What do you think of characters not knowing each other at the beginning of the game

[Red Bear]

or having a lot of secrets in the background that the other characters/players don't know about? I have a player who likes to do these two things a lot but I think the game is much better when all the character and players are on the same page, knowing each other with no secrets, and even similar alignment and trust each other. What do you think?

[JoeJ]

I think it's just fine if the players want that. In some kinds of games it's quite appropriate. For example, the PCs might be survivors of a shipwreck or a plane crash marooned somewhere. It's also a fun way to start a superhero game, because of the established comic book trope of heroes fighting each other when they first meet. OTOH, for the stereotypical fantasy or SF adventuring party, I think it's more plausible if the PCs know each other.

The one thing that is always a bad idea IMO is for one player (not character, player) and the GM to conspire together to keep secrets from the other players. If you want to keep secrets from some of the characters, tell those players what you want to do and ask them if they're willing to play their characters not knowing.

[CharonsHelper]

The one thing that is always a bad idea IMO is for one player (not character, player) and the GM to conspire together to keep secrets from the other players. If you want to keep secrets from some of the characters, tell those players what you want to do and ask them if they're willing to play their characters not knowing.

I would say that that's true most of the time.

But for example, I once ran a short who-dunnint campaign where it turned out that one of the PCs had done it. I'd run a short session for him beforehand where he murdered someone (who kinda deserved it). It was interesting because the evidence made it obvious, but he was able to pass it off as a frame job combined with the other players KNOWING that he couldn't have done it.

Eventually they got too close and he murdered the other PCs, ending the 3 session campaign. (Not the climax I was hoping for since 2/4 of the other players were out that day.)

It would NOT have worked if the other players knew beforehand.


And it depends upon the game system. Some RPGs are designed to have PvP elements.

[Haldir]

Demanding 100% information from other players is essentially telling them how to roleplay, which is bad. Suggesting that the DM can't use secret information in a players backstory to create interesting twists is limiting, which is also bad.
{Scrubbed}

[icefractal]

It can be interesting, but it's not usually my preference, because it often brings the personalities of the PCs into conflict with the metagame reality of the group existing.

Not all PCs would want to team up with all other PCs. Even of those, some of them would take quite a while to fully trust the others. Yes, you can decide to react differently, but past a certain point you may as well have just played a very different character from the start.

With the PCs already having pre-existing relationships, that issue goes away. You can play a character who wouldn't just cheerfully team up with the first group he met in a tavern, and that's fine because he's had plenty of time to build trust, offscreen.

If you're playing a character who's willing to join anything that looks interesting, with anyone who feels like coming along for the ride, then this a moot issue, but sometimes I like to play other things.

Or for that matter, you can make the process of meeting up and becoming a team the focus of the game, but again, that's not what I want to do every campaign.

[JoeJ]

Demanding 100% information from other players is essentially telling them how to roleplay, which is bad.

No, it's absolutely not telling somebody how to roleplay their character.

[Jay R]

or having a lot of secrets in the background that the other characters/players don't know about? I have a player who likes to do these two things a lot but I think the game is much better when all the character and players are on the same page, knowing each other with no secrets, and even similar alignment and trust each other. What do you think?

You have hit on a crucial point.

Being on the same page and trusting each other has no particular inherent connection with having secrets or not kn owing each other at the start of the game.

If somebody is hiding his background to not be on the same page and not be trustworthy, then that's a problem. But the problem doesn't come from the secrets. The secrets came from not being on the same page and not being trustworthy.

My character Gustav is the only northerner in the party. When he first joined them, he claimed that his mission was, "to protect you from the Great Northern Forest. Or to protect the forest from you. I don't know which yet." He didn't claim to trust the party until they had saved each other a few times. I had a great time playing out that learning process -- and so did they.

And that last is the crucial point. A player who is playing his character in ways that the other players won't enjoy is a problem. The problem isn't the specific method used to not be fun for others. The problem is that the player doesn't want to make the game more fun for the other players. With this kind of player, banning a hidden background is merely trying to fix the symptoms, and it won't work. He will find some other way to not make fun for the others.

But somebody who wants to make the game fun for everybody can bring in fun with a hidden background.

[Delta]

The one thing that is always a bad idea IMO is for one player (not character, player) and the GM to conspire together to keep secrets from the other players. If you want to keep secrets from some of the characters, tell those players what you want to do and ask them if they're willing to play their characters not knowing.

Definitely not always a bad idea, I've had that work out quite well sometimes (and less well other times)

One time in a Shadowrun campaign, one of the PCs was secretly an undercover cop, that went on for months and it ended up being great fun for everyone involved, if everyone had known before, I don't think that would've been any fun for anyone and just a bother.

[Darth Ultron]

Well, just having the players not know each other is not so bad. Really all it does is waste game time. Far too many players waste way too much time with playing out the ''I don't know you" pointless stuff. And, the jerks that will just use it to ruin the game, of course.

It can lead to each player just doing whatever they want and not at all acting in a group. And you can easily waste dozens of game sessions with the players ''not knowing each other'' and ''not playing the game''.


In a general sense, keeping secrets is fine. Most PCs will have a secret, or at least an unknown about them. The big thing is more what the secret is. A good player might have any type of secret, even just a pure role playing one. The problem secrets come from when the player wants some type of jerk advantage over the other players. A classic example is the dumb Aragon type secret: My PC is super duper special as he is the king of the world...but he just acts like a five year old jerk ranger..hehe..because he is so cool.

A lot of problem secrets are where the jerk player wants and over powered character, and wants to keep that secret from the other PLAYERS, will the willing help of the DM.

But mostly players keeping secrets from the other players is just pointless. Like player A takes like five hours and lies and hides the fact that their character can change shape. Then, in hour six, the character changes shape to escape a trap and tells the other players the ''not big secret'', and the other players just shrug ''whatever''.

[Tanarii]

Sounds pretty normal to me. For that matter, usually those secrets are secret from the player themselves. They mostly flesh out the background and personality as the game plays out.

OTOH secrets like "my character is actually the Ninja / Assassin class, not just another Rogue" aren't usual or particularly beneficial.

[WindStruck]

It can be an excellent opportunity for roleplay.

But.. yeah, we all know who the PCs are, and that they're going to be working together? Not stabbing each other in the backs? Probably...

[Anymage]

Being a "doesn't play well with others" type is a common stage of gamer evolution, where they rebel against the idea of being a tactically and mechanically optimized playing piece by going in the opposite direction. (Sometimes it's also a thing douchebags do to justify their behavior, but if you try to stop one avenue for that douchebags will just find another.) I find that giving character hooks beyond being a typical adventurer helps these people get a better handle on what they want.

Personally speaking, I like the PCs to have ties to the world, if for no other reason than that a sense of ownership is a really good motivator. Which here gets to a central issue. Secrets are fine, if they can be justified. The PCs should have a reason to band together beyond the simple metagame knowledge that they're all PCs. Both before and during play. If your secret, your backstory, or even your cooly disaffected archetype preclude that, to back to the drawing board.

[Haldir]

No, it's absolutely not telling somebody how to roleplay their character.

In what goofy universe is "I need to know everything about your character, even the things that they keep secret" not telling them how to play their character?

[CharonsHelper]

In what goofy universe is "I need to know everything about your character, even the things that they keep secret" not telling them how to play their character?

The same world where telling someone your RL secrets isn't giving up your free will?

[JoeJ]

In what goofy universe is "I need to know everything about your character, even the things that they keep secret" not telling them how to play their character?

The real universe, obviously. There's nothing in that at all about how you should play your character.

[Kelb_Panthera]

It can go either way depending on the details of how it's handled. I'm not against it in principle. If it's handled well, it can really enrich a game. If it's handled poorly it can destroy one. That's just all there is to it really.

[Tanarii]

Players don't usually pay that much attention to each other's backgrounds that haven't come out in play. There isn't that much difference between a secret and something that hasn't actively come up in play.

What matters is when the 'secret' is something explicitly known to the player or player and GM that is going to eventually have a negative impact on the other players / party as a whole.

Which is why I used the AD&D Assassin and Ninja classes as examples. Players were explicitly supposed to keep their class secret, especially for the ninja. And those classes were often built in trouble to the party.

Edit: otoh they were designed in an era of gygaxian RPG clubs with lots of players, and tourneys. And of course PC-classed henchmen. It was a slightly different context from the common small group home game.

[Hawkstar]

I have two vaguely relevant stories here. I once really badly bungled a game by making a character that "Didn't play well with others", because I tried making a Gnoll character, and playing it along the guidelines established by the culture established for Non-Evil Gnolls in Races of the Wild - The party had a chance meeting in a cave to shelter from a storm. I intended to play the gnoll as standoff-ish and defiant of the party - Making several mistakes I now recognize as "Terrible player" behavior - notably, taking all of the treasure from a chest, after (deliberately) tanking the trap attached to it. I'd intended to hand the treasure back out over the course of the RP, but I was also (Foolishly) in the mindset of not telling players more than I felt they needed to know about my character (So, I never outright told them "She's standoffish at the start, but I intend for her to warm up to them as she spends time around them, and give out the treasure."

Of course, it didn't help my plans that one of the players was trying too hard to be a 'team player' and eager to facilitate team-building, and making my gnoll extremely uncomfortable in the process (To the point that the campaign blew up when I had her react violently to him in an attempt to get him to 'back off'. No lethal intent - but a grapple escalated to him casting spells and everything went downhill from there)



The other idea revolving player secrets... Okay, so, actually, I was just going to make a "Mr. Roboto" reference.

[MrSandman]

My personal preference (note: personal preference, neither the one right way to do it nor the absolute truth) is for characters to have a reason to stick together, whether they know one another beforehand or not. By this I mean that there should be a believable reason for them to want to work together to start with and a reason to continue to work together. It really annoys me when a character adds nothing to the group, actively works to hinder them from their goal, and the only reason it doesn't get dumped on the first village they find is the PC label on his clothing.

Regarding keeping secrets, I think it can be done well or poorly. To do it well, normally requires that the other players be on board with others keeping secrets, so they at least should know that someone may be keeping a secret. I've got a story about that, but no time to write it, I'll add it later.

[Torack]

I honestly enjoy it a bit when there's a bit of both. Some of the characters know each other, like small clumps. Like in a four or five group party, two players know each other, and another three also know each other. I mean that way you get a bit of both worlds, where you have some distrust for the other PCs at first and get to build a relationship with them, while also having already having a strong bond with another PC.

[Knaight]

Most of the time the whole "how did these characters meet and form a party" is the sort of thing that's really boring in play, and also one that can often stretch credulity. Having characters who all already know each other is an obvious solution to that, but it's not the only obvious solution. A shipwreck was already mentioned, but other possibilities include being hired by a common authority figure, being the only survivors of a raid, being abducted by aliens, and being pulled into a fantasy world and transformed into its magical knights. Obviously these all have genre restrictions, some more than others.

As for secrets, eh, whatever. I generally find it more fun for the players to all know the character secrets so they can deliberately make them interesting in game with their actions, but there's a case to be made for keeping secrets secret. It mostly comes down to how much you value immersion and how fragile your suspension of disbelief tends to be.

[Delta]

I honestly enjoy it a bit when there's a bit of both. Some of the characters know each other, like small clumps. Like in a four or five group party, two players know each other, and another three also know each other. I mean that way you get a bit of both worlds, where you have some distrust for the other PCs at first and get to build a relationship with them, while also having already having a strong bond with another PC.

Yeah, this is an approach I like too.

Personally, as a GM, I ask everyone to have at least one "link" to the rest of the group. This can be as deep as "That other PC is my brother", or "Three of us went to the same school together", but at the same time, if someone wants to play the unknown guy, it can be rather remote links that one party doesn't even know about at first, like "I was once part of a mercenary group that fought for a bad guy, and I was there when we raided that other PC's home village", in the latter case, the other PC will most likely not even know that and probably find out during play (of course I would only do that if I was sure everyone involved could handle such a secret coming out later and the potential consequences)

[Quertus]

What do I think of characters not knowing each other at the beginning of the game? It's the best! That way, the chatters can develop real attachments to one another over the course of the game, rather than begin play with artificial ones that feel, well, artificial.

Of course, replaying the character later, and actually knowing some of the members of your party is the best even moreso! In this scenario, you're starting play with actual developed connections to the other PCs.

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Having secrets that the other PCs don't know about? Um... I'd have to say, if that isn't the case, it really hurts verisimilitude. Who doesn't have secrets? Ok, I kinda knew a guy who published all his passwords, including his bank account information, but, other than him, who doesn't have secrets?

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Having secrets that the other players don't know about? Yes, please. I don't want to read 100 pages of character background that my character doesn't know anything about - I want the joy of Exploration, of learning these things in character. Please don't take that away from me.

Also, I rarely game with/in groups composed solely of people who can keep player and character knowledge separate, so it really strains... everything... when they know anything that their characters don't.

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All the PCs having a reason to be together? Um, duh, if you don't have this, you're just asking for a gaming horror story.

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Ties to the world / setting / area? Yes, please. Please help my "not from around here" character to develop those by having an interesting world for him to interact with, a world that is worth caring about.

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Trusting each other because they have the same "alignment"? No thanks.

Requiring an ideology echo chamber, and being unable to interact functionally with opposing points of view? No thanks.

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I honestly enjoy it a bit when there's a bit of both. Some of the characters know each other, like small clumps. Like in a four or five group party, two players know each other, and another three also know each other. I mean that way you get a bit of both worlds, where you have some distrust for the other PCs at first and get to build a relationship with them, while also having already having a strong bond with another PC.

Done right, this can be really cool, and, as such, it's probably my favorite. But I've also seen it done wrong, and lead to cliques. So, word of warning, it isn't the perfect recipe for success by itself.

[Tanarii]

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Trusting each other because they have the same "alignment"? No thanks.

Requiring an ideology echo chamber, and being unable to interact functionally with opposing points of view? No thanks.

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I dunno man, it's pretty realistic for folks to gravitate towards those.

Of course, for most "adventuring parties", they're something more akin a professional crew brought together for a contract job. Skill set and the ability to work together are likely to be far more relevant than ideological outlook.

But that isn't always the basis for a party.

[Haldir]

The real universe, obviously. There's nothing in that at all about how you should play your character.

Telling you things about my character is a choice about how I want my character perceived, and how my character is perceived is an integral aspect of how my character is played. No matter how great you think you are at roleplaying and ignoring meta information, that information WILL bias in some way. If I choose not to tell others something about my character, that is my roleplay choice. Expecting or demanding otherwise absolutely infringes upon my roleplay choices.

[JoeJ]

Telling you things about my character is a choice about how I want my character perceived, and how my character is perceived is an integral aspect of how my character is played. No matter how great you think you are at roleplaying and ignoring meta information, that information WILL bias in some way. If I choose not to tell others something about my character, that is my roleplay choice. Expecting or demanding otherwise absolutely infringes upon my roleplay choices.

You're confusing characters with players. Characters can keep secrets without the players doing so. If the table is okay with players keeping secrets, fine. But it's not your sole decision as to whether or not that's a part of the social contract.

Your statement, "No matter how great you think you are at roleplaying and ignoring meta information, that information WILL bias in some way," is very telling since it has nothing whatsoever with the way you play your character; it's a demand to control the way other players play their characters.

[LordCdrMilitant]

I always start with the players knowing each other.

The first time I ever tried GM'ing, two halves of my party decided that, upon meeting each other, their characters weren't going to get along, so they basically formed rival parties until I forced them together.

[Yora]

I am always completely in favor of all characters being created as an already existing and established party. Having them all meet in a bar with everyone knowing that they won't be leaving before they formed a party is both clunky and a waste of time. Having them start as a party also helps with avoiding smartass players who think they are super briliant by making an antisocial character who dislikes all the other PCs. It can work in fiction, but is just stupid in an RPG.

[Haldir]

You're confusing characters with players. Characters can keep secrets without the players doing so. If the table is okay with players keeping secrets, fine. But it's not your sole decision as to whether or not that's a part of the social contract.

Your statement, "No matter how great you think you are at roleplaying and ignoring meta information, that information WILL bias in some way," is very telling since it has nothing whatsoever with the way you play your character; it's a demand to control the way other players play their characters.

So much fallacy. If you don't agree that players are responsible for creating the image of their characters, and that image is influenced by what other people know, I guess that's fine. You're wrong, but whatever. Gotta give you props for twisting "my characters image is my own to project" into "you're controlling my perceptions, therefore my character!" That is world class gaslighting.

[Tanarii]

Meeting in a tavern is fine if they're all there for a reason that brings them together. Like needing to find a job and meeting a prospective employer / old man quest giver.

Especially if their job is "adventurer". Or if you prefer, mercenary-for-hire. Those kinds of characters would expect to work with a pick-up crew from time to time.

Of course, that doesn't preclude them from having worked together in the past.

In some campaigns this works best as the basis for adventuring parties forming. For example, west marches or wotc official play, in which "pick-up" parties are the norm, with the possibility of having worked together in previous adventures. For a single party game, it may not work as well.

Gotta give you props for twisting "my characters image is my own to project" into "you're controlling my perceptions, therefore my character!"

From what I've seen so far, you're the one conflating those two things.