Knowledge and Secrets


Advice

Liberty's Edge

We've heard it all before. Knowledge is power, and it is the ultimate weapon - apparently.

In recent months, I've taken a fascination with the concepts introduced in Occult Adventures and Ultimate Intrigue, with their ideals of secrets being more valuable than any sum of gold. I wish to incorporate these concepts into my games, to add layers of mystery and subtlety. However, I do not know how.

There's always talk of how knowledge and secrets are powerful, but how, exactly? I may be inexperienced, or perhaps too narrow-minded to understand, but I wish I knew exactly what that meant. Sure, knowing an enemy's secret weakness can be a huge boon, or knowing the location of a powerful weapon can be great, but that's about it. Like it was stated in OA, there are powerful mages who trade in secrets with covetous outsiders, but what good is a secret if nothing is done about it? One could say that knowledge gives you power because it helps you control the situation more, but how does that influence a party, which in my experience, usually has very little autonomy and is led by the GM to their objectives. (Not that this was not of my own doing, I only recently have been getting seriously about my GMing.)

Please, if anyone has clarity upon this, or better yet, EXAMPLES of how knowledge is power, please share. I find these concepts to be fascinating, but in my weak-mindedness, I do not know how to incorporate them or use them in meaningful ways.


Awww.... stupid website ate my wall of text.

Kirin style for mundane application.

Secret names for power over monsters

Knowing players' connections to family and friends for evil guy revenge

I miss my full post. :*(


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kadance wrote:

Awww.... stupid website ate my wall of text.

Kirin style for mundane application.

Secret names for power over monsters

Knowing players' connections to family and friends for evil guy revenge

I miss my full post. :*(

Protip: left click on post, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C before you hit submit. Always.

It will save you a lot of tears.


Actually, I think you've already hit the nail on the head yourself. Knowledge can be applied to control (broadest definition, including all subsets) the situation. Everything the party learns along the way on their adventures that they can use to their advantage is power. Examples abound, from the mundane to the exotic to the mystical, within the game, though it usually isn't translated as such in game-terms. Thats up to you to relay to your players what knowledge they've learned, and possibly also how this knowledge is to be applied.

There are also direct translations of 'knowledge is power' in game terms, like the examples Kadance gives. These are great but often don't have the feeling you're trying to evoke simply because they're (easily) accesible and known entities.

Evoking 'knowledge as power' within the game requires the knowledge to be restricted by you as the GM, making the players work for the advantage they gain down the line.

Many GM's like to construct truly epic tales where the PC's are challenged with adversities, opponents and conditions they could never hope to face when you're purely going by the rules. Pathfinder gods for instance are not given stats on purpose and can do anything. PC's have no hope whatsoever against such a being normally. Yet they have to for whatever reason you've given (this reason in and of itself can also be a mystery that once learned gives them the power to try and figure a way out of the situation). Learning of a weakness, finding a macguffin, or circumventing its plot through exploiting a loophole are the only ways to turn the tide translated as giving the entity restricted stats and abilities the PC's CAN overcome, granting them a tool that otherwise would be unavailable like an artifact, or creating dependencies the plan hinges on in order for it to succeed which the players can then either remove, outlast, change or trick (the virgin can be saved [or slept with, or killed] before the sacrifice, stop the witches from sucking children's souls before dawn so they'll turn to dust [Hocus Pocus is a fun movie!], finding an alternate outcome if different conditions are met [no example right now:p] or telling them genies are still more powerful than sorcerers neglecting to inform them of their captivity and forced servitude [Y U so powerhungry, Jafar?!].

Figure out the goal/effect of your villain/situation and work backwards dividing the information required to overcome the grave threat until you've reached the reason for your players to get involved (and any extra mysteries you want to throw in as desired in order to give depth to the villain or situation beyond 'well, just because I say so'). All of these things are mysteries that once known equate to power. You can mess around with the order a lot, too. Throw in some obstacles along the way and you have a campaign!

Many tvshows and books work with this formula, too. Buffy the Vampire Slayer's storyarc for a season almost always included discovery of the villain, finding out its goal, discovering his plan and then figuring out a way to stop it (not necessarily in that order, btw), for example.

You can really choose to do anything here, thats up to your preferences, whether you go for the epic deity-defying struggle, stopping a cataclysmic event from happening (Armageddon is coming! Send Bruce Willis into space!], high stakes, high risk intrigue (Game of Thrones; the 'powerful knowledge' it starts out with is the illegitimacy of the king's heirs and diverges from there). The scale of the campaign's scope doesn't diminish the value of the trope, is what I'm saying.


Arcane Addict wrote:
Actually, I think you've already hit the nail on the head yourself. Knowledge can be applied to control (broadest definition, including all subsets) the situation. Everything the party learns along the way on their adventures that they can use to their advantage is power. Examples abound, from the mundane to the exotic to the mystical, within the game, though it usually isn't translated as such in game-terms. Thats up to you to relay to your players what knowledge they've learned, and possibly also how this knowledge is to be applied.

Yes, this.

Knowledge, broadly defined, includes situational awareness, meaning you know what's going on and what's likely to happen and can prepare for it. This can be as simple as knowing that there's a pit trap around the corner (so you don't fall in), or that the Duke of Beefstick is actually a figurehead for an evil vampire that has been running the duchy of Beefstick as a breeding farm for type O-negative blood for several centuries.

Knowledge includes knowing who your allies are, who your friends are, what their capacities are, what their intentions are, and what their methods for achieving those intentions are. Military scouts, for example, are often trained to identify SAM and DOC : Strength, Armaments, Movement, Deployment, Organization, and Communications so the commanders will not, for example, be surprised by a cavalry unit appearing out of nowhere and attacking an undefended flank.

Sun Tzu expressed the idea thusly: "what enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge."

In PF terms,.... say the king has hired you to rescue his pet dragon from an evil princess. Almost the worst thing you could do would be to stroll up to the front door of the castle and walk in like you own the place. There's not even a guarantee that the princess -- or the dragon -- will be there. At a minimum, you want to find the dragon before you try to rescue it. I'd also like to know if the princess is a second level commoner or a twenty-second level sorcerer, since that might end up relevant. Knowing whether she's guarded by Juliet's nurse or by Morgoth's balrog might be useful, too. Other questions will occur to you either before you attempt the rescue, or (to your detriment) during.....

Master Sun put it well: "Whether the object be to crush an army, to storm a city, or to assassinate an individual, it is always necessary to begin by finding out...."

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