GM fiat - an illustration

[deleuzian_kernel]

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.

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. Like I said 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)

Throughout this thread, you’ve consistently used the word "solving" the mystery to mean that the players’ theories are tested against a pre-existing, GM-authored backstory. In your view, the mystery is "real" because there is a definitive answer the players can discover, and their deductions either match or fail to match that answer.

I want to challenge that conception, because it’s more limited than it seems. What you’re describing is one kind of mystery experience, and, frankly, it often slides into Pro Forma play, where the investigation is less about REAL play and more about matching guesses to something the GM already knows.

Solving a mystery in RPGs cannot only, or even primarily, about verifying facts the GM has written down. It can also mean that players, through investigation and interaction with the fiction, bring new information into existence and shape the meaning of the mystery itself. Their decisions about where to look, whom to trust, and how far to press can change the trajectory of events, alter the lives of NPCs, and transform their own characters — and that procedural unfolding is the real engine of investigative play.

You keep pointing to the idea that "something happened" and can be "determined. These RPGs don’t waste precious table time in trying to answer the question of whether something "really" happened in the GM’s notes. The question is whether the players’ investigation has the power to change what happens next, whether their failures and insights create real consequences in the fiction. That’s what makes an investigation alive at the table, rather than a test graded by whether they guess the GM’s secret.

I think this quote of yours really crystallizes the misunderstanding many trad players have when confronted with alternative approaches of play.

We are talking about difference between a situation where the shared imagination is about solving a mystery but what's happening at the table is collaboratively inventing a story about solving a mystery and a situation where both the collective imagination and what is happening at the table is solving a mystery.

No, that’s not quite what’s happening at these tables. It’s not that we’re inventing a story about solving a mystery. What’s happening is that we are playing characters situated in an investigation, dealing with concrete situational constraints, and actively engaging with the known unknowns of the mystery. There are real consequences to what happens next, to secondary characters, to the fiction itself, and to the investigators as people.

When you say “collaboratively inventing,” it misses the mark. The mystery is procedurally discovered, not fabricated to entertain. Even when the culprit or backstory isn’t pre-established, the investigation isn’t arbitrary or invented on the fly. It is built out of the players’ actions, their inquiries, their missteps. What’s at stake is whether those actions materially shape the trajectory of play. What is being collaboratively constructed is not the mystery’s solution, but the history of how that investigation unfolds and what it does to the people involved.

That’s the difference between procedural play and performance.

There is no conflict. Any conflict you are imagining is just that. Your imagination.

I wanted to circle back to something you said earlier, which I actually thought was spot on:

Pre-establishment, if it's not adversarial in nature, won't impact agency. What happens after establishment, though, can absolutely affect agency. If the DM drives the players towards or away from pre-established thing, he's reducing or elimination agency.

I mostly agree with you here, when you that agency depends on whether the GM is using Fiat to steer outcomes, not on whether there’s a prewritten backstory. It’s the procedural openness during play that matters in terms of, not what’s sitting in the GM’s notes.

But then, in another post, you said:

A mystery is just a kind of puzzle to solve, and that's every bit as real in game as out. It's a mental exercise based on clues. That it's in an RPG doesn't matter.

This is where I think you’re pulling in opposite directions. On one hand, you recognize that agency collapses when the GM starts steering outcomes, regardless of what’s pre-established. On the other hand, you’re still seem to hold on to the idea that there must be an "objectivity" of backstory that is somehow essential — as if the fact that there is a hidden answer somewhere makes the investigation more real or meaningful because it's a real mental exercise

But if you take your first point seriously, the existence of a prewritten answer is irrelevant for agency presservation. It’s what the GM does with it, how they handle contingency in play, that determines whether the players’ actions have weight. So, I can’t help but wonder — why is this "objectivity" still so precious to you, if even by your own account, it’s not the thing that preserves or threatens agency?

Your first post seems to at least suspect that even when players are moving AWAY from the pre-established thing, meaningful play can still occur. Yeah?

I guess I'm not really sure you truly believe that the second post is as expansive and encompassing of all mysteries as other posters seem to be defending, yet you seem to be kind of agreeing with them, which further confuses me?

All this being said, I strongly resonate with what you wrote elsewhere about bundling people opinions with "sides" in a conversation. If it matters to you, and maybe it doesn't, I remember occasions where we have had previous similar discussions and I have noticed that you are now saying things like:

The narrativists have essentially created a new form of agency for their style of play, which is fine. What's not fine is to then say that our style of play denies or reduces agency, because it doesn't. Their agency doesn't exist in our playstyle, so there's nothing to deny. Neither one is better/greater than the other. They're just different.

I think you have a very good intuition and positive suspicion about what it is that we do, which is more I can say for outright deniers. This to me signals an openness, that I personally appreciate, specially because when people like me and other of the great posters here (they know who they are) go to explain and expose things at length, we do it out of the hope that, through digital text, people might grasp at what it is that we do when we play with this particular orientation. We don't do it to get internet points. We do it in an attempt to share what we have learned.

 

[bloodtide]

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?

I really wonder about all this, as all the words used just don't fit.

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.

So, like I often say When a DM is a fan of the players/characters, a Buddy DM and rolls out the Red Carpet with the Easy Button, the game has no agency: the characters have already 'won' and are just playing through the game to see how they won.

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.

Typical of simple, casual games. The players can do whatever and often just goof off, as no matter what the DM will just have the positive outcome happen. I lot like most media fiction.

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).

The problem with this line of thinking is so many players think that if their character sneezes that they alter game reality, and that is just dumb.

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.

Okay?

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.

Yes.

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.

While I can understand the "player whine and cry" here, I would say they are just completely wrong. A player can just do whatever they tell like on a whim and then say "I'm super duper and win the game forevers!"

To solve a mystery or any unknown, you have to take reasonable common sense actions to do so. You can not just "do anything". Of course, this is what you see in most fiction...even more so TV shows and movies. As they have a time limits, the characters will just do something and "BONK" a clue will fall into their laps and they will solve the whole mystery, problem or such.

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?

Well, if the players are not solving a real mystery for real....the other option, as the above, is for the DM to just random make stuff as the players tell them too, until the DM says "done".

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.

I call this Cinematic Play: the DM makes the story/plot/game world right in front of whatever the players randomly do.


Of course all this gets lost in all the words.

 

[Maxperson]

I wanted to circle back to something you said earlier, which I actually thought was spot on:

I mostly agree with you here, when you that agency depends on whether the GM is using Fiat to steer outcomes, not on whether there’s a prewritten backstory. It’s the procedural openness during play that matters in terms of, not what’s sitting in the GM’s notes.

But then, in another post, you said:

This is where I think you’re pulling in opposite directions. On one hand, you recognize that agency collapses when the GM starts steering outcomes, regardless of what’s pre-established. On the other hand, you’re still seem to hold on to the idea that there must be an "objectivity" of backstory that is somehow essential — as if the fact that there is a hidden answer somewhere makes the investigation more real or meaningful because it's a real mental exercise

But if you take your first point seriously, the existence of a prewritten answer is irrelevant for agency presservation. It’s what the GM does with it, how they handle contingency in play, that determines whether the players’ actions have weight. So, I can’t help but wonder — why is this "objectivity" still so precious to you, if even by your own account, it’s not the thing that preserves or threatens agency?

So agency comes from player being able to choose what they want their characters to say and attempt to do. The existence of an answer to the mystery doesn't negate that at all. They can choose to engage the mystery. They can choose to avoid the mystery and go do something else. They can choose how they approach the mystery, as there is not set path to the discovery of who killed Mr. Body. They can begin the mystery, get bored with it and go to the pub for some drinks before leaving town.

Having an objective answer to the mystery doesn't run in opposition to what I said above about agency. The DM is not driving play towards or away from it.

Your first post seems to at least suspect that even when players are moving AWAY from the pre-established thing, meaningful play can still occur. Yeah?

Yes.

I guess I'm not really sure you truly believe that the second post is as expansive and encompassing of all mysteries as other posters seem to be defending, yet you seem to be kind of agreeing with them, which further confuses me?

If my answer above didn't clarify, please inquire further.

All this being said, I strongly resonate with what you wrote elsewhere about bundling people opinions with "sides" in a conversation. If it matters to you, and maybe it doesn't, I remember occasions where we have had previous similar discussions and I have noticed that you are now saying things like:

I think you have a very good intuition and positive suspicion about what it is that we do, which is more I can say for outright deniers. This to me signals an openness, that I personally appreciate, specially because when people like me and other of the great posters here (they know who they are) go to explain and expose things at length, we do it out of the hope that, through digital text, people might grasp at what it is that we do when we play with this particular orientation. We don't do it to get internet points. We do it in an attempt to share what we have learned.

Thanks. I've actually tried to get my players to engage a bit more narrative control when we play D&D, having tried multiple ways in multiple campaigns to give them player or PC abilities that can alter the game world. They have ignored them almost entirely, preferring not to engage in narrative control/influence. At this point I've given up on it as something they just don't want to do.

I've also paid attention when people are talking about various narrative game systems. Some of them sound interesting and I wouldn't mind playing them as one shots. I still don't think that's the sort of system for me for long term play, though.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

No, that’s not quite what’s happening at these tables. It’s not that we’re inventing a story about solving a mystery. What’s happening is that we are playing characters situated in an investigation, dealing with concrete situational constraints, and actively engaging with the known unknowns of the mystery. There are real consequences to what happens next, to secondary characters, to the fiction itself, and to the investigators as people.

When you say “collaboratively inventing,” it misses the mark. The mystery is procedurally discovered, not fabricated to entertain. Even when the culprit or backstory isn’t pre-established, the investigation isn’t arbitrary or invented on the fly. It is built out of the players’ actions, their inquiries, their missteps. What’s at stake is whether those actions materially shape the trajectory of play. What is being collaboratively constructed is not the mystery’s solution, but the history of how that investigation unfolds and what it does to the people involved.

That’s the difference between procedural play and performance.

That you have rules and procedures for who invents what doesn't mean you're not collaboratively inventing a mystery story rather than solving a mystery. I do no understand why you and some others feel the need to write opaque walls of text to obfuscate this simple fact.

And unlike your earlier post seemed to imply, at least I have not equated the difference between these methods with the quality of the play. When I say one is "real mystery solving" and one is not, I do not mean the former is "better" merely that these are different things.

 

[thefutilist]

In a 14-month Savage Worlds campaign as a player, there came a point in time where I no longer felt that my character's main motivations had the ability to be realized within the "trad" framework that the GM was following.

I don't know if it's all trad. Even 30 years ago when I was doing full on trad, I'd have taken your characters backstory and made it part of the plot. You get to ideologically dismantle the slavers and have sword fights with them and so on. And taking backstory and making it plot seems far more prevalent now than it was back then.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I don't know if it's all trad. Even 30 years ago when I was doing full on trad, I'd have taken your characters backstory and made it part of the plot. You get to ideologically dismantle the slavers and have sword fights with them and so on. And taking backstory and making it plot seems far more prevalent now than it was back then.

Yeah, like integrating the character backstories to the events of the game is pretty basic thing that has been done for as long as I remember.

 

[innerdude]

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."

... snip ...

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?

I think this plays right along with my description of character intent. It's not simply that characters have the "agency" to go around declaring they're looking for clues and hoping to find "the answer" to "the mystery."

It's that the character actions have some additional association to them --- there is an intent to finding the solution, and that intent goes beyond simply "solving the mystery." Solving the mystery should have narrative meaning with respect to the characters and the fiction. And this is most commonly, as I expressed, where I see GM fiat coming into play.

 

[deleuzian_kernel]

That you have rules and procedures for who invents what doesn't mean you're not collaboratively inventing a mystery story rather than solving a mystery

You too have rules and procedures for who invents what!

Its just the case that you have decided that the GM invents most before play, the players invent little during play, and from what little they do, the GM gets to cherry pick which ones stick to what he invented before play.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Throughout this thread, you’ve consistently used the word "solving" the mystery to mean that the players’ theories are tested against a pre-existing, GM-authored backstory. In your view, the mystery is "real" because there is a definitive answer the players can discover, and their deductions either match or fail to match that answer.

I want to challenge that conception, because it’s more limited than it seems. What you’re describing is one kind of mystery experience, and, frankly, it often slides into Pro Forma play, where the investigation is less about REAL play and more about matching guesses to something the GM already knows.

Solving a mystery in RPGs cannot only, or even primarily, about verifying facts the GM has written down. It can also mean that players, through investigation and interaction with the fiction, bring new information into existence and shape the meaning of the mystery itself. Their decisions about where to look, whom to trust, and how far to press can change the trajectory of events, alter the lives of NPCs, and transform their own characters — and that procedural unfolding is the real engine of investigative play.

You keep pointing to the idea that "something happened" and can be "determined. These RPGs don’t waste precious table time in trying to answer the question of whether something "really" happened in the GM’s notes. The question is whether the players’ investigation has the power to change what happens next, whether their failures and insights create real consequences in the fiction. That’s what makes an investigation alive at the table, rather than a test graded by whether they guess the GM’s secret.

I think this quote of yours really crystallizes the misunderstanding many trad players have when confronted with alternative approaches of play.

I never disputed your point. Also people keep saying I am limited to a view based only on trad play, and while I don't some of the games mentioned here, my counter example came from my own experience running Hillfolk, which isn't a trad RPG at all. I am not denying you can build a meaningful and fun mystery adventure using the approach you described. But if you are bringing new information into the mystery in order to solve it, you aren't solving in the sense of going around, investigating, asking questions and actually solving a mystery that really was established in a way that is like how a real mystery operates. That doesn't make this approach bad. It doesn't make the approach I was talking about better. But it is a distinction that matters. Again I am not denying any of the points you raise in favor of this approach to play. But those points are exactly why I am making my point.

 

[innerdude]

I don't know if it's all trad. Even 30 years ago when I was doing full on trad, I'd have taken your characters backstory and made it part of the plot. You get to ideologically dismantle the slavers and have sword fights with them and so on. And taking backstory and making it plot seems far more prevalent now than it was back then.

Yeah, like integrating the character backstories to the events of the game is pretty basic thing that has been done for as long as I remember.

So .... why then in the 20+ years of playing "trad" games with "trad" GMs has it never once occurred to any of my GMs to actually do it?

Because it's not an inculcated / enculturated value with regards to the "trad" play loop. It's talked about in "world building" and "session zero" and "ask the players what they want" and "make your characters part of a living world"---but when the rubber meets the road, and the dice are hitting the table, and the GM has the choice between "following the living world requirements" versus "give credence and narrative space to the player's intent", almost without fail the "requirements of maintaining the illusion of the living world" wins out.

Because that's what "trad" GM culture teaches and espouses, and even moreso, decries any resistance to the "living world" paradigm as anathema, anti-immersion, and inherently opposed to "good RPG play."