What is the difference between the "Private to" and "Secret to" options for the "Insert a private line" option?

Private to the addressee knows it's private, secret to it appears (only to that person) as normal text.

OK, thanks.

Why would you want to add text that's secret but the reader doesn't know it's secret?

Because you want them to assume everyone saw it?

Say they've ingested some drugs, see things that aren't there and you want them to react to it naturally?

Oookay. That seems like a situation that doesn't come up a whole lot, but very useful. Thank you.

Someone that doesn't know their character is hallucinating?

Telepathic projections that the recipient doesn't realize are happening in his head?

Seeing dead people and not knowing it?



Plenty of reasons, really. It depends on the game and character.

That is so interesting. It does seem a great way to mess with someone's head.

You can use the secret to pass information from rare sensory inputs to only those with the ability to sense the rare facets of the scene without breaking the narrative with formatting symbols.

You mean like soul sight? :)

I like to do it to see if people will even bother sharing information.

For instance, I'll throw in a "<Player> noticed that Blah, Blah, Blah..." just to see if that person will mention that they noticed something.

When you include things in Private to, they're bright orange and everyone knows 'HEY, THIS INFORMATION WAS ONLY GIVEN TO ME!' so they jump to share things, instead of it being an organic decision.

Another good idea. Thanks

Yeah that's what I use it for too, to encourage PCs to actually share information rather than assume everyone else knows/sees the same stuff they do. Last time I ran a game on here I basically told the players to assume they were the only ones receiving certain information if it was, say, sensory input - just because they noticed the shadow passing overhead and the big dragon-shape in the sky when they look up, doesn't mean everyone else has, for example. Same with anything involving knowledge checks - their character might recognise some ancient runes, or a name spoken by an NPC, but they might only be getting that info because they're the only one with a background in/experience with the subject.

I use secret text all the time, I like to be sneaky like that, and I wish players could use them too - I had a character in one game who could speak only via telepathy so I used private text for their speech even though I was generally sending the same text to each of the other group members (just in case I might ever want to tell them different things, or something). Would've been nice to use secret so it wasn't bright bloody orange and I could just do it in normal black like the rest of the text, but at least it was there.

You can use the color tags inside the Private lines as well.

private to this player: this is orange this is gray this is orange again

Gray is not black.... but it's better than orange.
I do this all the time for my players who might be speaking telepathically with a familiar...

On the other hand, the grey might be be difficult / impossible to read depending on the user's theme.