Hi, this is my first post on the forum!
I’m GMing my first game, and I wanted some advice on what I should share with my players and what I should hold back. We’ve done character and crew creation, and one short character-building scene, but we’ve not gotten into much of the actual play. I’ve done a fair amount of prep work, mostly stocking up on NPCs and narrative hooks, sketching out faction and NPC connections, pre-writing some flavour text, and especially laying foundations for the world and themes for me to jump off from during play. This last one is what I’m asking about; obviously my players will encounter NPCs and factions, but I don’t know whether I should explicitly share with them my “tenets”, the “rules” I’ve made to inform and guide my in-the-moment GMing.
As an example, I was having some trouble with the magic system. I really floundered with the idea of it; unlike the criminal world, the class system, the political tensions, etc., I didn’t find it intuitive enough for it to coalesce into anything I could get a decent grasp on and build off of. I didn’t want to make up fake physics rules for an imaginary world though, so, instead, I made some thematic tenets that would clarify what was relevant for me to ask when magic came up. For instance, one of them is “fear has power, no matter on which side of it you stand”, so if I needed to come up with a ritual off the cuff, I might look at how fear informs the practitioner and/or their target:
this ritual
- hides a person from your enemies’ view
it requires
*three drops of a loved one’s blood (a loss the caster fears),
*your own tears brought forth in joy (what bolsters the caster and/or invokes their enemies’ fear),
*and a vial of ghost oil (anchors to mechanics, but keeps to themes of hiding and risk)
I have a dozen or so of these tenets, some to guide how I convey the world, some to guide how I navigate play, but all imperatives impacting the game. So my question is: should I share these with my players? Will that help them to anchor their play in a shared fiction, or will it add confusion and obligation that slows things down and makes the game less fun? Will knowing what I’m working off of clarify what I’m trying to convey, or will it ruin the suspense/surprise of not knowing what the GM is going to do next?
I feel inclined to share most of them, since I want to be very explicit and transparent about why I’m doing what I’m doing and making the calls I’m making, but I also don’t want them to be locked into stuff I came up with, alone, before we started. Y’know, like, sure, I’m putting up streamers and balloons, but the party comes into being when the guests step through the door.
(Also, since at least one of my players probably uses this forum and might see this: shhh, GM-forum-posters confidentiality, no tattling)
(tbc, that’s a joke, it’s fine if you see this)