Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs
artichoke, I'm sorry, but you're misreading the passage you quote, perhaps because it's not in the most logical order. David explained it correctly, but I'll go over it more closely.
The starting condition is "When a Secret appears, it is not necessarily made public." The secret's appearance takes place on an appearance roll, that is, on a 6 or less, or approximately in one session out of ten. It may or may not become public. The normal consequence is that the PC engages in frantic efforts to see that it doesn't become public, and those efforts drive the storyline.
(Compare Secret Identity, a specialized form of Secret, which emulates all those Silver Age stories where Superman frantically tried to conceal his nonheroic identity—once he even asked John F. Kennedy to pretend to be Clark Kent, reasoning that if you can't trust the President you can't trust anybody.)
If the PC's efforts fail, or if they decide not to try (like Tony Stark saying "I am Iron Man" in the first movie), then you get the situation in the preceding paragraph, "If a secret is ever made public. . . ." But that's normally going to radically disrupt the character's life, especially if they took Imprisonment or Exile or Possible Death; it often writes the character out of the campaign entirely. But the secret being made public is not something that can happen just because you rolled a 6 or less. If the order of the paragraphs had been reversed that would have been clearer, but that's how those sentences are meant to be read.
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That's how I had read it. Just because the secret doesn't have to be made public doesn't mean it can't be made public.
In my response to your post I said there are two ways it can come up and quoted the text. I'm not sure why you're under the impression that I said it's only possible for it to become public.
Since it has been resolved that the player doesn't get to just make it public whenever he/she wants to it's less of an issue. Hopefully the tense problem in that sentence will be corrected.
A reader shouldn't be expected to understand that, after having read the word "you/your" as referring to the player eighteen times in a row, that the nineteenth "you" refers to the GM — especially in a sentence that has a weird tense switch.