I’ve been following this discussion with great interest and especially now with the pressing question about when mysteries in TTRPGs are “real” or just an illusion, and
whether pre-establishing a solution is essential for that sense of "reality". Reading through everyone’s posts, I kept thinking about a workshop I recently attended over at
Adept Play, led by Ron Edwards, called "
Investigating Investigation." It tackled many of the points that have come up here, particularly around agency, mystery design, and what’s actually happening at the table when we run these scenarios. I’ll drop a link to it at the end of this post, because I think some of you might find it clarifying. It certainly helped me.
One thing that stood out to me in the workshop, and that echoes some of what posters like
@hawkeyefan,
@Manbearcat and
@pemerton have been getting at, is that
the real question isn’t whether the mystery is “objectively real” in the sense that there’s a correct answer sitting in the GM’s notes. It’s about whether the process of investigation is procedural and contingent, meaning: do the players’ actions and deductions genuinely drive what happens next, or are developments and outcomes ultimately protected and ensured by the GM?
(
"Investigation” in RPGs isn’t limited to murder mysteries, but broadly applies to any situation where characters actively seek information to overcome an obstacle. The missing piece might be a culprit’s identity, the cause of a supernatural curse, or the layout of an unfamiliar environment, whether you’re playing
Trail of Cthulhu,
Blades in the Dark, or even something like
Forbidden Lands or
Apocalypse World. In all cases, what’s at stake is whether the players’ efforts to uncover information genuinely shape the story. Importantly, these dynamics aren’t limited to mystery-focused games; they apply anytime an investigative scenario is woven into play, whether as the core premise or as one thread among many.)
In this thread, several posters have seemed to bundle the idea of a mystery being “real” with whether the backstory was pre-written and sealed away from player input.
One of the most useful things Ron did during the workshop was to label this dynamics: he identified
two variables that govern how mystery scenarios function procedurally,
Backstory Authority and
Asymmetric Knowledge. We spent quite a bit of time mapping out the different ways these can be configured in play, outlining four basic configurations based on whether the backstory is pre-authored or built during play, and whether knowledge about it is held asymmetrically (by any one player) or is shared evenly across the table. The workshop pushed back on the idea that any particular configuration guarantees or destroys agency and our collective experimentation with different exercises confirmed it. (I actually GMed a short exercise on
situational yet asymmetrically predefined backstory authority!)
Ron made clear that agency, that is the capacity for players’ actions to materially affect outcomes, exists independently of whether the GM wrote down the backstory in advance. As he put it, the problem isn’t whether the GM knows the answer; it’s whether the investigation has real consequences, whether players can genuinely succeed, fail, or alter the course of events based on what they do. A mystery can have a set backstory and still be run procedurally, but
it becomes illusionist when the GM quietly guarantees that the players “get there” and “do that” no matter what, at which point their agency collapses.
The workshop offered a framework for thinking about mystery play that contrasts
Situation Play (which many here are also describing) with what Ron calls
"Pro Forma" or
"Magic Trick" play which are scenarios where, even if there’s a backstory solution written down, the GM uses
GM Fiat (unconscious or conscious behind-the-screen force, not just decision-making) to guarantee that the players will eventually piece it together. That kind of play can be entertaining, but it’s structurally closer to dinner theater: the players may not realize it, but the outcome is largely preordained.
But the flip-side might also be surprising to some posters here:
Are Ron and the participants at that workshop really saying that there can be a set backstory for a mystery and still preserve the kind of Story Now gameplay some of us value? Yes, but only if that backstory is treated as situational material, not as a preordained script. The key is whether the GM is prepared to let player action genuinely change the trajectory of play, rather than nudging, steering, or correcting to protect their pre-written outcome (in some cases, the expectation of the possible trajectories of play).
And this is precisely where I think, despite their stated commitment to “letting play determine the outcome,” trad players are still entangled in a structure that relies on GM Fiat: that is, using behind-the-screen force
to make sure the scenario produces a particular shape.
Several posters in this thread have repeatedly tied agency to the "objectivity" of the mystery’s solution, but the effect of this mindset is often the opposite:
it leads to situations where the GM decides, sometimes unconsciously, when to "help" the players and when to "punish" them for not acting like proper investigators.
It shows up in how failure is handled, often not as a consequence of in-play events but as a judgment call by the GM about whether the investigators are “investigating right.” Based on his own descriptions of play, this is exactly what I believe
@bloodtide tends to do: by his own account, when players “fail” to think the right way, the scenario adjusts not procedurally, but through correction dressed as “organic cause-consequence,” forcing the players either toward clear and obvious failure or toward being “given another chance” once they conform to the GM’s sense of how a mystery should be solved. That’s not a function of the mystery being pre-written.
It’s a function of who is holding narrative power, and how it’s being applied to shape outcomes.
The alternative, and what Ron encouraged , is to treat investigation as a procedural activity. Not procedural in the rules-heavy sense, but in the sense that
what the players know, learn, or fail to learn shapes the unfolding of the fiction in consequential ways. A good mystery, in this view, isn’t really defined by whether the GM had “the answer” in a notebook; it’s
defined by whether the players’ engagement can produce discovery, failure, or unintended outcomes that actually change the trajectory of play.
Isn't this last bolded statement, TRULY, what we all really want when playing these scenarios, regardless of style or orientation?
What Ron clarified — and I think many here would find enlightening — is that contingency in investigative play isn’t limited to whether the culprit’s identity is pre-written. In fact, it’s more useful to think about three distinct and equally valid variables that can each be made contingent or not:
(1) whether the culprit (and, let me extend for the purposes of this thread,
backstory) is discovered at all (i.e., “who did it” or what happened),
(2) what happens to secondary characters or NPCs during play, and
3) what happens to the investigators themselves.
The fascinating thing is that most so-called “no myth” mystery play, the kind where the backstory isn’t pre-established, works wonders because doesn’t actually make the culprit+backstory element contingent in a meaningful way.
Instead, these games often focus their procedural play around the second and third variables: how the investigators’ actions impact the fate of NPCs and how the investigation transforms the investigators themselves. The culprit may be emergently defined during play, but the real procedural engine is what the players choose to do, who they help or harm, and how their investigation affects them personally. The workshop’s exercises and participant discussion corroborated this, repeatedly revealing that the act of investigating produced real dramatic shifts, not because of any prewritten answer, but because of how play unfolded around these three variables.
As people already know, I’m drawn to Story Now, procedural mystery play, scenarios where the mystery emerges through play, and where the execution of the investigation is real playable material, not performative. Despite what many here claim, trad approaches to mysteries and investigations typically tend to be just that:
purely performative.
If anyone’s curious, here’s the workshop link:
Investigating Investigation – Adept Play. It might help frame some of the debates here differently, particularly around agency and the difference between running a mystery and running a mystery scenario where the mystery is “solved” by design.
PD:
@Old Fezziwig I’m curious to know if any of this resonated with you!
.
