Welcome to the fifth in a series of Design Diaries for Rocket Club by the game’s creator, Em Hubbard:
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A few years ago, during an especially funny game of Rocket Club, the players were having an intense conversation in character. Things had gotten weird, and one character was struggling with something they weren’t ready to say. “You can tell us,” another character said. “There’s no secrets in Rocket Club.”
The irony is apparent to anyone who’s played this game, because there are always secrets in Rocket Club. The character who said it was harboring their own secret, as was everyone else at the table.
Secrets (with a capital S) have been a core part of the game since the very beginning. Every player character is hiding something. It might be a huge secret with devastating implications – I brought the aliens here. Or it might seem small and insignificant – I have a crush on the star basketball player. No matter what the Secret is, it matters deeply to the character, and they have reasons for hiding it.
They may seem like small background details, but Secrets carry a lot of weight in the game in two important ways.
First, they add complexity to the characters. You’ll know a lot about your character just from considering what they feel the need to hide. Your Secret is always burning in the back of your mind, weighing on you, maybe influencing the decisions you make. Since every Secret is also tied to a Mood, there are many times when the thing you’re hiding pops up during play, pushing characters to do unexpected things.
Second, Rocket Club is a game about community, and Secrets strike a delicate balance between individuality and connection. Secrets are meant to be hidden and eventually shared, so they carry a dramatic tension as characters work to keep their Secrets, and they create powerful moments when the truth finally comes out.
Mechanically, Secrets are at the core of character development. Working through their Secret is a player’s ticket to leveling up – gaining new abilities, improving their stats, or dramatically changing their character. This is an incentive to eventually share a moment of connection with another character. The process of getting to the point of sharing has changed a lot throughout the design process, but I’ve always thought of it narratively as a growing confidence and sense of connection. Throughout the story, your character feels more and more comfortable confiding in their friends until eventually you just can’t hold it in anymore.
Sometimes that moment of sharing is a bombshell reveal, but usually it’s a quiet moment of mutual support. It probably won’t have a major impact on the plotline. One character tells another what they’ve been holding on to, and (usually) the other character offers words of support or encouragement. These are almost always beautiful and moving moments of roleplay.
There’s something very fun, to me, about creating a moment, driven by the game’s mechanics, when the character is ready to share. It’s a fun constraint, knowing that with each experience point, your character is getting closer and closer to spilling the tea, and you never know exactly when it’s going to happen. At the same time, there may be moments when you want to share, when it would be convenient and helpful to share, but the game tells you you’re not ready yet.
The timing is often not ideal. Characters end up blurting out a Secret while alien lasers tear through the bowling alley. They shout, “I cheated on the English test and let my sister get in trouble for it,” while hunkered down behind the ball return. It’s awkward and difficult, but that’s how secrets are. That’s what happens with feelings forced down and hidden. And the moment of sharing is all the more fun when it happens in the middle of an unrelated crisis.
In the game I mentioned at the start of this post, the character who was struggling with their Secret did eventually get to share it. The rest of the group was debating whether the alien threat might be attacking town to retrieve its lost alien baby, and the player eventually sobbed, “I’m the alien baby!”
Ready to jump into your own Rocket Rig and start testing the boundaries of science? Learn more about Rocket Club here or sign up for a playtest at this link!