Before I start experimenting with them to figure this out the hard way on the fly in an active game... what is the difference between "Secret to" and "Private to"?

IIRC, Private To shows them it's a private line to them. Secret To does not.

Private lines start with [Private to Character_Name:
Secret lines do not have that bit (or the color that comes with it). Let's you give someone a private line without letting them know that it was private to them.

Ignore me, for some reason I was confusing 'Private' with 'Private' (i.e. inline vs threat in the private section).

What was said above. :P
This message was last edited by the user at 21:01, Sun 21 Aug 2022.

Aha.  So something I'll never use.  Thanks!

I tend to use the "Secret to" with a list of names to indicate information received through enhanced senses. How would someone know whether those around them can or can't hear the whisper from down the street?

Secret to is extremely useful if one or more members of the party can see something the others can't (eg they're fooled by an illusion, or pick up some detail that nobody else does) - if the GM flags the text as private then the player immediately knows that information is directed to just them, whereas secret text looks exactly like normal text to the player seeing it so it doesn't raise doubts (for an illusion) or highlight the detail (so the player may or may not guess it's important).

Yes, I understand how it works, just doesn't fit my GMing style, so it's not useful to me.  I fully expect others find it beyond useful for them.

The Secret Lines and the Language groups are IMO one of the best underused features on rpol.  Love them so much.

The saddest thing about 'Private to' that I just recently realized is that if you have a Private to Multiple Recipients, all of the recipients can see each other on the list. In order to actually have the same message be truly private to multiple individuals, you have to actually list the message individually for each single one.

That's a major pain. Sometimes, even when you don't mind highlighting the information as being important, you don't want everyone to know who ELSE got that important information.

If this is coming up multiple times with the same group of people, you could always create a language group for a fake language, and make it private to the group.  They will each still see it as highlighted, but they won't be able to know who else is in that group.

Language feature is epic!