problems with mysteries and turns it up to 11. You not only do not have knowledge to react to regarding other people, but also you don't have knowledge of your own character beyond the first couple of minutes you have it in your hands. You have no input or choice in how it's interpreted, nor in how you should respond to it. I do not like it, Sam, I am. Much of this can be attributed to the fact that I don't like to be told how to play a game. I like creating my own characters. I like creating my own plots, my own worlds, my own settings, and I like to do it with other people. Hiding information means that we can't actually do all of that together. Hiding information is going out of your way to make sure that you can't do that together. Secrets, in short, are a problem, but there is a solution. Secrets that aren't secret. Hidden knowledge that is obvious because it's sitting right in the middle of the table. Mysteries without any clues.[^2] The trick is that the secret stops being one person's to hold. Either it sits out on the table where everybody can see it, or it stops existing as a fixed thing at all. That second one is where **Public Access** and **Brindlewood Bay** live. What if you take a mystery and just throw all the facts onto the table and let everybody know? What if everybody knows who committed the murder, with what weapon, and in what room? Or what if everybody knows that *nobody* knows this yet? It hasn't been decided. Their *character* goal and their *player* goal happen to coincide in that they want to pin it on someone else or *"discover the facts"* and enjoy watching the fallout. What does that mean? Well, firstly, it means that everyone gets to play all the time, knowing what everyone else knows. The mystery is no longer about what someone else wrote. The mystery doesn't happen before the characters are involved. More importantly, the mystery doesn't happen *before the players become involved*. The players become the true protagonists and prime movers of story. The situation they find themselves in predates them, but the action does not because the questions are generated by play. One of the axioms of modern tabletop RPG design that I truly adore is *"play to find out."* We are not playing to find out what someone else has already written down. We are playing to find out what happens as a result of our actions. When it comes to secrets, you cannot play to find them out, because in order to discover them, you have to know them already. I'd like to play to find out if I get to dictate those secrets or play to find out if I can go against someone else's intention, but I don't want to play to find out what's written on the backside of a piece of paper. Secrets. There are ways to make them pay off for you, but there's only one mechanism by which that happens: they have to be known. Tell your secrets, share them around the table, and play with open hands. If you've never tried it before, do so. I hope you enjoy it. If you have, I hope you already enjoyed it. That's it from me on secrets today. RPG a Day 2026 continues tomorrow, where hopefully we'll have another couple within a 24-hour period. One can only hope. [^1]: The board game. Yes, there is [a board game in which the crew of the Battlestar Galactica is dealing with standard board game stuff, but one or more of you is secretly a Cylon](https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/battlestar-galactica/). It's okay. The funny part to me is that Fantasy Flight Games calls it *"a cooperative board game."* Believe me, there's nothing cooperative in that game. It's all going for the throat all the time. [^2]: Okay, that last one is just a really good musical reference. You know what you're in for when you're reading this site. Don't give me that look.