Hidden Rewards/Choices

One things I've noticed while playing through the Infinity Engine games is that when your choices matter and what gets rewards is much more hidden than in current RPG games.  In Rise of the Argonauts, the dialogue you hovered over would display which god you would earn favor with for selecting it.  In Mass Effect, prompts appear for when you can make a Paragon or Renegade impulse choice.  At one point in Alpha Protocol, you were told to either go left to save a group of strangers or go right to save someone you care about.  These games all make it very obvious that you have a choice to make and what the outcome will be (more or less).  On the flip side, in Baldur's Gate 2, there are at least some choices you can make without realizing it.  For example, while saving one party member's home from a troll invasion, you come upon the keep's captain of the guard.  Your party member tells you he must be under a spell.  He automatically starts attacking you, but if you can charm or mind control him, then you will actually save his life by having him switch sides.  There is only the slightest hint this is possible and it's probably not something most people automatically thought to do (or maybe it was just me...).

Normally, I don't support hidden things like this in a game because I don't like to miss anything.  But that's because I like to min-max my characters so I can be my best.  I've realized the more I just engross myself in the characters and the story that I don't WANT to min-max, I just do naturally.  So actually hiding the information is making it impossible for me to do so without following a walkthrough as I play a game (which defeats the purpose of playing the game usually).  Showing me that a certain dialogue choice will give me good points takes away my choice completely if I'm trying to be a good person.  So hiding the rewards behind my choices and even hiding the fact that I'm making choices makes it easier to fully immerse yourself as a character and get into the story.  The danger of hiding these rewards and choices is that if you're not consistent, it can be very frustrating when someone doesn't understand the logic behind the rewards (e.g. romancing the Sith governess of a planet doesn't make you evil, but romancing the girl in your fake cult does?).  So the balance needs to be found between transparency and clarity.

Board games can also play with the concept of hidden or transparent rewards.  In a lot of adventuring board games, the rewards you get for either exploring or killing monsters is usually drawing the top face-down card from some deck.  This means you don't know what the result of your adventuring will get you, so it makes the reward (and subsequently your choices) more about luck than about strategy.  You can mitigate the luck aspect if you have one deck of high risk/high reward cards and one of low risk/low reward cards.  If the rewards were face-up then players could race for the ideal rewards or form a strategy around acquiring the rewards.  This is all another balancing act between where you want the luck and the strategy of your game to  be.