Are your campaigns mysteries, or puzzles?

[I'm A Banana]

I think this piece from Malcom Gladwell's recent piece in the New Yorker is kind of relevant for the game, so I'll exerpt it here:

The national-security expert Gregory Treverton has famously made a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source bin Laden will remain at large.

The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much. The C.I.A. had a position on what a post-invasion Iraq would look like, and so did the Pentagon and the State Department and Colin Powell and Dick Cheney and any number of political scientists and journalists and think-tank fellows. For that matter, so did every cabdriver in Baghdad.

The distinction is not trivial. If you consider the motivation and methods behind the attacks of September 11th to be mainly a puzzle, for instance, then the logical response is to increase the collection of intelligence, recruit more spies, add to the volume of information we have about Al Qaeda. If you consider September 11th a mystery, though, you’d have to wonder whether adding to the volume of information will only make things worse. You’d want to improve the analysis within the intelligence community; you’d want more thoughtful and skeptical people with the skills to look more closely at what we already know about Al Qaeda. You’d want to send the counterterrorism team from the C.I.A. on a golfing trip twice a month with the counterterrorism teams from the F.B.I. and the N.S.A. and the Defense Department, so they could get to know one another and compare notes.

If things go wrong with a puzzle, identifying the culprit is easy: it’s the person who withheld information. Mysteries, though, are a lot murkier: sometimes the information we’ve been given is inadequate, and sometimes we aren’t very smart about making sense of what we’ve been given, and sometimes the question itself cannot be answered. Puzzles come to satisfying conclusions. Mysteries often don’t.

While it goes into some politics issues, my main concern here is how this relates to adventure design.

Are your adventures mostly puzzles, where information will slowly reveal the true answer and the PC's must acquire such information to find the Real Culprit (tm)? Divinations seem to be the shortcut for puzzle design: "Who knows the answer?" or "What is the key?" become questions that can shortcut a lot of game time. They help you find The Solution to the Conflict.

Or are they mostly mysteries, with several possible likely outcomes, that require the characters to use their own (and the player's) judgement to determine which clues are the important ones? Where amount of information doesn't matter nearly as much as quality of information and analysis? Divinations would seem to be less helpful, here: you can find out who performed Action X, but that wouldn't solve the problems presented by that action. You can ask a deity's advice on your descisions, but deities have their own agendas and worldviews coloring their response.

Is your party solving puzzles, arriving at conclusive endings? Or are they investigating mysteries, taking one possible path to one possible solution that has its own reprocussions?

I find my own design tends to favor mysteries. I'd rather have my players asking "what if" questions, speculating and then acting on that speculation. I find it really helps the playing of a role -- what would my character consider the cause for this event? And because I tend to free-wheel a lot as a DM, it can help fuel my own game design. If a character decides Option A is the important option to puruse, I can hinge the next adventures on Option A (even if Option P is the real solution). It helps the PC's have an instrumental role in the outcome of the adventures, too. Whatever they end up accomplishing is important to the character, rather than a static wall of facts, so they have change the campaign world with their own desires.

Now, yes, all campaigns have a bit of everything, but I'm asking what yours tends to be: does X happen and the PC's must find out U, V, and W before X becomes clear? Or does X happen, and the PC's must react to X happening, even if it's not entirely clear how or why X happened?

Tell me about your experiences, I'd like to see what you think.

 

[The_Universe]

My adventures tend to be closer to "puzzles" as defined by the article quoted than "mysteries" from the same. Though the nature of the driving force behind the adventures are intended to be mysterious, I try to develop things so that, no matter where the characters eventually go, they will eventually accrue enough facts to accurately characterize and effectively react to the primary threat of the campaign.

That said, from a player's perspective, I tend to think that even primarily "puzzle" adventures will seem to be "mysteries" since the the PCs can never completely foretell the consequences of their character's actions. Though the goal of the campaign may be to uncover the factual location of the Majestic Maguffin, all the little things leading up to it are filled with mysterious reactions. The PCs have no way of knowing with any actual certainty what will happen if they mercifully leave their enemies alive (or mercilessly kill them); although the DM may be treating these actions as "right" or "wrong" ways to solve the puzzle he or she has created, the PC's cannot see into the mind of the DM - hence, it remains mysterious, even if designed as a puzzle.

In short, the distinction can never be apparent to the players, unless you flat out tell them which thing it really was.

 

[Mycanid]

I find my own design tends to favor mysteries. I'd rather have my players asking "what if" questions, speculating and then acting on that speculation. I find it really helps the playing of a role -- what would my character consider the cause for this event? And because I tend to free-wheel a lot as a DM, it can help fuel my own game design. If a character decides Option A is the important option to puruse, I can hinge the next adventures on Option A (even if Option P is the real solution). It helps the PC's have an instrumental role in the outcome of the adventures, too. Whatever they end up accomplishing is important to the character, rather than a static wall of facts, so they have change the campaign world with their own desires.

This sums up much of my taste too. I vastly preferred Mysteries.

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

Neither, really. They're places to explore.

 

[Woas]

Neither, really. They're places to explore.

Same here. I guess my real answer is mysteries: but several of them at a time that can be completely unique from one another.
If the party follows some path and ends up loosing interest or the 'mystery' gets written into a corner, then there are other places to explore to find other mysteries waiting.

 

[DaveyJones]

Neither, really. They're places to explore.

qft. to explore or to ignore and find some thing else to do.

 

[mmadsen]

Most adventures are puzzles, because the player characters need to explore and find new information to make sense of things; they don't simply need to pass abundant information through the right filter.

 

[Piratecat]

Mine are usually mysteries, no question about it.

 

[Nonlethal Force]

Given the choice between mysteries and puzzles, I go for mysteries.

But in truth my adventures are stories. One of the things that make me a difficult DM is that as I've grown in my DMship I've grown patient. I don't have a story to tell the players. I am the storyteller of the players actions.

In other words, to me gaming is no longer about my plots and schemes. I find out what the players want to do and where they want to go and then I weave a story that involves them. If the players indicate they're looking for a puzzle or mystery then I'll give it to them. If they're looking for a gladiator style fight I'll give it to them. If they're looking for just about anything else that doesn't compromise my ethics ... .... I'll give it to them.

 

[Arashi Ravenblade]

Mysteries.