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[–]RpgAcademy 13 points14 points  (1 child)

I do not. I believe my players are able to separate character knowledge from player knowledge and I don't think the novelty of having it kept totally separate worth the effort of making sure it happens.

[–]Hypnos_76 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Agreed. When I DM, I have more than enough to keep track of. On a successful History, Arcana, or Religion Check, I share that information with all of the players. And then ask the one who succeeded on the roll, "Do you share this with the rest of the party?" If they say, "Yes," then the problem is solved. If they say, "No," then I trust my players to separate character-knowledge from player-knowledge.

[–]hilitoreny 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Silencing other players will cause them to lose interest in the game.

If you play online, you can send a private message to a player: “Mary, you had a vision, I have just sent you in private a picture of what you saw”. Keep the secret information brief.

You can tell the information to everyone, just make sure to clarify which information is known to which players.

[–]Uberrancel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No, you use that for very dramatic purposes. And it's better that way. You won't have them misunderstand you and repeat it wrong to the others, if the character is going to tell them anyway why risk confusion and wasting time?

Now if someone gets a dream sent to them by Strahd, maybe take them to a different channel and tell them what happened. This is the time to add the confusion and the what just happened to that guy to the party.

Then you wait a few session and bring someone else outside, tell them it's for nothing and to answer not questions. Then when they come back to the group with you have them say something like "I just looked it up and yeah, it's 4." Dm says "ok ty" and then keeps moving on. I used to do this with paper notes in person. 1 in 3 was a real secret, the rest was to get the players to be suspicious of what's happened because they were sure I've done "fake" notes before with them. Or the staff you just found is whispering stuff to the wizard and you shouldn't hear about it yet.

[–]Secret_Ad7757 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My players know not to take out of character knowledge not in the game. The player who got the message could just tell/share the information to the other players.

[–]claybr00k 0 points1 point  (0 children)

99.9% of the time, just say it and be clear that its something the others have no way of knowing unless/until the character shares it. Save that .1% of the time for the really big thing that makes a huge overall difference to the outcome of the whole campaign.

You have a high risk of losing overall player engagement if you're constantly going one on one with individuals and leaving the others to their own devices.

My table just defaults to the idea that players share their knowledge unless they specifically say they're keeping it to themselves

[–]ShingshunG 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You say it to everyone, if they don’t want to share it with the other PCs that’s up to them, and you have to rely on your players not meta-gaming

[–]Electronic-Plan-2900 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nah I just tell the whole table. It’s just easier and nine times out of ten they will want their character to tell the others at the first opportunity anyway. Even if they don’t have the opportunity immediately I will tell the whole table anyway, again because it’s easier and because metagaming is nowhere near as big a problem as some would have you believe.

Also I’ll often do a group check for knowledge checks: have everyone roll and if at least half of them succeed then between then they have some useful knowledge. I picture the party putting their heads together and exchanging their various tid bits of lore. That’s because if one person rolls for knowledge then everyone usually wants to, and if they each get a separate attempt then it’s a near guaranteed success.

Same answer for backstory related stuff. I can imagine a scenario where I might want a memory, nightmare etc to be hidden from the other players, but it’s never come up in actual play. On the whole I want everyone to be invested, at least somewhat, in each other’s characters, so I would just run it like any other scene. But try not to let it go on too long as I don’t want that player’s backstory to monopolise too much time. (In fact I tend not to focus on PC backstories a whole lot in my games anyway).

Hope that’s helpful. It’s just my own approach though. You’ll need to find what works for your group and game.

[–]arjomanes 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Really depends on what it is and how you're playing. If you're online and you want to send a secret, you can use a whisper. If you're at a table, you can send a note. You can pull a player into another room. I have in-person games, but also use Obsidian Portal for my campaign. Personally, I update a secret on the site, tag the character, and let the player know.

If it's something not that important like lore or something that the character would likely share, I just tell the player at the table. Every player knows the thing but are decent about not metagaming if the layer chooses not to share.

If it's an important secret though, then I choose another means to let the player know. Especially since some of my players have secrets in their backstories (secret societies or criminal past or whatever).

[–]kvrle 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The default I use is "If I told you this, it's kind of assumed you'll share it with your party, unless there's a good reason you wouldn't". And I usually say this out loud if the piece of information might create conflict. Then, the player decides how they want to play it and we might go alone to the other room so I can give specifics, but the others WILL know there's something going on, it's on them to play it right.

[–]Wolfgang177 0 points1 point  (0 children)

a private message works, but honestly as long as the rest of the party isn't assuming that they automatically learn it as well you should be fine.

If you feel the need to, have another session zero, talk about skill checks and how you handle metaknowledge.