Dark Secret should be called Behavioural Flaw instead

During character creation, you pick a Dark Secret, and you’ll get XP every session that your Dark Secret applies. The underlying mechanic is sound, but I think the name is bad. If it’s about encouraging roleplaying, it should be Behavioural Flaw instead.

Why do we even have this rule?

The hardest thing to do in any TTRPG is to have your players be captured by the bad guys and for them to be happy with it. (“But my character wouldn’t be captured” / “The GM is railroading” / the rules encourage the PCs to fight to the death etc.) Forbidden Lands distinguishes between Broken and dead, which is good, but that still requires the GM to inflict massive damage rather than have the PCs decide to come quietly.

But a close second is rewarding good roleplaying. My gaming table of 30-odd years routinely ignores any game’s rules about “give out XP for exceptional roleplaying”, because we’re cynical bastards who don’t think any of us roleplay particularly well. It’s only when the game says “OK, but if you hit this particular mark you get XP” that we’ll consider it.

That’s why it’s good that Forbidden Lands has two rules about gaining XP if you roleplay your character.

Pride exists so you can be a Big Damn Hero and say “no, goddammit, I will not go gentle into that good night”, and when all looks lost you pull out a d12 and… have a 42% chance of things still being terrible, because this is Forbidden Lands. You might lose your Pride if you fail, and you may not be in a situation every session where you could roll your Pride, so this is very much the secondary roleplaying mechanism, but it’s pretty sound.

The primary mechanism is Dark Secret. “Did you suffer from your Dark Secret?” is one of the XP questions, and the important word here is “suffer”. This makes it easy for the GM: did the player decide to do something suboptimal, because it’s what the character would have done? This is similar to how e.g. Blades in the Dark says you should get XP if you do the sort of thing that your character should do (e.g. a Leech gets XP when they address a challenge with technical skill or mayhem), because you might not, and it’s pretty clear if you did.

So far, so good.

Why should starting characters have dark secrets, anyway?

Min-maxers will happily tell you that the optimum build for a character is to be Young, because you have more attributes, which you can never get more of in-game; and fewer skills and talents than other characters, but you can easily rectify that once you start getting XP. This also plays into the post-post-apocalyptic feel of the game: the blood mist is over, and most people with families are merely happy that life is now going to be a little bit easier, but for a rare few, this is the time to set out and explore the land. These adventurous people without existing bonds to weigh them down are almost certainly going to be young.

But that also means that these people haven’t lived yet. Their life lies ahead of them, in the campaign. Why should they already have a dark secret?

I’m sure the game has thought of that. Let’s look at the Dark Secrets in the Player’s Handbook (pp. 23-30), and categorise them.

• You occasionally do weird things, but nobody would notice and it doesn’t harm you:
  • Secretly you enjoy inflicting pain and injury on others.
  • You enjoy setting things on fire - ostensibly in the name of the god Horn, but you like it, too.
  • You are haunted by doubt and don’t believe in the songs you sing.
  • You are secretly deeply in love with an NPC or another PC.
• You behave strangely sometimes, but it’s no big deal:
  • You enjoy wallowing in the mud and to live off what others would never eat.
  • As everyone and everything are part of Clay’s creation, you lack respect for other’s property.
  • You are a moralising know-it-all who thinks you always know the will of the gods.
  • You don’t trust anyone and think they all want to take your silver.
  • You feel uncomfortable among other people and prefer to be alone
  • Your horse is more important to you than any human. Others cannot understand your bond.
  • Your yearning for magical power is stronger than anything else.
• You occasionally do weird things, and it might cause you harm
  • Your purse is often empty, for you spend silver as swiftly as you obtain it.
  • You sometimes take to the bottle to chase away the memories of all those you have killed.
  • You compulsively steal valuables you catch sight of.
• You have a dark past which will almost certainly not catch up with you:
  • You once served the Rust Brothers as their jester, but managed to escape.
  • Once, you left a wounded friend to die in the woods to save yourself.
• You have a dark past which does occasionally catch up with you:
  • The old wound from the claw of a demonic beast never fully healed.
  • You panic in closed and cramped chambers.
  • You are haunted by visions of the world behind the veil.
  • Zygofer the Spellbinder haunts you in your dreams and makes you obey him.
• You have an enemy:
  • Once, you killed a Rust Brother, and you are now wanted by them.
  • You owe silver to a powerful individual. A lot of silver.
  • You conned a Rust Brother and now they are bent on revenge.
  • Once, you stole something valuable from a Rust Brother and now they seek revenge.

Oh.

It’s hard to say with a straight face that many, let alone most, of these are things that you could use as a source of XP, and yet that your fellow players would be surprised at eventually finding out. Many of these Dark Secrets are either stuff you do all the time, or secrets about your past that will basically never come up. Only a quarter really count as proper dark secrets.

The phrase “Dark Secret” is unhelpfully precise

I was statting up rival adventurers for my campaign the other day. One of my NPCs is basically a dwarven biologist geek: she wants to explore the world and find interesting plants and animals. In her sample quotes that I use to remind myself how to play her, I have “I’m afraid I must insist that you let me poke at that plant and find out how it works” and “Shush, mummy’s looking at bees”. Her Pride is “I will discover all of the secrets of the natural world”.

But then I got to Dark Secret and drew a blank. She’s only 24! She’s done nothing reprehensible!

And then I thought “OK, how about we call it Behavioural Flaw?”, and immediately I got “Gets nerd-sniped about fascinating biological facts.”

And immediately I can see what effect this would have in play. The party are on a beach, the tide is coming in, they’re at risk of being cut off from the mainland, even drowning, but Aiobhgreinna is fascinated by stuff happening in a tide pool and insists that she needs to see what happens next. Or they’re being attacked by insectoids, the fighter and the hunter insist that they should retreat to higher ground and pepper them with missile fire, but there’s some very interesting behaviour going on – is that chemical signalling‽ Fascinating! – and she’s sat cross-legged on the ground taking notes.

Meanwhile, her childhood best friend Aloisinna (who my notes describe as “basically Luisa out of Encanto”) has the Pride “nobody I protect shall come to harm”, but also the Behavioural Flaw “In denial about being in love with Aiobhgreinna”. So every time Aiobhgreinna gets into trouble because of being a huge nerd, Aloisinna darts in and rescues her, but is in denial about what this means, because they’re both from a very traditional dwarven society, so they pretend they’re just good friends (Aiobhgreinna is oblivious, Aloisinna is in denial).

I love this, and I hope my players meet them. But one thing that’s very clear is that neither of these behavioural flaws are secrets. They’re respectively “she does this sort of stuff all the time” and “everybody but them can see that they’re in love”. The last thing you want to do is say “it’s no longer a secret; you have to ditch your XP fountain mechanism”. Things were just getting good!

PCs’ Behavioural Flaws should cause them problems maybe 1/3 of the time

My player’s dwarven hunter started out with the Dark Secret from the rulebook “You feel uncomfortable among other people and prefer to be alone”, roleplayed it but wasn’t happy, and switched it out for “When I kill an animal I need to appease its spirit in a private ritual.” The party was wandering around comparative civilisation at the time, so there was no need to hunt to eat, and then wandered into a terrible dwarven city that used Grey Bears as perimeter defence, and Bristleburr was satisfied that the damn things were monsters using trapped dying souls as ammunition for their Fear attacks, so wasn’t going to spare any time to soothing the dying soul.

But last session they ended up being stuck because a huge herd of bison was in their way, decided to hunt one bison while they were waiting, and then realised that a pack of wolves was interested in the kill. The party decided to just take a haunch and leave the rest of the carcass for the wolves, but Bristleburr needed to also take the heart, so he could burn it in a subsequent consecration. I didn’t rule that anything bad happened on that occasion, because they had things under control, but if things had been tighter I’d have been happy to say “because you stuck around to cut out the heart, you’re going to have to fight at least a few wolves”.

Similarly, sneaking out of the camp to do a private religious ritual sounds like an excellent time to be jumped by wild animals or treacherous NPCs when all of your mates are away and/or asleep.

Another player has the standard Rogue dark secret “You compulsively steal valuables you catch sight of”, and again, this can be an excellent way to cause them trouble, by having there be shiny things belonging to important NPCs that a sensible player would leave well alone. But I think you can overdo it: if the question is “did you suffer from your Dark Secret?”, then a tactically-competent player who manages to roleplay their behavioural flaw and not get caught has technically stiffed themselves out of XP.

Also, if this quirk of the character always leads to bad stuff happening, the player may start to wonder why they’re doing this stupid shit in the first place.

Instead, I think their behavioural flaw probably won’t cause them any trouble, but there’s always a chance that it might. This being Forbidden Lands, you could roll for it: between 2 and 4 dice is probably low enough if you’re aiming for stuff happening about a third of the time; or you could start at 1 die and if nothing happened, roll another die next time (this requires some bookkeeping on your behalf, though). Or you could make a value judgement based on other stuff you’ve got planned and dramatic irony. Either way, it keeps the players on their toes, and it means you don’t have to think of something bad to happen every time they trigger it.