Warning: this article is Bullshit!
No more than once a month, I let myself write a rambling, bloggy piece of stream-of-consciousness crap about whatever I want. I don’t try to give practical advice — though there’s always something to learn — or provide rules hacks — though I might preview one — and I can’t promise well-organized arguments, sidebars, or even tiered headings — but they might happen. I’m just letting you into my head. And it’s a frigging mess in there. You’ve been warned.
Guess what? I’m writing a roleplaying game system of fantasy adventure!
No, not that one. A different one.
It’s a long story that has to do with WotC’s threat last month to screw content creators like me up, down, and sideways if we don’t lick their boots and my crazy — and spiteful — promise to write a lightweight by crunchy alternative to D&D for my high-tier supporters. And anyone else who wants to pay for it.
I’m calling it the Slapdash Engine because I literally slapped it together over one long weekend and then threw the thing into an alpha playtest. After three weeks of turning frantic napkin scribbles into an actual playtest document.
Meanwhile, I’ve been bragging to my secret inner circle about all the super cool features that will make Slapdash better than D&D and also every other fantasy RPG ever.
And that’s where today’s story starts. With this brag:
In Slapdash, anyone can cast divine spells, but only clerics get to know the actual divine spellcasting rules.
Man did that break a few brains. Maybe it just broke yours. If not, give it a second. Think about that statement. Wait for the obvious flaw to jump out. There you go. I can tell you spotted it by that twitch in your eye and that sproing noise.
Sorry.
Anyway, that humble little brag about my awesome slapped-together-pile-of-crap RPG was the start of one hell of a roller coaster ride. One to do with the Monster Manual, secret lore, metagaming, and a rebellion against an evil cabal of Game Mastering High Priests.
And today, I’m going to tell you why Slapdash gods work that way, why it’s okay for the players to read the Monster Manual, and why GMs who custom-make all their monsters to discourage metagaming are making their games worse. And everyone else’s too.
And next month, I’ll tell you why you need the Evil Cabal of Game Mastering High Priests. Because treating GMs as a privileged caste worthy of respect and gratitude actually provides players with the best damned TTRPG play experiences possible.
But that’s next month.
The Secret Lore of Slapdash
In Slapdash, the fantasy adventure RPG coming this winter from Angry Games, Inc., divine magic doesn’t come in the form of spells clerics can sling. Rather, divine magic comes down from on high as blessings and curses delivered by the gods themselves in response to appeals, ceremonies, and sacrifices.
All right, you got me. To some extent, that’s just a bunch of window dressing. Divine spellcasting is just spellcasting and the appeals, ceremonies, and sacrifices are just what other boring, crappy games call spell components.
Except…
In Slapdash, anyone can invoke a miracle. Any PC — or NPC, for that matter — can beg the gods for help and have some chance of a response. They just have to do it blindly. The players of priestly characters actually get to see the Divine Spellcasting chapter of the book.
Sort of. It’s complicated. Wait for the full release, okay?
Lots of my supporters thought that was a damned cool idea. And more than a few said that made a lot of sense for divine magic in a fantasy world. But a few of my supporters immediately tried to spot the trick. They knew there had to be a trick. I couldn’t mean what I said. How could I? Divine magic couldn’t possibly work like that. Not for long, anyway.
Suppose, for instance, that Slapdash really had a secret set of Divine Spellcasting rules that anyone could use blindly, but which players got to actually read when they made themselves a cleric. Even if you ignore the seemingly impossible mechanics that could possibly facilitate casting spells by blind guesswork, what prevents a cleric’s player from just telling their allies the rules so everyone can cast divine magic more effectively? And what happens when a cleric’s player retires their cleric and plays something else? Does the game include a standard-issue Neuralyzer with which to erase their memories of the Divine Spellcasting rules?
Now, my supporters have good reason to suspect some verbal smoke-and-mirrors. I’m tricksy. I never lie to them, but a lot of my truths are only true figuratively or on some kind of technicality or given a specifically narrow definition of one word or another. But, in this case, I meant pretty much precisely what I said. Notwithstanding a few minor details in execution and the translation of my designs into D&D-esque terms to make them easier to grok.
The point is: yes, in Slapdash, there are Secret Mechanics anyone can use but only some players get to know right out of the gate. I think that’s something lots of fantasy adventure and roleplaying video games do very well and something TTRPGs absolutely should find a way to steal. I’m a big fan.
And the fact that Secret Mechanics don’t stay secret forever? That’s not a bug; it’s a feature. It makes games better.
And to explain my reasoning to my followers, I posed a simple — and semi-rhetorical — question:
Is it okay for players to read the Monster Manual?
And man was that a mistake!
Is It Okay for Players to Read the Monster Manual?
To be fair, that question wasn’t a mistake until I took it to Twitter. Which is par for the course. Twitter should dump its little bird mascot in favor of a flaming garbage dumpster.
I knew I was asking a loaded question, one that’s started fights since Eddie Gygax and Dave Arnoldson invented gaming in the fifties. Especially the way I phrased it. Because my question isn’t just about whether it’s okay for players to act on information the GM didn’t explicitly give them in play — the bullshit metagaming debate — but also about whether it’s acceptable for players to purposely seek that information to get an edge in the game?
To be fair, those were precisely the issues I was trying to highlight regarding Secret Mechanics. Remember, the question was just a way to start a discussion I could then end with a correct answer that justified my crazy-ass design decisions. Because I see myself as Socrates. And that’s quite apt as most of the Internet sees me as corrupting gamers and ruining the community.
Anyway…
The answers I got ran the gamut. But I can summarize the vast majority of them thusly.
Is it okay for players to read the Monster Manual?
- No, but I can’t stop them.
- Yes, because I can’t stop them.
- Yes, but my players know they can’t use that knowledge in-game.
- Yes, but they can’t reference it during the game.
- Yes, because I render that information useless by never using published monsters as written.
- You’re an asshole.
I’m not being facetious or hyperbolic with that last response. Outside of my supporter community, I got a lot of social-media replies letting me know the question was offensive and stupid and I was an absolute asshole for even asking for it. And even though I had to interact with a lot of obnoxious, self-important assholes to get there, I did eventually find out what I’d done wrong. I’d identified myself as a member of the Secret Cabal of the High Priests of GMing and I had to be destroyed.
I shit you not. And even though the self-important, obnoxious dumbasses aren’t interested in a well-reasoned response, I am nonetheless going to analyze that whole thing next month. And explain why, yes, I am a member of the Secret Cabal of the High Priests of GMing and we’re the ones who run the best games that make players happiest.
But I digress…
Interestingly, I didn’t get a lot of unqualified negative answers. But I also didn’t get a lot of unqualified positive answers. Few people said yes outright, though admittedly some did and several of those weren’t really engaging with the issues at hand.
And while you can suggest that sample or selection bias played a role here — and it undoubtedly did — the number of you’re an asshole responses suggests sample bias wasn’t as big a factor as it could be.
The funny thing is though, the majority of respondents can be divided into two broad groups. There were the people who thought only an asshole would ask such a question and the people who wanted to say no, but knew they couldn’t.
I mean, you had those sad, resigned GMs who clearly wished they could stop their players from reading the Monster Manual but know it’s beyond their power. Or who said, “look, I know I can’t stop you but at least don’t do it right in front of me, please!” But you also had the GMs who said, “fine, you can read the Monster Manual all yo want, but I’m going to stop you from benefiting from it in-game.”
And special mention must be made of the dumbass idea that players shouldn’t be allowed to metagame. That is, the idea players should be forbidden from using knowledge they have that the GM doesn’t feel their character would have. If you hold that opinion, you’re dumb. Not wrong, dumb. You are unreasonable, wrong-headed, and foolish. People’s brains don’t work that way and you introduce more problems into your game than you avoid by trying to enforce that crap. I’d explain further, but I have better things to talk about and frankly, I’m not sure you can grasp the explanation.
Anyway…
Obviously, sensible GMs recognize there’s something about players reading the Monster Manual that doesn’t sit right. And some of it is probably just down to fair play and earned victories. If you know what a monster can do — and you can come up with strategies to counter its tactics and exploit its weaknesses — you’ve got an advantage in the fight. And that’s undeniably true. Good information is as empowering as a magical sword, a high-level spell, or a mechanical bonus.
But magical swords and high-level spells and mechanical bonuses? Players have to earn those through play. They have to overcome challenges to loot magical treasure, they have to gain levels to get the best spells, and they have to come up with cunning plans and crazy capers to get situational bonuses. And that means that a player getting inside info about a monster is the same as a player writing mAjiK SWarD +2 on their sheet between sessions and expecting the GM to let that fly.
Information is valuable. All of us GMs know it.
Personally, I think information is the most valuable. And I think that’s good for the game.
Discoverable Secrets
Hopefully, it’s clear that I’m using the Monster Manual as a stand-in for any useful information players can exploit in play. And the reason I’m using the Monster Manual is because D&D — and shamefully, most TTRPGs — lack examples of such information, which I’m going to call Discoverable Secrets. Apart from the magic item lists and monster stats, there ain’t a lot of useful, exploitable stuff hidden away for the players to discover later.
And I think that’s a shame. I’d love to see tons of shit hidden from new players’ prying eyes. My ideal Players’ Handbook — crazy as this will sound — would show players nothing but the options they can start play with. High-level spells and abilities? Hidden. Prestige-tier feats? Hidden. All but the most commonly known deities? Hidden. Uncommon, rare, and exceptionally rare magical items? Hidden. Hell, I’d hide rare races and classes too.
I know, I’m crazy, but hear me out.
TTRPG designers are inexcusably clueless about what Discoverable Secrets do for the fantasy genre and the fantasy adventure gaming experience. They don’t realize what a terrible disservice they’re doing to GMs and players by making everything so transparent. And most GMs are so clueless about this crap themselves that they’re willing to destroy the value of what few Discoverable Secrets there are in their desperate scramble to stop players from cheating.
Imagine if a major, modern TTRPG publisher was so terrified of the relatively tiny problem of internet piracy that they absolutely refused to sell simple, transferable PDF copies of their rulebooks. Imagine if the only way you could access an electronic version of the rules was by being logged into — and subscribed to — specifically licensed platforms.
That’s what GMs are doing whenever they try to confound or forbid players from exploiting the knowledge they’ve got. If you change up your monsters to prevent the players from using what they know or if you exclusively use custom monsters or if you forbid your players from using what they know regardless of how they know it or if you never use the same monster twice in the same campaign, you’re as bad as WotC not selling PDFs. And you should feel bad.
Fantasy adventure TTRPGs should contain Discoverable Secrets. They make fantasy adventure TTRPGs infinitely better.
Fantasy adventure TTRPG players should be able to exploit Discoverable Secrets in play. It makes fantasy adventure TTRPGs infinitely better.
Fantasy adventure TTRPG players should share their Discoverable Secrets with each other. It makes fantasy adventure TTRPGs infinitely better.
Let me explain…
Discoverability
Discovery comprises one of the eight major kinds of gameplay engagement. It’s one of the eight emotional experiences people play games to experience. And Discovery is one of the core engagements of fantasy adventure gameplay.
Discovery is a form of intellectual conquest. Discovery is beating back the darkness of ignorance. It’s revealing the map, it’s finding the hidden dungeons, it’s understanding the world’s secret backstory. And that’s usually how we tabletop gamers think about Discovery.
But the most valuable, most powerful Discoveries are the ones that make players more powerful. Discovery grants knowledge and knowledge is a form of power. As you play The Witcher, you figure out which potions and mutagens and poisons work best against which foes and jive best with your playstyle. As you play Breath of the Wild, you learn how objects in the world interact with each other, how your runes interact with them, and how to use those interactions to solve puzzles and win fights. As you play Elden Ring, you learn enemy movesets and weapon animations, and you know when to block, when to parry, when to sidestep, when to use a strong attack, and when to panic-roll the hell away as fast as you can. As you play Hollow Knight you learn which charms do what and which you can combine to great effect and you learn boss patterns so you know how to dodge and when to strike.
Discovering mechanics is Discovery too. And it’s a more empowering, more joyful, longer-lasting kind of Discovery. Yeah, it’s great to see a dragon for the first time in Breath of the Wild or to ride that one elevator in Elden Ring — you know the one I mean — but discovering the dragons spawn at set times and places so you can farm them for armor-upgrading scales and horns is a much more valuable Discovery. Breaking through the Maridia tube was amazing once, but Shinesparking was the gift that just kept on giving.
Worldlore reveals and scenes of wonder are great. By all means, include them too, but they’re not the same as getting a list of spells to choose when you level up and saying, “I had no idea I’d ever be able to do something like that.” And then experimenting with your unexpected power in your next dozen fights.
To many players, Discoveries about the game’s mechanics are actually more rewarding and leave a longer-lasting feeling of empowerment than Discovering another dungeon on the map or another interesting fact in the world’s rich historical tapestry. Such Discoveries are empowering. And it’s empowerment players feel like they earned.
Utility
Discoveries aren’t empowering if they’re not useful. I hope that’s obvious. Information you can’t exploit doesn’t make you feel more powerful. It’s just a fun fact for you to file away. And that’s why purposely redesigning monsters — or custom-building your own beasts — destroys the value of Discoverable Secrets. You’re rendering the players’ knowledge of the game’s mechanics null and void. You’re robbing the Discoveries of empowerment.
One reason GMs can’t see this is that they don’t think beyond the campaign they’re running and they don’t consider the big-picture gameplay experience. The RPG experience ain’t limited to a single adventure or campaign. It’s something players do across numerous adventures and numerous campaigns for months or years. Lots of people have been playing D&D 5E for nine years now. Nine! Years! And you can’t ignore that long-term aspect of the play experience.
Strategy and skill are essential game components. Games without elements of skill or strategy aren’t games, they’re activities. They’re Candy Land. They’re slot machines. To qualify as a game, players must be able to affect the outcome with the quality of their choices. Moreover, players must get better at making better choices as they play.
I know we don’t like to talk about this shit as GMs — I know the concept of player skill is weird and icky — but we have to. Because it’s a central part of games being games.
People who have played D&D for years should be better at playing D&D than people who just started. Put an experienced player and a newbie in the same fight with the same pre-generated PC, the experienced player should get his character through that fight without a scratch and the newbie should barely scrape by. That’s vital for long-term engagement and playability. If that ain’t the case, then the only way to keep people around is to constantly introduce new, better options until the game’s a bloated, overwrought, overpowered mess. And then it’s time to throw your game out and make a new one.
Players — not characters — are meant to play TTRPGs for years. RPG systems — not campaigns — are meant to provide years of fun. You can argue all you want that it’s unrealistic for 1st level characters played by long-time gaming vets to know more about the world and its monsters than newbies playing the same characters. Maybe it is — though every Greek citizen who went to the same play knew how to answer a riddling Sphinx and I know how to kill a vampire even though I’ve never meant one — but honestly, realism is way, way, way less important than long-term engagement and investment.
It’s better for the long-term play experience — which is bigger than your tiny, crappy little campaign — if the players get to learn the ins and outs of the game and exploit the hell out of it.
Community
When Hideo Miyazaki took a break from drawing animes to make one of the best action RPG video games ever — Dark Souls — he recognized that, in the age of the Internet Gaming Community, you could make a game totally frigging inscrutable and gamers would band together and scrute the hell out of it. He intentionally obfuscated the hell out of Dark Souls — and Blood Souls and Elden Souls and all the rest — because he knew Discoverable Secrets unite communities like nothing else. He said so in interviews.
People are communal by nature. They love drawing circles with themselves and their fellow insiders on the inside and outsiders outside. And because of in-built psychological limits on just how many members social groups can have, communalism is necessary, healthy, and pleasurable. People need a sense of belonging, but it ain’t meaningful — and it doesn’t feel good — if it ain’t earned.
People who piss and moan about gatekeeping are idiots who don’t know thing one about human social wiring. Which is why everyone tries to keep them out.
I ain’t saying toxic communities don’t exist — or that communalism can’t turn toxic — but I am saying that communalism isn’t inherently toxic. Hell, it’s a requisite for good mental and social health.
Miyazaki totally understood that one of the best ways to build a gaming community was to give them a bunch of secrets to uncover and mysteries to solve. Let them build a collective body of shared knowledge. That’s what human communities do best. If you don’t like the Soulsborne games — because you can’t handle a challenge and you hate fun — look at how the Legend of Zelda community got together for years to figure out the incomprehensible timeline of the Zeldaverse.
Of course, Nintendo — shortsighted dumbasses that they are; much like a certain circle of wizards who live on a certain coast — totally ruined that by publishing an official timeline to sell some overpriced hardbacks.
Discoverable Secrets — and the sharing thereof — unite communities. Especially gamer communities. And, like it or deny it, the roleplaying gaming hobby is both social and communal. Need proof? Just visit frigging Indianapolis one August. A hundred thousand people would not visit a godawful place like Indiana just to play the same pretend elf games they could play at home if some serious communal forces weren’t in play.
You Can’t Stop the Message
Discoverable Secrets — exploitable game mechanics that aren’t shared directly with new players — enhance the tabletop roleplaying gaming experience, both at the table and beyond. And they’re a perfect fit for fantasy adventure which is Discovery-focused by its nature. Moreover, with the asynchronous nature of tabletop roleplaying games — a single, omniscient trustee hides behind the curtain and reveals the world to the players one session at a time — you’d think TTRPGs would lean hard into Discoverable Secrets. They’re perfect.
So why don’t game designers lean into them? And why don’t GMs appreciate their worth? Worse, why do so many GMs actively sabotage them?
Enter the Perfect Solution Fallacy.
It’s impossible to stop secret info from spreading. You can’t stop players from reading the Monster Manual and Discovering all the Secrets. Nor can you stop them from telling their non-cleric compatriots all the Secret Lore of the Gods gleaned from their days at Pretend Elf Seminary. You can’t stop players from acting on information that wasn’t honestly gained through play. And even if you could stop all that, there’s a small subset of players who also run games and GMs who also play games. And they’re gonna carry information across the screen.
The fact that Discoverable Secrets can’t be perfectly preserved and protected — and the fact that some people cheat — doesn’t mean they’re not damned valuable. Hell, people rip apart Soulsborne games and publish all their secrets practically the same day they come out and that hasn’t stopped the strongest gaming communities on the net from forming around the joy of Discovering their Secrets.
GMs who forbid players from acting on their knowledge of the game to prevent cheating — which is bullshit anyway — are ruining the fun for everyone who came by their knowledge through honest effort and years in the table trenches. Same with GMs who constantly reskin or custom-build new gotcha monsters so their players can’t use what they know from previous games. And they’re not just hurting their own players, they’re also hurting the communal experience of shared Discovery for the sake of their tiny, petty, tyrant kingdoms.
I Meant What I Said and You Should Too
I was telling the truth about Divine Spellcasting in Slapdash. The details of deity worship in the Slapdashosphere won’t be published in whatever passes for the Slapdash Player’s Guidebook when it comes out. They’ll be entrusted to the GM. Probably on little player-friendly handouts with little disclaimers about sacred trusts and the joy of Discovery they represent. Over time, the info will spread. Some foul cheaters will have all the handouts and use that information to their advantage. Most gamers won’t. Spoilers will happen. And moderators in Slapdash Discord communities will probably have to adopt strict spoiler policies. Just like in online fan communities for all sorts of other media. Over time, a body of shared Slapdash knowledge will form. I can’t stop that. Hell, I’m hoping it does.
Meanwhile, though, don’t hamstring the Discoverable Secrets in your system du jour. You have no idea the value of what you’re breaking. Understand that it is okay for players to read the Monster Manual, though they won’t if they want the best experience, and you should probably tell your players so.
Read it if you want, but you’re ruining the fun for yourself if you do. I don’t care though, because you’re only ruining the fun for yourself, and that’s not my problem.
Beyond that, let your players use what they know. Even if you think so little of your players that you don’t trust them to have come by their knowledge honestly. Stop with the no metagaming bullshit. Include plenty of challenges from published rulebooks. As written. You can build your own custom stuff too, but two-thirds of your challenges should come from the shared pool of communal knowledge.
In short, stop screwing your players out of one of the corest of core engagements in the entire fantasy adventure gaming genre. If not for the sake of your players, then for the sake of mine. After all, one day, one of your players might end up at my table, or one of mine might sit at yours, and they shouldn’t be screwed over just because they changed GMs.
And if you can’t abide these rules, absolutely don’t buy Slapdash when it comes out. I don’t want you ruining it for everyone, you petty little tyrant.
I think it partially comes down to the trust a player has towards the system. If a player doesn’t trust the system enough, there is not that much of joy to discover the hidden parts (and play the game). If a player trusts that the secret parts enhance the experience, then it’s an…emergent experience, if that is the right word. And the trust must be also kept from the system’s side – I don’t think it is fun in any way to discover (to quote a semi-common reddit post) that “Monsters actually have no HP, but die whenever it is ‘dramatically appropriate'”
My immediate pearl-clutching at the divine spellcasting slapdash rules had less to do with player knowledge and more to do with class invalidation. I wouldn’t want players to play cleric once, learn the rules, then never play cleric again because other classes get mechanical bonuses instead of knowledge bonuses. Given that the divine spellcasting info won’t be in the Player’s Guidebook, that fear was unfounded.
I love unveiling secrets. When I moved to Deadlands and an ‘undead’ surprised a player by pulling out a gun, my players learned that some undead do that in this world, and it was an awesome experience.
In regards to this article, I had three specific experiences where player knowledge actually deepened player engagement more than a set of screw job, gotcha stats would have.
The first two were in regards to monsters that I created myself based on monsters from the FF series, which had noticeable tells whenever they were going to execute an action or an ability. The players that were in the know immediately caught on, and after telling the other players, they adjusted their strategies accordingly and it was a really memorable experience.
The second instance was with a mind flayer, in which the group was split, I just handed a player the stats for the mind flayer and said “here, he’s on your side anyway, run with this monster since your character isn’t here.” Now, only one player in the group didn’t know what flayers do in general, and the player I handed the stats to knew the lore backwards and forwards, they just didn’t know how flayers mechanically ripped your brains out. Regardless, when that flayer became the current antagonist, that player started crapping their brains out in fear well before the flayer could get to it, because they had seen what was in store for the group. The players all knew brains were going to be removed from skulls anyway, having the mechanical knowledge only served to help them strategize further.
This all boils down to the fact that if I were still in my GMing infancy, I probably would’ve moronically yelled at the players that “their characters don’t know that about mind flayers.”
For me, Outer Wilds will always be the game with Discovery in its purest form. No monsters to slay, levels to gain, or items to craft. The only thing standing between you and finishing the game in 22 minutes, is knowledge. And it kept me hooked for the 30ish hours it took for me to finish the game. It makes me sad that it’s a “can only play it the first time once” type of game, but it’s more memorable for it.
And that’s the kind of game I would love to be able to run, in a more Zelda/Dark Souls form. One where player knowledge and experimentation is rewarded. I can’t think of a better way to keep most players engaged in a world than proving to them that there’s always something more to uncover, so they better keep their eyes open and brains turning.
I toy with the idea of reskinning a monster, but deliberately giving the core aspects out.
So, this is a huge winged bird with feathers and a beak, but then it starts using dragon moves and stats, and then it breaths fire.(Ok, I haven’t read the dnd monster manual, but the idea)
Then the player realize mechanically this is totally a dragon. And make strategies.
Metagame? Hey! We’re experienced adventurers! If there is a frog here we have a pretty good guess it’s cold blooded. There’s always a pattern.
I thought it would be cool to just see what the monster do and then my mind snaps out the answers for the rest of the blanks. Every piece of information counts, but still always unknown.
Still, I guess good telegraphing always does the trick.
Part of this comes from The endless sequel or whatever the name is in English. The Gm shows the total points used to build this combat encounter, shows a limited amount of skills stats and components, and the players can give a guess at what he used and what he’s hiding, as well as what he might include to go along with the known skills.
Mechanic, yes, probably not the best solution for immersion, but fun.
Oh my God did I reply to the wrong place?
Where did you mean to reply?
A lot of this comes down to play time, and you’re right, I have been playing 5e for 9 years so maybe your suggestion would work. However, I hate how long computer games are nowadays – I always use walkthroughs and guides so that I can experience the story & optimise gameplay without wasting time. So I may hold off on Slapdash until those discords & guides are available..
There is a point where it’s possible to take the analogy too far.
Really excellent article. I personally am guilty of homebrewing far too may monsters (or running OSR systems with really inadequate bestiaries), though that’s just because I enjoy making them. I definitely see the argument for how empowering it is for players to learn the system inside and out, so I’ll try to stick to stuff from the book much more often for my budding Savage Worlds campaign.
There’s a tradeoff here between broadening your players sense of mastery over the system as a whole, and deepening your players sense of mastery over your specific campaigns. If you reincorporate homebrew monsters at the same rate you would have used published ones, then the functional difference between a new monster manual coming out and your homebrew monster is zilch.
Maybe you will discuss this during the sequel but for discoverable secrets to work, the GM/DM must know those secrets and how characters/players discover, internalize, and apply the Discoverable Secret. That implies a level of understanding (dare I say mastery?) that may not be existent in a new game. Possibly establishing the “rule” of “you shouldn’t GM/DM unless you have read the totality of rules and can pass this 900 question quiz” might resolve it… While I understand the logic of the premise (exact details of the above 900 question quiz being wrong), it does seem to be a high bar to run a game let alone master it. Doesn’t it work so well in video games precisely because the system (aka GM/DM) knows the Discoverable Secrets and universally applies them?
Do you really have to be able to answer a 900-question quiz about magical items to be able to hand them out in D&D?
No, but that is also not a Discoverable Secret as written/provided. Part of the accessibility of TSR/WotC (any edition but arguably especially 5e) is the openness of the rules for common understanding. Having a Discoverable Secret may be as simple as the difference between fire and lightning magic underwater or as potentially complex as as Divine Casting by non-divine characters. The first requires consistent application of Adjudication whereas the second requires consistency in Declaration and Description. Granted that is a large reason of why I am diligently following the Mastery lessons but to assume the Mastery prior to running seems a large leap from this side of the Mastery fence…
I think you are overthinking it. Or missed part of the point.
Half of the article talks about having knowledge that you acquire through having been privy to the rules for it.
As a DM I read the monster manual, but I don’t remember everything. As a player I avoid looking at the monster manual, but there are things I know. And I learned that Goblins have high Dex from trying to use Sacred Flame on them and always missing.
That’s the things we are talking about here. Consistency comes from there being actual rules effects to back up things.
The same goes for us GMs. Have I internalized all the info in Worlds Without Number yet? No. But I know there’s rules for crafting, so if the players want to craft something I can prepare for it. I know you need “arcane salvage” for it, so I know they need to do an adventure before they can make the thing anyways. So off they go while I prepare.
They honestly don’t need to know more than “Hey, can I make a spear that returns into my hand after I throw it?” and then me saying “Sure, but you need the heart of a Dejiwoo in order to make it.”
“Where do we find that?”
“Ah, I have no idea, maybe someone in the world knows?”
I may very well be and it could just be a case of Fear of the Unknown/Unfamiliar…
Bottom line I am am seeing a large difference between handling a player’s declarations of “I ACTION a RESULT in SITUATION with INTENT” vs the GM/DM providing “RESULT because of ACTION in SITUATION regardless of INTENT”.
The first allows clarification of all three as part of the Declare-Determine-Describe cycle through the Murky Mirror whereas the second seems more difficult to manage in the Murky Mirror without seeking clarity and therefore revealing the Discoverable Secret.
It’s a small thing, but in my current campaign I have two brand new players and one player who is a fantasy nerd who has read the Monster Manual and Campaign setting books from cover to cover.
When I described the party’s first time encountering an Intellect Devourer, the two new players were intrigued and creeped out – but it was only when they saw the facial expression of the experienced player and their screeches of “DON’T GET CLOSE! KILL IT KILL IT!” that the new players felt terror 🙂
I’m in a somewhat similar position of having a table of pretty mixed experience levels and that’s why I’m pushing back a bit for this article. I absolutely agree that Discovery is a powerful and underused TTRPG tool (I LOVE all the sealed mysteries in Gloomhaven for example.) I agree that a player that reads the MM is ruining it for themselves. Where I disagree, is that they are ONLY ruining for themselves. When one player has practically memorized the entire monster manual and spews for the information at the table, I will assert that doing so takes away from the Discovery fun for the other players and the DM should watch out for this.
My players include two 12 year olds who are pretty new to D&D, a 16yo who lives and breathes D&D, and three other adult players. The 16 yo is very motivated by Challenge with some Fellowship and Fantasy thrown in. When the party encounters something new, he will share his knowledge from the MM. Paradoxically he doesn’t seem to take any joy in doing so– he just wants to get on with the fighting. In sharing what the 16yo knows, though, the two 12 year olds don’t get to “Discovery” anything for themselves. For them it is akin to playing a video game with a aggressive walkthrough that automatically describes how to overcome every puzzle and obstacle as soon as it is encountered. Ex, the 12 year olds aren’t learning that a rust monster destroys metal but rather they learn “in this fight we keep our metal away from that monsters because he said to do so.” I’ve tried to address this by asking the 16yo to not share his knowledge of the MM though I’ve told him he’s free to act on it.
Angry – how about a demo at GenCon this year?
“Discoverable Knowledge” – you are absolutely 100% dead on that it makes the game more fun for players, especially if they then use that info to their advantage. HUGE plus to your game if you use it, fellow GMs.
On a side note, I once created a campaign called “Immortals”. The players rolled their stats thinking they’d come back the following month with PCs all fixed up. Instead, I immediately dropped them into an adventure at level 0. They were free to use any skill or ability, and I kept meticulous (and painful!) track of when they used each skill. When they used it a certain amount of times they would “level up”. The background was that they were all children of the top god, and when trying to overthrow him they lost and were sent to earth with their memories wiped. The eventual goal would have been to discover this and kill daddy. One of the players died and all I gave him was some huge god saying “What are you doing here? Go away!” and he was res’ed back into his body, with a TON of questions. The mom gods were secretly helping them, for example, a tiny portal would open and a potion of healing would roll out of it. Unfortunately, my forward thinking idea wasn’t universally accepted and we ended the campaign after 3 adventures. Oh well… back to “normal” D&D…
I’m using the Forgotten Realms precisely to achieve this effect. I told my players flat out “Anything you’ve read about the Realms is fair game. But like all stories, don’t be surprised if some of it is wrong.”
I even had a player spontaneously exposit some relevant historical lore about the ruins they were entering.
Personally I modify monsters all the time…but there are rules to this, rules that make the game and the game world richer and deeper. The only thing is, you need to provide ways for the players to learn those rules, at least some of them. Ogres may have eight hit dice, certain spells, and incredible intelligence in my world–but players have a chance to learn this. Telegraphing the differences without giving away the game is a kind of puzzle design and can be one of the most fun parts of GMing. It’s also a big part of games like Elden Ring. Godrick Soldiers and Leyndell Soldiers have essentially identical skins, but you better pick up on the important differences (eg, lethality) quick. Doing so increases your enjoyment playing the game.
Only tangentially related, pardon the bandwidth.
I was pondering recently why I love the Eberron setting but am only *meh* concerning the Pathfinder Golarion setting. The biggest difference (besides Keith Baker not feeling like he had to preach to the gamers running Eberron how they should run their social lives) is that while both have suffered a pretty horrific event in recent history (the death of the deity Aroden in PF, the Mourning in Eberron), the authors behind Eberron freely admit there is not a canonical reason why the Mourning occurred, and Mr Baker himself has said it is that way so every DM out there can create their own reason (and Keith likes to change up the reason in his own campaigns to play around with the world in that configuration). However, the folks over at Paizo came up with a reason for the death of one of the most important deities in Golarion’s past… but they’re not telling anyone else. Why not? Apparently it’s because we’re not one of the cool kids. Eberron offers up a secret that you get to create – we’re not telling you what that secret is so you can flex your own creative muscles and make it your own, to be revealed or not, at your discretion as the GM. Pathfinder/Golarion – once they announced that they knew what had caused this calamity, it stole that opportunity from their GMs (the people who buy their products and why they exist as a company) as now we all know that whatever we make will always be not the truth (most likely) and they’ll never tell us what that truth actually is. Huge mistake on their part, all they had to do, from the beginning, is just say “we’re not setting a reason so you GMs out there can make up your own, we have our own theories but we didn’t want to restrict any of our players’ creative natures”, but admitting they know it and will never reveal it? Makes it an Undiscoverable but Very Public Secret, and yeah, not as interested in playing their game anymore.
I am currently running an Eberron campaign and hoping to guide the party towards finding out what caused the Mourning (in my version of it) and then trying to do something about it. Here’s to hoping it they follow the breadcrumb trail I am laying out before them. I do have a new player at the table (though they are all new to Eberron itself so there is always a sense of discovery for all of them) and it has been fun, the few sessions we have had, to see what I need to explain better to our new player versus the older hands.
Doesn’t this just make the death of Aroden a discoverable secret for you? You can’t discover something without moving from the space where you know there is a specific answer that you don’t have, to having it. So the company needs to set out a track ahead of themselves of new things with specific true answers that they don’t give you.
I have been a DM since high school, so almost 25 years. I started with 3.5, and yes, I miss it. That isn’t my point. I have always heard “metagaming is akin to godmodding” from other dm’s, but I don’t track with that. You mention “pretend elves” a lot in your articles, and anyone who had ever bothered to look up what an elf is (in literally almost any lore) knows that elves live a long time. It makes no mechanical, or thematic sense, that a player elf has lived potentially hundreds of years and doesn’t know that a red dragon doesn’t like the cold, or that a rust monster is, in fact, a pain in the ass if you don’t toss it a handful of gold coins and run for it. Even human player characters should know basic things about monsters, as those monsters are bloody everywhere. We’re they raised a noble? Never once left their villa? Then why would they ever become an adventurer in the first place?
If anything, player characters would better know how to survive and deal with issues than the players themselves.
I don’t know exactly when it entered the popular imagination of gamers, but there is a sort of Alice in Wonderland logic that many gamers seem to believe in where magic is basically totally absent from large urban settlements and farmsteads in the national heartland. All monsters, magic items, etc, either come from, or have been pushed to, the mysterious Over There that the adventure occurs in. What you are doing is going into the OT, killing and robbing a bit of the magic from it, and dragging it back to civilized society to thunderous applause.
Read your Campbell. This is the monomyth and there’s a reason it’s endured forever and underlies so many hero stories.
I’ve read Campbell. And the numerous academic sources debunking his anthropology.
Who’s talking about anthropology? I’m talking narrative structure.
Anyway, my point (I always forget that part) is that trying to keep what your players learn from reading the book out of the game doesn’t make sense because their characters, honestly, should know that already. And if not? Bardic lore. Knowledge checks. This isn’t hard.
Discoverable secrets sound fantastic to me however, I have reservations for one type of player: People who get long-term enjoyment from aiming at a certain type of ability or character goal or ‘build’ probably bounce off this type of system.
I’m thinking of the 3E player who slavers over their 19th level capstone power, or the players pulled forward by the knowledge that next level they get X.
Personally I prefer discovery to foreknowledge, but I’ve played with and run for these types of players. Maybe they are the ones who seek out the online guides? Or this style of game just isn’t for them?
In the original article on MDA angry doesn’t play coy that he considers about three of the motivations to be the objectively most optimal motivations to cater to in an rpg. This is I believe an example of Building as fun, and building something without knowing the laws of physics that controls it is largely an exercise in frustration.
On the players knowing what monsters can do part. I believe the sentiments is caused by a lack of proper encounter design. I feel that if your only challenge for an encounter is not knowing what the creature does then it’s a bad encounter.
I guess it also boils down to GMs that try to chase that feeling of “they have to solve what my creature does” or wanting to actively use all aspects of their toy. Like if a creature does x when hit by y. Then the gm wants to use y, but any player who knows that x causes y will not use it on the creature. This upsets the gm.
And a lot of that can be solved by better encounter design. (or adventure design leading up to the encounter)
There is definitely a kind of fun that comes in the form of “Knock that monster unconscious and chain it to the ground, I’m gonna target it with every single spell I’ve got to see if any of them have special interactions.” There is a learning, puzzley kind of entertainment that I know I personally enjoy.
A GM designing a creature to do x when hit by y is their way of putting something new and unique into the game. They should neither want or not want it to happen, but if it’s there, and a player discovers it and exploits it, they should be happy that the player is engaged and playing well.
In souls-like games discovery is noticing patterns of bosses and overcoming them through trial and error. You die, a lot. Your own reflexes are typically the deciding factor. The obscure lore very rarely gives a tactical advantage in game.
It’s different in a ttrpg, you’re trying your best not to die and it leaves little room for experimentation if the result is death each time. So the fun, in part, becomes tactically gaining an advantage through the pursuit of knowledge. If you already know everything a creature can do and all of it’s weaknesses, whether by in-game knowledge checks or by reading the MM outside of the game itself, the joy of that particular discovery is experienced differently, but still there. The new joy becomes the satisfaction of trying to exploit it in-game, and exploiting opponent’s weaknesses for personal advantage feels good.
Same can be said of magic rituals, lore, politics, etc. Player knowledge will increase over time, one way or another, that’s a feature not a bug, sure it will reach a point when they know “everything” about a game/setting and will seek new opportunities for discovery. But by the time a player knows that much, they’re just as happy to teach noobs, encounter a clever variation, or simply RP a less capable PC for the fun of it. Still the choice should be theirs to make, not shoved down their throats by intentional misdirection by the GM at every possible turn.
Other than monsters, what other sort of actionable, discoverable secrets are GMs working into their games? And how are you doing it? A quick one that comes to mind for me is traps (specifically Angry’s old articles on traps and telegraphing their existence.)
Is the reasoning the same if you replace Monster Manual with the “Adventure Path or Module you’re running” or “GMs notes”?
I suppose it is. You can’t stop them from getting access to either if they really want to, and it may enhance the experience for them.
My main reason for not liking players reading monster stats: I don’t always run them “correctly” and I dislike backseat GMing. The “why didn’t you use the awesome skill of player killing” questions after the encounter. Sometimes the answer is “I completely forgot that I could do it, because I was a little tired that day.”
I do like the general idea that a Playershandbook should really contain as little information as the players need to make informed decisions in game, and nothing more.
After the WotC scandal I started looking into many other games, and most other games don’t have multiple books. Which is understandable, but it also means the “hidden knowledge” is less hidden. But I wouldn’t mind actually preparing handouts letting players only pick things as they come up. That would be sort of cool.
This is an interesting and confusing article. My mind is making parallels with D&D 3.5e’s/Pathfinder’s ‘Ivory Tower’ design. (Too) Shortly put some feats and classes were just worse than others, traps for new players to take so experienced players could express their system mastery by avoiding them.
It’s a design philosophy I rather dislike.
But the proposed ways to find and acquire this system mastery in Slapdash aren’t by pouring over character creation, but at the table. Good options aren’t hidden among the bad ones, but options are simply hidden until used. Good article, plenty of food for thought.
That was not an “intentional feature” based on some “Ivory Tower design approach.” The designers never intentionally built bad feats as traps for new players. That’s a ridiculous assertion. I assume you have some clear statements of intent from the designers mouths to back that up. Otherwise, you’re just making assumptions based on your personal preferences and biases.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080221174425/http://www.montecook.com/cgi-bin/page.cgi?mc_los_142
There’s an old archived Monte Cook blog post about this that I’ve seen referenced. This paragraph in particular sticks out:
“Magic also has a concept of “Timmy cards.” These are cards that look cool, but aren’t actually that great in the game. The purpose of such cards is to reward people for really mastering the game, and making players feel smart when they’ve figured out that one card is better than the other. While D&D doesn’t exactly do that, it is true that certain game choices are deliberately better than others.”
It continues with some examples and nuances, but as far as I can tell that’s a designer stating clear intent. Though it is an article written in hindsight.
Rereading this, it does seem I conflated the term ‘ivory tower’ with deliberately better and worse options, which are two separate concepts in his blog post. That’s what I get for putting it (too) shortly. My apologies if this blog post is not a good source.
Interesting… thank you for this. I do think there’s a difference, qualitatively, between purposely designing bad mechanics to trap newbies and designing options that are okay, but not great and then designing great options for those who master the game. I am aware of the practice of the Timmy card and am also aware of the practice of designing mechanics to push newer players away from first-order optimal strategies in video games.
Recently, Adam Millard provided an excellent take on this design strategy in “Why Are Beginner Strategies So Boring?” which you can watch here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gy3p1SzgLM
Balancing a game to allow players who master the game’s systems to be rewarded is a very common design strategy, as it happens, but it is not the same as what the OP connoted as purposely dicking over newbies as a form of ivory-tower gate keeping.
PS: Millard also mentions the Timmy card design in MtG in the video, though he doesn’t call it that.
I would push back on the idea that some feats or classes are just “worse”. They may be worse for certain types of play, they may not be what you like…but there is no objective worse.
My favorite player that I’ve ever played as, (as opposed to DMing for), was a Wizard. I never once took an evocation spell. The fun for me was finding other ways to be useful in combat. Was that “suboptimal”? For many people, sure. But I had a blast.
Back in the 2E days, I always took proficiency in things like Heraldry. There was no mechanical advantages for it, but it played into the idea of the character I wanted to play. Is heraldry or etiquette a worse choice than alertness or danger sense? Depends on how you want to play the game. But there is no objective yes or no answer.
What determines if something is a good or a bad pick depends less so on how the player wants to play the game and more so on how the GM is running the game, I would say. Heraldry might be a good pick if the GM lets you identify warbands at a distance or discern who’s the most influential knight at a tourney, but if he doesn’t care for doing any of that then it could be a wasted pick and something that never sees any use.
Same thing with classes, a campaign set in a big capital might not offer many chances for a Ranger to shine, unless accommodated by the GM.
Of course some picks are objectively worse if they are useful in fewer situations than others, like if something has too many prerequisites in order to function that it ends up being impractical.
Man, here I was expecting the divine intervention rules to be a mechanic that the gm can use to generate divine intervention rules, which they than share with the player. The player can then share them or withhold them as they desire, but until the gm hands the player the Divine Intervention sheet, they can’t know the rules, they can only know the mechanics behind how those rules were generated.
This is maybe a strange analogy, but image a guy that has a shift at work while his favorite team is playing, and so he records the game to watch afterwards. He tells his workmates not to give him scoring updates, nor does he turn on the radio, nor get on the internet while at work. He is waiting to watch the game in full without knowing the outcome, and so that he can soak in all the drama as it unfolds, one play at a time…
Not strange at all. People have been managing their exposure to spoilers for ages. It’s not unreasonable to trust players to do so.
Like another poster I immediately thought of Gloomhaven’s sealed boxes for unlockable characters.
Picture this:
The group just finished their first adventure of Slapdash.
GM: Alice, your Sorceress reached level 2. Here are your new spells.
The GM hands her a sealed envelope with the Sorcerer Lv 2 handout.
GM: Bob, your fighter reached level 2. Here are your new abilities.
The GM hands him a sealed envelope with the Fighter Lv 2 handout.
And so on…
I mean putting the handouts you already mentioned into a sealed envelope is not that big of an innovation, but I still think it’d be hella cool.
I actually considered an entire heading on Gloomhaven and the success of other Legacy-type board games. Especially when combining legacy-type play with campaign-style play. It’s a brilliant model that resonates deeply with gamers and more TTRPGs need to take advantage of it. In other words… yes, you cracked the code.
I was also going to mention Legacy games as a proof that people are receptive to this type of idea, that the thrill of unfolding new concepts as you play is unlike anything else, and that people will gladly limit their own exposure to spoilers/spoiling other people in order to achieve that experience.
Heck, people do experimental stuff in storytelling games all the time (see Alice is Missing as a recent example) that relies on players to buy in to the concept. Why not in traditional RPGs as well?
I look forward to Slapdash and I definitely think the audience is there for it, despite the pushback from the polls.
Something similar to the Divine Rules System was done for Deadlands (at least the original, I’m not up to date). There was a players’ section of each book with general background knowledge that any player could read without issue. No Man’s Land which players were directed to if they were playing a specific character type or using a specific item or whatever (and by directed to I mean there were page references in the players’ section) and then the GMs bit with background details not immediately available and rules that only the GM was likely to use significantly. They were also highlighted in the players’ section so GM’s could read the book as the players did and then go get the extra info they needed. Of course players could as well, but they were discouraged if they didn’t want to spoil their own surprise. It’s a style of book layout I really enjoyed.
The joy of discovery is one of the core features of the campaign I’m creating.
The setting is a large medieval city that has spontaneously transported from a mundane Earth-like world to a magical Fantasy-like world. The residents have no idea how things work here; from the seasons, to how magic works, to what the indigenous denizens are like, races or monsters. To make things worse even exploration is difficult because the mist comes out each night, and “there’s something in the mist!” It’s all very West-marchy and a lot is to be determined randomly as I go, and so far it’s only intended to be played solo, not as a group, so no idea how it would feel to players.
Most of the progression involves discovery of these things before they are “unlocked” as usable. To begin with you can only roll martial characters with Human heritage. As things are discovered more options become available. Exactly how this unfolds and what the effects will be are determined through play. Even I don’t know how things will turn out. While I do have a plan, I’m not married to it, let the dice fall how they will. The joy is the discovery as much as the outcomes.
But, more related to this post, no two versions of such a game would be the same, the races and monsters of the world will have different abilities/tactics/motivations based on the dice and how they are discovered and interacted with. Magic would similarly unfold uniquely as different sources are discovered and pursued. If the game was polished enough for publication the “Monster Manual” would be a series of random tables, and while enterprising players could work out probabilities, they’d never know for sure.
That being said tropes are tropes and I’ve found it’s generally best to play within expectations rather than trying to subvert them all the time.
OK, I know I will by this comment officially make myself a stupid mouthbreather but we know that people are better at telling what they like than at telling what they want and better at either than at explaining why, so here goes…
I just can’t connect with the supposed joy of Discoverable Secrets of game mechanics. It is somehow inherently frustrating for me when it goes “a-ha-ha, you could do this thing, if only you knew”. It would be easy to write off as me not gravitating towards Discovery aesthetics, except I do gravitate quite a lot to it in any other areas – but not in game mechanics. (“Game” can be any of board game, video game, or TTRPG.) In game mechanics, I just feel hamstrung by it. (Now, it’s actually an interesting question whether “this monster is vulnerable to fire” would register as game mechanics or world info in my brain, I’m not sure. The divine spellcasting thing definitely would register as game mechanics though. There’s little I hate more than “there’s magic, there are rules to how it works, but you aren’t getting them and can’t deduce them”.)
(I also don’t really connect with that communalism thing but that’s a spectrum thing I have my shrink for. Why do I do TTRPGs then instead of sitting in the corner? Returning to the beginning, I’m better at telling “I don’t get communalism in general but somehow still like TTRPGs and forum RPGs and all that jazz” than at explaining why – although I do have some guesses.)
Aesthetics of play are broad labels and population-level classifications. Down to the nitty-gritty individual level, everyone’s going to have personal preferences. Some instantiations of some kinds of aesthetics just don’t resonate with some folks. I am not going to label you a stupid mouthbreather for having different preferences. Especially because you’re wise enough to recognize you’re speaking only in terms of personal, subjective experience. In short, you are doing it right and Angry commends you. And you’re just who you are.
If it is any comfort, I could be totally wrong on my read of the population-level engagement and when I try to sell Slapdash, it’ll fail because fewer people like Discovery vis a vis game mechanics and sealed boxes and things than don’t. That’s the risk designers take.
I like the idea of discoverable secrets especially around how the world and the different Ancestries work. Negotiating with an orc in my world is far easier if you avoid having pork at the table or in sight (as my orcs are pigmen, so eating pig would be like an alien eating a mentally challenged human in front of us).
I would say that there’s good meta gaming and there’s bad. Good would in my mind be players discussing what tactics to use in order to approach a problem, ideally this would be done in character, but there will likely be instances where it can’t be approached in that manner, for instance looking at a battle map, you can’t really see only what your character sees unless you’re playing online with fog of war, and that’s still not entirely accurate. As well as choosing to do something that advances or makes the plot more interesting.
Bad would be using knowledge your character shouldn’t have to give yourself an unfair advantage, and I disagree that that wouldn’t be a GM’s problem, because it could be, and it depends largely on how transparent the player is being about having read ahead in a module for instance, as well as how it affects the group. If one player is running ahead avoiding and pointing out all the traps and stealing all the best loot and one shotting the boss due to having brought anti-boss repellent specific to that encounter ahead of time, then that’s likely no fun for the rest of the players involved and it sure as heck wouldn’t be fun for me as the GM either.
Something to keep in mind regarding those secret skills is how they interact with the earlier skills, because unless you can swap skills, then there’s bound to be regret in learning you could have made a better build after the fact, unless that’s by design as well.