One of the most powerful storytelling tools that a writer can use is to invoke the secret motivations of a character for the readers. This not only adds a little pep to a story–after all, it will be novel and exciting for the audience so long as it does not stretch disbelief–but it also gives a great motivation in tabletop roleplaying games as a way to fully flesh out a character in ways that don't cause problems with metagaming at the table. After all, if players don't know another player's character's secret, they can't act in such a way that will give stuff away.

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I've always been intrigued by the concept of secrets in roleplaying games (it was the one thing that made Pathfinder Society seem really interesting to me), but Paranoia is a game that influenced a lot of this philosophy for me.

Paranoia, for the uninitiated, is a game in which the entire goal is to survive a dystopian future where a malfunctioning computer is likely to consider anything you say or do to be treasonous, Communist, or signs of mutation (all of which are punishable by death).

The marketing blurb says it best:

As a Troubleshooter, you are a member of Alpha Complex’s most expendable elite force. Tasked with finding trouble and shooting it, you will be hunting mutants, terrorists, traitors, [CLASSIFIED], secret societies, renegade bots, and DAIVs, which are [REDACTED]. You’ll save Alpha Complex from its greatest threat, unless you accidentally become Alpha Complex’s greatest threat.

Paranoia: Red Clearance Edition is the one I personally own, and you can find it on Amazon or DriveThruRPG (affiliate links). However, every edition I've played has been pretty good, and I'm not quite sure which ones I've played over the years.

The thing about Paranoia is that everyone has a whole ton of secrets, and keeping them is the goal of the game. If you've ever played Mafia, Werewolf, or Town of Salem, you know what this sort of game looks like. Paranoia just adds a complication because of how the whole setup also pushes the group to try to work together just enough to get a common goal achieved.

Of course, with traitors, mutants, and Communists (and Communist mutant traitors!) everywhere, someone has to be found to be one. . Not trying to accomplish the goals is treason, but something as small as a wrong word can be damning.

"What I think my comrades-uh-teammates are trying to say is-"
Actual last words of a character in one session of Paranoia I was in.

The real lesson of this, however, is that secrets add interest. In a game where everyone is truly universally cooperative, there's no reason to have any concern about what other people are doing, and the only conflict comes between the heroes and the villains.

Of course, a strong cast of supporting characters can help to make this more complex and undo some of the issues that might otherwise arise, but this is not always feasible, either due to the storyteller's level of skill or investment or the players' interest in side-characters.

If every player in a game has their own secrets, however, it is an entirely moot point.

A Case Study

The other day I ran a one-shot of Degenesis for a podcast, and I think it went really well because of this. (disclaimer: I'm a freelancer for SIXMOREVODKA, the creators of Degenesis, working on Degenesis-related stuff). The two players took on the role of a kid whose buddies had been killed by a Chronicler's Shutter (sort of a secret agent reserved for work the Chroniclers deem too violent for their image), and the Shutter.

Neither of them really knew the true identity of the other (though the lackey suspected that the kid was affiliated with the people she'd killed), and it led to some great dramatic tension; the kid's player assumed that the Shutter was actually being exploited by the Chroniclers, rather than one of them, and it led to a great climactic scene in which the Shutter's player revealed (out of character) that she was going to take the artifact back to the Chroniclers.

I don't want to reveal too much about the whole setup; the scenario was not related to my work with SIXMOREVODKA, but I do plan to make it publicly available at some point, but I think there's a few things that work well here:

The whole scenario was built with an introduction, two scripted plot points, and six playable characters with their own secret motives (as well as overt reasons for being on a journey). The conclusion was unscripted, and entirely dependent on the players' choices.

The introduction of the adventure went without a hitch, and the scripted plot points were intended to really communicate the setting for the players (who were new to the world of Degenesis).

The characters' motives, however, were intended to keep the players guessing at what their next course of action should be.

In a twist of irony, the two players actually had common cause for a large part of the story; the Shutter was to escort the Chronicler home for punishment (since having to resort to murder is frowned upon, and the reason he had to do that was because of his prior embezzlement of funds), but the Cluster (the governing body of the Chroniclers) was willing to accept his death along the way so long as the artifact made it home to them. In the end the Chronicler managed to escape, but not before the two players engaged in one last futile hunt to try and find him.

There's a comparison to be made to Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, a book which I can't really claim to be much of an expert on (I read it in high school), but which has stream-of-consciousness accounts from a handful of characters. While I don't know that the players necessarily got into stream-of-consciousness from their characters' perspective, they have a similar disconnection from the other players' characters.

This storytelling was very interesting, in part because a lot of games I've played in often turn into descriptions of what characters think, and what wound up happening was a lot more description of what they did. Now, not having played with this group before I can't guarantee that it's unusual to have that happen, but I think there was something to be said for it. Characters' actions matched their motivations, but those motivations were concealed from other players.

I think that helped a lot in creating a dynamic story.

Application and Take-Away

One of the elements of psychology that is not really well known is how people internalize group dynamics. Of course we know a fair deal about how people interact, and we can draw some conclusions from what we observe in social hierarchies and society at large, but this is often left out of storytelling.

A lot of storytelling is heroic in nature: the Hero must face a challenge and vanquish it, making the world a better place.

Adding secrets to the mix creates a game that feels a lot different: the characters still can pursue a heroic goal, but they also have a source of natural conflict.

Secret conflict tends to work better than overt conflict: there are times when some minor conflicts can be acceptable (e.g. two characters with different ideologies, but working under the same banner), but there are also times when this can be disruptive as players take things too far and slow down the story.

However, secret conflict serves as a way of increasing tension and intrigue.

I think that it works much better than overt conflict, because players have an investment in not letting it flare up during the middle of other storytelling. However, without any inter-party conflict, the game becomes a lot less interesting: the only conflict is that provided by the storyteller, and if the players are perfectly in union that becomes an example of having to provide harder challenges continuously: something that should naturally happen but which should not necessarily be arbitrarily exaggerated and accelerated by the lack of human motive.