An old article from OSR blogs which you may have seen, but I only found it recently when reading the rulebook for His Majesty The Worm rpg (which is more like a compendium of useful rpg advice)
https://diyanddragons.blogspot.com/2019/10/landmark-hidden-secret.htmlThis blog describes a system for categorising the presentation of information in rpg games, or how to create THE HIDDEN THING etc. There are three types of information,
-LANDMARK
this is "free" information, that the dungeonmaster volunteers and provides to players upon establishing the scene. No action is required on the player side to uncover it, it is often used to anchor or illustrate the immediate environment and surroundings of the encounter setting
-HIDDEN
this is defined as any information that comes AT A COST, ie it requires a player action to uncover. The cost could just be time, or resources (eg spend money to bribe / hear a rumour) or it could be a tradeoff (eg by choosing an action that uncovers this hidden information, you forego some other choice action) and it could also be some skill check on the player side.
Something I thought was interesting about the osr blog approach here is that "hidden" information is NOT SECRET, ie the dungeonmaster should exert themselves and telegraph or provide blatantly obvious suspicious hints and leading information etc that invites the attention / alertness to encourage the player to be drawn to the "hidden" thing
-SECRET
the idea with the secret information is that it is sort of recursive, the existence of the secret is itself a secret. So from the dungeonmaster's landmark scene setting descriptions alone, as well as the hints at hidden things, there is no direct indication of the existence of the secret thing. Maybe it can only be inferred by a player after uncovering several "hidden" things at a cost as described above, but even then it should not be obvious, or may require some player initiative or intuition / experimentation. The secret thing is more like a conjecture, player hypothesis or conspiracy theory.
The author of the blog also recommends that all of the most important information should be landmark or hidden, ie discoverable. All secret information should just be optional, to prevent catastrophic game-breaking impasse etc. I thought this was very useful advice, and a concise dungeonmastering framework for the provision of narrative information
