In Zyborg Commando Resurrection Overdrive every character has a secret known as a dark shadow. This only gets revealed during your final day, but you can hint at it in other ways until then. It makes you a danger to your own team. This is one of those games that’s so crazy it just might work. I still have to run it for my group. That’s been on my to-do list for way too long.

But that’s certainly not the only game where characters can have secrets. Sometimes that’s a formalized part of the procedure, but often it’s not.

Very often, people decide to have a secret and plan some sort of big reveal. I’ve had people tell me that there’s no point to having a secret or internal motivations unless they’re revealed to the group, but in my experience there’s another, (and just as rewarding) way to handle that.

For a long time, in our All for One campaign, Martin had a secret that he only sort of revealed to us. What it is isn’t important. The important part is that it influenced how he played that character and how that character behaved. All for One, to me, that’s the much more fascinating and, dare I say, realistic part.

In real life, lots of us have secrets that we don’t reveal to people, but they certainly influence how we live our lives. Why should it be any different for our characters? Having a secret or two, or even a skeleton in the closet, is one of those things that can add a real depth to a character. Even if nobody ever figures them out or even realizes that there is a secret, it certainly influences how that character behaves and thinks and reacts to the world.

After all, there are countless secrets that I have had as a game master that never saw the light of day, but it certainly influenced how things happened and how certain non-player characters behaved. It doesn’t matter that nobody discovered them. What matters is how they influenced the experience.