Exchange of Realities

When I wrote about campaign journal articles yesterday, Josh mentioned that part of a reason for his were that they were useful to the game group. It makes perfect sense to me; my players all are or have been regular readers of this blog, and I’ve been able to sneak in plenty of hints, reminders and in-jokes when working on my game-relevant posts.

But having readers in the audience is a double-edged sword; every now and then there are details that it makes sense to share but that the players just don’t know yet. (One of my former players actually refused to read my stuff for that reason, even though I’d made it pretty clear to him that I was avoiding spoilers because everyone else was a regular.)

Sometimes it’s something that hasn’t happened yet; maybe you want to talk about how you planned a certain location, or discuss the fine art of juggling multiple timelines happening offstage but affected by what the players do onstage. Other times it’s still-hidden context; character motivations that nobody’s realized yet, relationships that exist but haven’t had the chance to come up, plans in the works. Even admitting there’s something left to tell can be a giveaway; I have a couple series that I never got around to writing because the corresponding Impractical would have to admit that there were parts of my use of the topics that the players just hadn’t figured out yet. (Prophecies and mysteries come to mind.)

I’ve seen all sorts of ways of dealing with this issue. Some people avoid future information like the plague, reminding their readers to not spoil details on the module they’re using and carefully tiptoeing around questions that don’t have answers yet. Others begin the post with “If you’re in my group, DO NOT READ THIS.” (How many groups actually obey is an interesting question in and of itself.) Then there are those who don’t worry about it, cheerfully discussing their plans for games before they’ve even run them.

I take a mixed approach to my hidden details. Most of the time, I try to hide what’s coming, or who’s got a hidden agenda (though by now most of the group has realized that anyone with a physical description probably has a hidden agenda somewhere, particularly if they’re written in something more complicated than plain text and especially if they take a custom color). Every now and then, though, I find it useful to write a post that hints at a preexisting character dynamic; my sample wordless conversation post and “Feel, don’t tell” both featured active NPCs I knew the group would recognize doing things offstage and in backstory respectively.

Your turn, RPG bloggers. Do your players read your blog? How do you try to avoid giving too much away in your campaign journals? Do you ever give in to the temptation to gloat? Fire away!