Memory Packets
In all the techniques listed above, players need to know something about the unique properties of items, characters or spaces ahead of time for their characters to recognize them in the game. For instance, Greek letters are useless if none of the players know of their significance when they encounter them in the game.
It is possible to defer the knowledge of unique properties until the players actually see the symbols or numbers in a game. “Memory packets� are printed slips of paper with two sides: one side displaying a “trigger� and one side listing information that needs to be delivered upon recognition of the trigger. Triggers may be as simple as a single Greek letter or as complicated as a description of events, such as “Open if you fall unconscious.� These slips are stapled shut to prevent players from accidentally reading the hidden information and placed in players’ packets.
When a player encounters the triggering information during the game, the player removes the staple and reads the contents of the memory packet (or “mempack�). Most games give players the freedom to open the mempack at the first convenient opportunity, allowing events like battles to continue without interruptions. Item numbers and badge numbers are often used as triggers, so that players would have no knowledge of the nature of the number until they actually encounter it in the game. For instance, a trigger on a mempack may simply be the number 1029. When a player with the mempack finds an item card for a dagger with the number 1029, they could open the packet, revealing contents that read, “That’s a magical dagger! You can kill monsters with it!� Lines of speech or direct prompting by a GM can also trigger mempacks.
Mempacks take a fair amount of time to prepare, as they need to be cut out, folded and stapled before they are put in a player’s packet. Thus, they mostly practical for situations where very few characters will need to react to a situation in special ways. However, because they have the potential to reveal a lot of timely information to a player while effectively concealing the nature of the information, GMs often default to mempacks whenever they wish to defer information availability. Mempacks do have the advantage of being relatively non-hosing for players and GMs during the game, although the small, stapled slips of paper can be easy to misplace. More complicated contrivances, such as player-inserted or nested mempacks, have also been used in games.
