Suppose there's some bits of informations which would make for a much better players experience if they don't actually know it, let's say it's like some ending spoiler, how would you manage it?
Drowning it in labels and warnings on the DM manual is not going to work in the era of internet trolls, sooner or later (more like no longer than 3 seconds later) some smartass jerk is going to shout this secret into everybody's ears. Even in the best case scenario, we're still monkeys after all, and courious as such, even if it's going to bring our own demise. Orpheus and Eurydice's myth is almost as old as writing.
Is such an occurrence even manageable?

Let's say I have two problems of equal gravity:

- A player that actually reads the module beforehand and learns all tis secrets.
- A player that is completely disinterested and won't read/remember a sentence about the setting, or understand a secret held for too long.

I find the second more common, but to fix the first I just change a few things (especially the name of the dungeon/region/etc.) and a few details.

If you're writing a book, you could add optional secrets/rumors that may or may not be true.

Quote from: Eric Diaz on May 01, 2023, 04:08:35 PM
Let's say I have two problems of equal gravity:

- A player that actually reads the module beforehand and learns all tis secrets.
- A player that is completely disinterested and won't read/remember a sentence about the setting, or understand a secret held for too long.

I find the second more common, but to fix the first I just change a few things (especially the name of the dungeon/region/etc.) and a few details.

If you're writing a book, you could add optional secrets/rumors that may or may not be true.

Also, the first type of player is often also a GM, and GMs tend to be pretty good at "forgetting" what they know for sake of the game.

Spoilers are not that bad anyway. Everyone already knew what happened at the end of the film Titanic, but it still made a billion dollars.

What I've done is run the game with everything open. Players can look at the map with secrets displayed, if they want to read what I'm reading (upside down), they can. If I do that it takes the fun out of using meta knowledge to get an advantage. I've had them walk into traps they knew were there because they were clearly marked on the map.

Let's try with an example: Sherlock Holmes is actually helping his murdering friend John Watson cover his killing spree framing innocent people with his superior intellect, in a RPG where players are cops. Players might think they did the best they could, but in truth there's a shadowy presence always one step ahead of them. If they can feel it, it's awesome, but once the secret is out, who the hell would want to keep playing?
Has any game ever tried something similar? I guess not. I wonder if it can even be done, to keep secrets from players.

I personally have managed it by before starting a campaign I have stated that they should not read the game books at all, because
it will spoil THEIR fun  As far as I know, they haven´t done so

I've tried vetting participants in advance. They'll swear they haven't read the material and promise not to. Then there's always a sizeable percentage that end up doing so anyway. <smh> I honestly don't get it.

It's fun for me for the adventure to have unknown twists and surprises both from the GM and player side.  As a player I won't read spoilers.  As a GM, I ask my players not to.  If they do and they're not attached to me outside the game (family, friends) then I won't want to run for them again.

From the publisher side, I haven't seen a good solution.  The best I've seen is when the adventure supplies a list of possible twists that you can choose and encourages you to make up your own.  The only real solution is to write your own adventures.

Possible hot take: secret information being saved for a "big reveal" moment ... is railroading. Those sorts of moments are great in stories, and they are fun in games when they happen organically, but trying to make them happen when the participants have agency is pure folly.

Much like the wonderful suggestion to "stop hiding traps," where the challenge isn't finding the trap but avoiding it, I prefer these sorts of secrets to be obvious to the PCs, with the challenge being to overcome the NPCs misconceptions, for example.

Quote from: Zalman on May 02, 2023, 11:00:16 AM
Possible hot take: secret information being saved for a "big reveal" moment ... is railroading. Those sorts of moments are great in stories, and they are fun in games when they happen organically, but trying to make them happen when the participants have agency is pure folly.

Much like the wonderful suggestion to "stop hiding traps," where the challenge isn't finding the trap but avoiding it, I prefer these sorts of secrets to be obvious to the PCs, with the challenge being to overcome the NPCs misconceptions, for example.

I pretty much agree with your hot take. A good adventure can't be spoiled because it's all about the journey not the destination. It reminds me of Vonnegut novels where he spoils what's going to happen in a few pages and tells you not to worry. He was a master of spoilers that made you want to keep reading.

That said, I can see situations where it would suck, like OP's Sherlock Holmes example. The whole adventure is built around a conceit and it is not necessary to railroad. You could sandbox an investigation game where the real bad guy was a friendly NPC. However, this type of thing has to be done really well for it to not feel cheap. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd has been accused of being a cheap gimmick and that novel was written by the best selling author of all time.

So yeah, maybe the best thing is don't worry about it, use lots of random tables or improvisation, and make the published adventure your own by heavily modifying it.

I'm GMing one published campaign that has a Big Reveal. The book does a great job of keeping it hidden, by not referencing it at all unless absolutely necessary, eg it is not mentioned in the NPC descriptions and other areas players are likely to see. 

Quote from: Hellfire on May 01, 2023, 03:48:29 PM
Suppose there's some bits of informations which would make for a much better players experience if they don't actually know it, let's say it's like some ending spoiler, how would you manage it?

I guess I'd want to clarify the question a little further. Are we talking plot details in an adventure, or are we talking setting lore?

If we're talking about plot details in an adventure, I'd second a lot of what others have said. I.e., adventures shouldn't have pre-determined plots, and in the case of published modules there's not much you can do other than put your players on the honor system or re-write a lot of the module.

If we're talking about setting lore, that's actually a subject which is very close to my heart. I absolutely love games where there are legitimate mysteries (with answers) to the setting, particularly if they let the player play amateur archaeology and piece together those secrets from clues dropped into the game. IMO, this is quite difficult to do in a TTRPG, because of the requirement that so many things be laid out on paper for the players to read. It's actually one of the few places where videogames have an advantage over tabletop ones.

However, I've been working with my own settings on trying to make this work. One solution I've been experimenting with is to write up separate GM and Player versions of the Gazetteer. The player one would be written from an in-universe perspective, full of rumors, unknowns, vague descriptions, and even a few flat-out falsehoods. That is to represent what is generally known by occupants of the world. The GM version is written purely from the meta perspective, and contains the truth of everything going on in the setting.

A couple of obvious problems arise with this approach, the biggest one being that it's a trick you can only pull once. Once a group of players has played through a few campaigns and started to learn the secrets of the setting, the value of the approach falls apart, and at that point they'd probably rather just have a complete setting in one book. It would also stop working if the setting ever got popular enough for people to actively seek out the lore. And of course it's a lot of extra work, and if (you were selling hard copies) extra expense.

Most of the conversation here is about a big reveal.  Just knowing what monsters are in an adventure can be a problem too.  Knowing what's up ahead and customizing your spell loadout can turn a reasonable challenge into a boring cakewalk.

Quote from: ForgottenF on May 02, 2023, 01:48:35 PM
If we're talking about setting lore

I thought the title was clear enough. It's an internal mechanism in lore players should never know.
Being more specific, I had in mind this "GM trick", it's just one line, one single line, which changes completely perspective on the setting and interaction between players. It's a bit like "Bruce Willis is dead", once it's out there's no more fun to be had.
Is it even possible to protect?
Best I could think of was to have some brigtly red borded pages in the GM manual, "If you read what's here you're ruining the game for yourself as a player. If you reveal what's written here you're not smart or fun, you're just a useless asshole".

The only way to really do it is for the GM to do it--and never reveal it until the players discover it in game, if they ever do.  One person can keep a secret, after that, it gets iffy, fast.  This even extends beyond the campaign, sometimes.  I do this all the time.  I have secrets that weren't discovered in the game--and never will be, unless I use them again and the players discover it then.  That's why I don't reveal them even after the fact.

The only way to really do this, sort of, in a published adventure, is for the author to do exactly what I've described above, with a secret designed to be extracted before the book is published.  At most, the author will reveal in a GM section that there was a secret, which is itself a critical piece of information.  Then it's up to each GM to fill it in with whatever facts they decide will fit.  The author never tells, because someone might want to run that adventure even after the author is long dead.

Now, occasionally the players will get really intrigued by a secret and be unable to unravel it.  It can be very dissatisfying to leave that hanging at the end of a campaign.  You've got two basic choices:  1.) Run a second campaign about figuring it out.  2.) Tell them in a kind of epilogue fashion.  I can think of 2 times in the last 2 decades where I've caved and given the epilogue.  It didn't really provide much of a payoff compared to playing it out.

If your players love this stuff, and you want to do it well, then you must accept that you will likely take some of the campaign secrets to your grave.

Edit:  Ask yourself this: Was Star Wars better or worse after the explanation of the Force in Episode 1?  Sometimes the best part of a mystery is that it stays a mystery.