Goznar

@hexcrawl As far as I can tell, secrets in OSR RPG play are generally meaningless as a test of player skill. I'd appreciate your input! Let's say you've got a room with a secret door hidden behind big curtains. The clue is that the curtains are surprisingly free of dust compared to the rest of the room. The process for challenging the players goes like this: 1: They notice the clue (the curtains are free of dust). This is a test of their observation. 2: They decide to spend more time investigating the room (Can I get a closer look at those curtains?). This is a resource expenditure. 3: They solve the puzzle suggested by the clue (They pull back the curtains and find the door). This is a test of their reasoning abilities. There are two steps here that make this a "secret". The first is whether they notice the clue. Well, that's almost always just up to whether the DM draws attention to it. In the Landmark/Hidden/Secret model, the curtains are a Landmark, which players can investigate to see if there's Hidden information. However, the only basis they have for making this decision is whether the DM draws attention to it. When I'm DMing, I can trivially see as I describe a room whether the party suspects anything about a given feature. Let's say I mention the curtains, and the party doesn't raise an eyebrow. I then decide to elaborate about the dust, so they don't miss the secret; now I'm the one deciding whether they find the secret! The secret tested ME, not them. So instead, lets say I glaze past the curtains, so as not to change their first reaction; that's just me deciding they DON'T find the secret! Let's say, to break up this dynamic, I include a bunch of random noise, and lavish description on the parquet tiles of the room, which hide nothing. A party paying attention would learn from this, and would learn that my enthusiasm signifies nothing; they'd be left with the choice of investigating everything, or investigating nothing, since they now have no information on what's relevant. The second step, the resource check, is no more a test of the party than the first. Managing resources is about weighing risk vs. reward, but in a secret, the reward is definitionally hidden. If it isn't hidden, it's just a puzzle. Since the reward has to be hidden, the party has to weigh the risk of investigating against a reward they know nothing about- so that can't be a test of player skill either! The third step, solving the puzzle, is certainly a test of player skill; but there's nothing "secret" about it, at this stage the players already know there's a problem to solve. I might as well have said "There's a door behind the curtains on the wall there; how are you going to open it?" when they walked in the room, and I'd have provided them with the same degree of challenge. Let's say we take the DM out of the equation; his role is just to read boxed text from the module. Each room has a description describing its Landmarks, and each Landmark with a hidden feature is described as being slightly off, such that the party can infer that there's a secret there. Well, we've reverted to step one, and simply displaced the burden of how well to call out the Landmark onto the module designer. Maybe this solves it, since designers can act more adversarially towards players than DMs should. However, the signal to noise problem is still in play- if the designer includes a lot of scenery noise, a wise party would start to ignore it; if they include very little, a wise party would follow every lead. The optimum is built into the meta-aspect of the design, not the content of the game. You're getting to know the designer's narration style, not the logic of the dungeon. Is there some way to include secrets that don't suck in OSR-style play, or are secrets just overrated?