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Ever been in an RP with secret/hidden character sheets?


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This is something I've been mulling over for a while, and I'd like to hear from both GMs and non-GMs. Has anyone ever taken part in, or run, a roleplay with hidden character sheets? Metagaming is an issue I repeatedly run into, and I'm wondering if it can be mitigated by just.... not having public character sheets that everyone can look at. Or maybe public sheets with blatantly false information? Like yeah, sure, your vampire is actually three hundred years old.... but only you and I know that. What if your vampire's public-facing character sheet says he's forty-five? WIll the other players pick up on side comments? Would the other players still assume that their character might feel an unusual charisma around him?

 

idk, mang.

 

what do you guys think?

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I've been in rps with optional character sheets, now I know that's not exactly hidden, but there were some players who'd always have info sheets up, some who never would, and me who only had sheets up for some of my characters.

 

now there were two players with no info sheets which I knew which gave me totally different impressions of that lack.

 

one player was pretty active, he had distinct characters so If I saw them once I'd know enough about them to create a theory of personality about what made that character tick, and thus be comfortable with those characters come next time we'd rp.

 

The other was more vague, It was hard for me to be comfortable rping with him because even if I had some idea of who he was playing I couldn't create a theory of who that character was based on in-thread impressions. I'd wish for even a bare bones bio just so I could know enough to work on.

 

 I do like truthful bios, but when I don't want people to know something about my characters I'll often leave it out both of bios and of mention in rp threads unless the character deems right to bring it up. Like I had one character who could be pretending to be another, and made a bio for each. Some of the members on the site I was on made guesses about their similarities, but I never confirmed it.

Edited by Kazetatsu
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I’ve done tabletop games where character sheets were between the player and the DM, and they were super fun! It helped with the immersion since they were all supposed to be strangers to each other. 8D It was super fun, not knowing what the other characters’ motives were, if they were friend or foe, if they were truthful or lying.

 

Tbh, I prefer that. I rarely read the character profiles of the characters I thread with (at least not until I’ve threaded with them for a while first) because I like to go in as blind as my character. (Obviously, if the characters are supposed to know each other first then that’s different and I want to know everything my character would reasonably know.) I like to be surprised! I like spontaneity and I don’t like planning a lot.

 

I also write my character profiles this way. I only include info that is public knowledge, and if my character publicly lies about something, then I put the lie in the profile. If they say they’re 30 but they’re really 300, I list their age as 30, etc.

 

All this is totally okay on my games. Our character profiles are there to be utilized however the player wants. 8D All my experiences with this style have been very positive and a lot of players do the same thing. I dig this shit. 

 

So yeah, I’m 100% happy with the idea of private profiles.

Edited by Viscount Rhi-Rhi

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I've been a part of forums without applications in the past, which was just fine. The challenge of relying on only the information provided in character was fun.

 

So, having that information private is fine by me.

 

...So long as you don't require character approval. If you do, that can be daunting for new players who are looking for applications, just to see where your standard is and what the norm is.

 

If that's the case, could you have a field for secrets? Say all the public information is displayed well publicly. This information might contain lies that the character maintains about themselves. However there is an additional field "secrets" where the player can describe things that are not commonly known. This field is only visible to staff and the member.

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I have run roleplays where to avoid meta-gaming the Character Sheets were archived after approval where only Staff had access to them. Obviously, that means your roleplay forum/site could be less appealing to people who are accustomed to using OOC information to their advantage and that may potentially impact traffic.

 

I would be fine as a player submitting a CS in private as well that would be kept secret. As pointed out it makes the game of learning about a character a bit more challenging and appealing.

 

 

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These are all such good responses! Keep it coming, I love hearing about everyone's thoughts and experiences!

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I was on a vampire of the masquerade site that did it. History, application was all hidden in a form only for myself and the admin running my character's side could see. It allowed us to talk in private, and it also meant if my character lied no one could call me on it, unless they brought an admin in to roll a BS roll. It was a lot of fun, a lot of mystery. I really enjoyed it.

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I’ve had secret roles for characters that I’ve talked to admins privately about so that while my history/information said one thing there was a whole other level of shit going on behind the scenes. 

 

This is is especially important if your character is sort of a puppet master sort. They control things from behind the scenes but no one should know what’s going on behind the curtain. (Wizard of oz level shit). 

 

This is sort of thing is especially important to hide because you don’t want every Tom, Dick or Jane knowing that you are the mastermind behind some shit until a plot level reveal. 

 

I dont prefer to do apps because of the OOC knowledge it provides characters that they feel they all need to know and do know even if they have zero valid reason to know it. 

 

I hope that helps. 

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I have been on boards where the applications, histories, character sheets and rolls were all done in private concealed manners. Private subforums for each member and Admin doing a lot of behind the scenes work. The problem I have with them is two-fold. On a board where all the character information is secret you can suffer from a board looking a lot less active than it really is. For instance if the Admin spends 7 hours doing behind the scenes work rolling for people, answering questions and plotting you might not get a single visible post that shows they're watching the board. This can lead to a false impression that the board is slow or dead. 

 

The other problem I have with this situation, is that you have to have serious trust in the Admin. On the board I was on if you watched the flow of threads carefully enough and had a decent grasp of the mechanics of the game you started to notice a strange trend in the "luck" of certain characters on their success/failure ratios. Some characters that the Admins interacted with frequently were statistically beating the odds on a regular basis while players that the Admin clashed with seemed to be unusually unfortunate when it came to the roll of the dice. Since all of those rolls were hidden you have absolutely no proof that the Admin wasn't playing favorites. Which can lead to a serious feeling of alienation of a board and cause the players to feel as though the Admin has a VIP group who are getting special favors. 

 

I love the concept; but I am a little skeptical on the practical applications of the system. 

But I do love the idea of a hidden section of the board where players and Admins can place secrets so players can have private histories and stuff that allow them to move their characters deceptively. 

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  • 4 weeks later...

I'm on a site where all the apps are put in areas which are closed to anyone not in that membergroup. It's a heavy stats-based site with a combat system so all your moves, etc are hidden from others. People only know the info that YOU give them. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

My forums encourage applications that are basically IC scenes that allow us to get a feel for the character. Now we do still look for stuff like what magic you have, where you're from and age but that's mostly for convenience. If players want to use the scene to give away some of their history that's cool, if they don't that's also cool. It's a good way to get a feel for characters personality while leaving them open to development. I personally have made some characters in the past and through playing them their profile became a bit of an outdated relic, all the stuff I established in it never being that relevant. An open history also allows some fun twists to develop, like when you make the character you might not expect to have a secret sociopath sister but then you meet the right player and it's meant to be~~~

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I've never gone the hidden route, as I've always participated in games in which the applications (if there were any) served as reference material.

 

Of course my own games have bios with which folks can be about as vague or as detailed as they want. For me, that means I leave a lot unsaid there. For example, I have a character who's terminally ill, but it's not written anywhere, and I've hardly hinted at it in threads so far. It's also pretty much a big ol' crapshoot to figure out my characters' sexual and romantic orientations, because I hate it when players are forced to disclose that (Characters inevitably start behaving like they already know that info upon meeting your character for the first time).

 

That disclose-what-you-want approach may be the way for you to go, in some capacity. I'm not sure what kind of metagaming you're fighting, but this way folks can essentially hide whatever they feel inclined to hide. No one can manipulate the story with info another player doesn't want their character to have. If you have stats and don't want players to know each other's, you could also separate that out from basic biographical and other info that's helpful to have out in the open. You just need two different spots to disclose private vs. public info.

 

Another context: With tabletop games, I'm used to everyone keeping most of their character info to themselves. I've been involved in a game over the last few weeks in which we all knew just about nothing about each other's characters at the start, with the exception of a couple of characters knowing each other beforehand and having a little bit of info. We still don't know all that much about each other's characters, but we aren't deliberately hiding a ton of stats. For example, everyone now knows that my character has the best notice/investigation stats and that my character's the only one with healing skills. That just comes out as we explain what we're doing. We don't stress about keeping everything between us and the DM.

 

 

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I'm used to the OPPOSITE problem; where players intentionally use "holes" in their character sheets to fabricate ways to metagame or powerplay on a thread-to-thread basis. (mostly on sites where characters have supernatural/non-human abilities).  

 

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On our D&D forums our character sheets are public, but we're all highly experienced roleplayers and really good friends and we don't really meta (and if we do we catch one another).

 

I am also playing a game where we have a "Public" profile which includes information the people around you would know. Physical description, rumors (true and false ones) etc but, we've also kept secret character sheets with full details for the admin. I don't personally ever see this as a problem, as all OOC stuff gets handled off the forum in chat or in Google Docs privately, that way only IC stuff actually appears on the forum itself. It is nice. It can make you look dead to guests, but having a disclaimer and regular announcements could easily mitigate that.

 

I personally prefer private profiles. If I have the option to do bullet points on an application I will. I hate how people assume my character's secrets or private personality quirks are widely known because they read them on my profile. I always make sure now to only put what someone would publicly know about my characters, and they can learn the rest from seeing that person in action (or as the admin access to my secret docs).

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