Upthread I posted this:Cthulhu Dark predates FKR, yet the lite version perfectly encapsulates what an FKR game is, and is frequently mentioned by the handful of people into FKR. And, of course, you had people here dispute that it was an FKR game, because reasons. Which is weird.
And got no reply.Is Cthuhu Dark a FKR game?
I've asked whether Wuthering Heights would count as FKR. And likewise have had no reply. I've talked at some length about Classic Traveller, with reference to Christopher Kubasik's location of it within a free kriegsspiel tradition, and have had no response except technical discussion of Traveller editions from a fellow Traveller enthusiast.
This is making it hard for me to orient myself in the conversation, because every time I mention a play experience of mine that looks like it might overlap with the FKR space, I either get told I don't understand FKR, or get no reply.
I'll try again. Here are a series of posts I made last year about a freeform murder mystery that I ran for my family:
A few weeks ago I ran a session like this for my family - one of my daughters wanted to do a murder mystery for her birthday.
I adapted a murder scenario from an old Traveller module, and wrote up some characters (one for each other family member, plus a couple for their entourages, plus a small number of important NPCs whom I played). There was no action resolution in any mechanical sense - the players described what their PCs were doing, and who they were talking to, and I delivered up information as seemed appropriate (eg what they found if they searched a stateroom; what a NPC said if they spoke to him/her; etc).
This is an example of puzzle-solving: the players' goal is to acquire enough information to be able to infer to the hidden bit of my notes (ie whodunnit). It is a different experience from watching an episode of Death in Paradise or The Mentalist, as there is the first-person description element to it. But it doesn't really involve very much more agency.
(One difference from those shows is that they are scripted to try and occlude the audience's access to the relevant information, whereas in our murder mystery I was desperately trying to shovel information out the door. A better comparison might be to reading The Eleventh Hour.)
This was a GM-driven experience. The players' contributions were entirely saying where their PCs went (inside a starship where I as GM had already decided what the floorplan was, what - of interest - was in each stateroom, etc) and speaking as their characters.
We didn't use any mechanics. Predominantly physical actions were resolved via description with me saying yes to the task performed (I return from the Starlight Lounge to my stateroom; I look in the cupboard) and then just describing the upshot (OK, you're in your room; You see that in the cupboard there are two of each set of clothes).
Talking to NPCs happened by the players speaking to me in character, and me deciding what the NPC said in reply and then saying it. For scene-setting this was fine. When it came to interrogation of a key NPC I felt the weakness of this approach. The NPC in question was part of the conspiracy to murder, but the players hadn't worked this out and I wasn't going to have her just confess (thus defusing the mystery and ending the scenario). I am not a terribly good actor, and so performing evasiveness to some appropriate degree was not too easy.
The whole experience was fun enough, but it certainly didn't involve very much player agency! And for me it drew my attention to the limits of GM decides and narrates social interaction.
I think that's a fairly full description of what I did. Is it anything like FKR?I ran a freeform murder mystery for my daughter's birthday last year. The answer was pre-authored by me. The setting was a spaceship in jump-space, so like an "Orient Express" or isolated mansion whodunnit - and reinforced by my framing - there were a finite number of suspects in a finite space. (Though the actual solution cheated a little bit in this respect, it was within fair parameters I think.)
The actual play consisted of (i) the set-up, letting the players get the hang of their characters and meeting the NPCs (including the victim) and then (ii) the investigation. This was all just "poking around" Poirot-style.
I think it counted as a game. And it was a RPG - there was shared fiction and the players had their own characters to play, each of which has a motive to be the killer and thus establishing a possible red-herring for the other players (there was no promise in advance that the killer was a NPC; and two of the player positions included associated and also suspect NPCs).
Where it differed from what you (@Campbell) describe in your post was that there were no real stakes, and no player agency over the shared fiction. It was entirely exploration of a situation established, adjudicated and developed by me as referee.
Yes. It's found on pages OM110 to OM114. Here's the last two posts of mine I can find discussing this:Seemingly unrelated, but relevant, question. Does Marvel Heroic have a character creation system?
It's very straightforward to make PCs for Marvel Heroic. I wrote up two (for my kids) in about 10 minutes each yesterday. I've designed characters using the same system for fantasy RPGing too.
You just work out what the character is able to do, and assign appropriate traits and abilities.
I've played quite a bit of MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic, and built characters for it. The only balance concerns I've had, and they certainly weren't enough to break the game, were Wolverine being perhaps a little too good in a straightforward supers game, and Gandalf being perhaps a little too good in my LotR game.
I'm also pretty familiar with RPGs that use free descriptors for PC building (Over the Edge; Maelstrom Storytelling/Story Bones; HeroWars/Quest; Cthulhu Dark; the background system in 13th Age; just to name a few).
Is OtE an example of proto-FKR?