The Art of Withholding (Just Enough)
How and when to reveal information as a Games Master without giving the whole game away
Last night, the session felt off. Not broken. Just—adrift. You’ve probably been there as a GM: the group stalls, players look uncertain, and you wonder whether you’re doling out clues too stingily… or if you’ve handed them a feast and they’ve only nibbled the garnish.
So you second-guess. Did you do something wrong? Did they miss something vital? Are you holding back too much? Or are you just overthinking?
This is the heart of an ongoing GM dilemma: how much is too much?
The Investigation Isn’t Just What’s Found—It’s How
A helpful metaphor emerged in the post-game chat, drawing from the Slow Horses TV series.
Imagine this:
Stage I: A character rummages through a bin while someone watches from a window. Everything is hasty, surface-level, and compromised by fear of being caught.
Stage II: They steal the bin bag and tip it out elsewhere, quickly scanning it.
Stage III: They take it somewhere private and spend an hour dissecting every receipt and scrap.
All three stages offer different levels of investigative engagement. But in most RPGs, players operate almost exclusively in Stage I—getting surface-level clues because that’s the tempo they’ve set. But what happens if that’s all they ever do?
You get players walking away with a single scrap of burnt paper… and leaving the rest of the compost heap untouched. Not because they’re uninterested, but because the rhythm of play never encouraged them to dig deeper. They got a “clue”—that must be it, right?
Players Aren’t Lazy—They’re Looking for Cues
Most players don’t want everything handed to them. But they do want to feel like they’re on the right track. When the trail goes cold, some will push forward… but most will assume they missed something, give up, or redirect their attention elsewhere.
That’s where the GM comes in—not to hand over the solution, but to act as the invisible hand that adjusts the altitude of the searchlight. Sometimes that’s a nudge:
“You walk away from the heap… but as you step back onto the path, you see something else glinting in the compost. Maybe it’s worth taking another look.”
Other times, it’s a deeper internal beat:
“You recognise the name. K-Cell. You don’t know the details, but your training tells you they were the kind of team that got buried—officially and unofficially. And if you heard the signal, maybe someone else did too.”
Think of this not as spoon-feeding but as focusing the spotlight. It’s not about making things easier; it’s about making the stakes and options clearer.
If you’ve ever run or played The Dee Sanction, you’ll know that walking the line between secrecy and disclosure isn’t just a GM skill—it’s the whole point.
Agents of Dee survive by what they know. If you haven’t yet joined the conspiracy—or wish to deepen your role in it—you can still gain access to the Monad Edition of The Dee Sanction through late pledge.
Don’t Punish the Curious. Encourage the Engaged.
The real fear for many GMs is that by revealing too much, they cheapen the experience. If you say too much, the players won't feel smart for figuring things out. But in truth, players rarely feel cheated by information they earned through action, even if you helped illuminate the path.
Where they do feel cheated is when they learn, after the session, that they walked right past something important… and the GM was silently watching them do it.
There’s no glory in obscurity.
It’s Not a Puzzle Box. It’s a Shared Creation.
There’s a temptation to make the mystery perfect, withholding the truth behind layers of clues and narrative elegance. But a good RPG session isn’t a clockwork puzzle. It’s a collaboration. And if a clue must be discovered for the story to continue, then it isn’t optional. It’s structural. Don’t bury it—reveal it in a way that feels earned.
That might mean moving information to wherever the players actually go, delivering it through a different character, or letting a missed opportunity come back around, recontextualised. The goal is not to protect the mystery at all costs—it’s to create a satisfying narrative rhythm of tension, release, and revelation.
Final Thoughts
The flow of information is a performance. Revealing and withholding is less like writing a book and more like playing jazz. You’re responding to the moment, the group's tempo, and the players' instincts. Some nights, they’ll dig through the compost without prompting. Other nights, they’ll need the metaphorical rake handed to them.
And that’s okay. Because this isn’t about tricking them, it’s about inviting them into the mystery.
With just enough withheld to be tantalising.
And just enough revealed to keep them moving forward.
Have you struggled with how much to reveal in your games? What’s your approach when players overlook something vital or obsess over something incidental? I’d love to hear how you manage the rhythm of mystery and discovery. Leave a comment and let’s share tactics from behind the screen.