The problem with this is in the example we are giving, people actually are solving a mystery. Their theory of who did it can eb tested against the established facts the GM has about what happened and who is guilty.
But this makes the
actual mystery the following thing: what answer has the GM written down?
The GM knows, and the other players are trying to learn. And the way that they do that is by declaring actions that prompt the GM to tell them things from their notes - things that conform to, or follow from, the answer that the GM has written down. And the players try to infer from these things the GM says, to what the GM's answer is. The GM's answer thus resembles the cards hidden in the envelope in Clue(do); or the code pegs behind the shield in Mastermind; etc.
But when we spell it out as I have, then it becomes obvious that
prompting the GM to reveal their notes by declaring appropriate actions
is central to play.
the notes also form a mental model. The point is you can objectively explore these locations and objectively solve the mystery. It isnt' teh same as literally being in those locations. But it is more objective than if these details are amorphous. But it also not limited to that. There will be necessary extrapolation and invention along the way.
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Again, no one is claiming a perfect model of a real life murder. They are trying to create the best possible one they can for players to investigate, explore, and solve. And the more they run them, the more they create them, the better they generally get at it.
No one is confused about any of this - I think we have all played and GMed many mystery scenarios in the Shadowrun, CoC, etc style.
We know that the GM sometimes has to extrapolate, and that in that extrapolation they make sure the conform to the pre-written answer, or say things that follow from it (like eg if the answer tells us that so-and-so hasn't been home since Friday, and now it's Thursday next week later, if the PC's visit so-and-so's house the mail won't have been collected, the milk in the jug on the table will be sour, etc). I think calling all this a "mental model" is needless jargon - talking about relationships to what is written in the notes (like extrapolation, consistency/conformity, etc) is clearer in my view.
But the players are not "objectively exploring" these things; that's obsucarantism. They are sitting in their chairs at the table! What they are doing is declaring actions which prompt the GM to tell them things, either things the GM had already written down (like "So-and-so's breakfast is still on the table") or things that they have to extrapolate from what they have already written down ("Yes, there is a jug of milk." "I taste a drop." "It's sour.")
It's not a "model" of solving a real life murder at all. I've never trained as a homicide detective, but I doubt that homicide detectives train by playing through CoC scenarios. (On the other hand, I would expect mystery writers to be better at solving CoC scenarios than the average RPGer, just because they have had more practice at imagining links between bits of information presented in a story to point at the solution to a fictional mystery without actually outright giving it away.)
Because the purpose here isnt' to simply have the GM reveal note content. It is for the players to be immersed in in the solving of a mystery or exploration of an adventure. The notes are a tool. Not the end in itself
I do object to that description and explained why to another poster a few posts back. It might have been Hawkeye. My phrasing was while it isn’t innacurate that this is part of what is going on, it also misses so much nuance and interplay. I used the example of it being like describing a boxing match as two people swinging their arms till one of them falls. That isn’t inaccurate but it very much misses the nuances of what is happening
It just describes part of the process. This is why I said it was like describing boxing as people swinging their arms till someone falls down. But it was just an analogy to make a point about how you can describe something and miss a lot of the details that really matter. My point was this way of explaining the GM style, misses a lot of the stuff that matters
And I have never said planning things out, pinning them down, so they can be modeled is bad. I just think when you describe things as ‘discovering what’s in the GM’s notes’ you miss the fluidity of what actually goes on in play. But for a mystery to work in the way I am describing, the Gm needs a mystery that is set down (I.e. a murder, a Midwest, events and backstory leading up to the murder, events that occulted after the murder, motive, suspect, method, etc).
To my mind you can't have it both ways. Either the goal is to find the answer that the GM has written down - in which case revealing that answer
is an end in itself. Or else the goal is to be immersed in the fiction of solving a mystery - in which case the games that
@hawkeyefan describes do exactly the same thing.
Now perhaps there are RPGers who, for whatever reason peculiar to their preferences and dispositions, can't immerse in the fiction unless they truly believe that the GM has written an answer down in advance. But those personality traits of theirs tell us something about their capacity to immerse, and nothing about the "reality" of any mystery.
And to offer an analogy: I've had fun playing CCGs, including M:tG and two different Middle Earth/LotR games. Those games could be presented purely technically and mathematically - replacing the various categories like "flyer", "Goblin", "sword", "Haven" etc with purely technical labels that define the interactions between cards and "life points" and the like - and the game play would not change. But I wouldn't play such a game; for me, much of the pleasure of playing those games, especially the LotR ones, derives from imagining Aragorn and Legolas and Orcs and Dol Guldur and the like. The flavour text is part of the experience.
So someone who described the game play only by reference to the mathematics would not be capturing all that makes those games fun. I certainly wouldn't use that sort of analysis on my marketing materials! But it would nevertheless be an accurate technical description of the play of the game.
Obviously in a RPG "mystery" we want the stuff in the GM's notes to be interesting and colourful. And unlike a CCG, the fiction actually matters to the resolution - eg if the player describes a box, I as a player can declare that "I (ie my PC) look inside it". So some at least of the colour is not
mere colour (unlike a CCG where it is all just mere colour). This is why we can talk about consistency to the fiction, extrapolation from the fiction etc - because it is not mere colour, but matters to resolution.
But if the goal of play is to ascertain what answer the GM wrote down, then that is the goal. If the GM has written down that stuff about a murder (about the Midwest, and the motive, and the preceding and ensuing events, etc), from which the players are expected to infer what the GM has decided is the "truth" of that murder, then the players have to "make moves" in play that will prompt the GM to tell them that stuff. And given that we're talking about a RPG, the moves that players make are to declare actions for their PCs. And given what they are trying to do, what they want from those moves is to have the GM tell them stuff that the GM wrote down (or extrapolations from that), so that the players can then make the relevant inferences.
The fact that the game process for doing all of this is also fun and immersive (much more than Clue(do), I would assert) doesn't change the fact that that is what we are trying to do. Just as Moldvay said on p B4 of his rulebook - "Eventually, the DM's map and the player's map will look more or less alike." He didn't need to cloak his game play in obscurantism.
it is kind of the like the difference between a mystery novel where the writer has taken pains to establish what happened before writing it, so that the reader has opportunities to perceive clues and guess before the end of the book, and one where the writer is just making it up as they go (and none of the clues would have any real predictive power)
So, when reading an Agatha Christie-esque whodunnit, I am absolutely trying to work out what the author wrote down! Trying to draw inferences from the things they have written that I have read so far, to work out what I will find when I read the final chapter.
I personally don't find this a very helpful analogy for mystery-solving RPG play of the traditional CoC-ish variety, precisely because it emphasises the
GM's notes" aspect but ignores the *declaring actions that will prompt the GM to reveal the content of their notes part - and it is precisely the latter that is fundamental to RPG play, and that gives it an immersive and interactive character that is different from reading a book.
However, I am not saying you can't run a mystery where people are discovering an unknown is collectively. But that was never a mystery to be solved. It is one they collectively engineered to gather.
In the real world, there is no answer written down that the players are trying to infer to. In the fiction, there is a mystery that various people are trying to solve.
I believe that it can certainly be as immersive as traditional CoC-esque RPGing. In part because, at least as I have experienced, it does not involve "collective engineering". That would be a good description of co-authorship of a mystery novel; but I don't find it apt for the sort of RPGing that I do.
