Well, you can't solve anything unless there is a problem.
It depends.
Players set goals for themselves, the DM sets goals for the game.
But I doubt we use "goals" in the same way.
GM fiat - an illustration
- Thread starter pemerton
- Start date
Players set goals for themselves, the DM sets goals for the game.
But I doubt we use "goals" in the same way.
hawkeyefan
Legend
That wasn’t clear from what you said. So the GM can change things as needed, but not central details? Which would those be? Where do you draw the line?
I haven’t commented on sandbox play at all.
I mean, it’s what play involves. It seems odd to me to shy away from it.
hawkeyefan
Legend
Yes. They are different. How are they different? What makes them different?
What I would challenge you to do is avoid any description like the one below that relies on ideas of “real” and “unreal”.
Describe how the game works.
Yes, because it is not real. Not as you are describing. It didn’t happen. What actually happened is that the GM created a bunch of details… made a bunch of decisions prior to play… and the players are now trying to guess/deduce what those are. The way they do so is by having their characters interact with NPCs and locations and other elements of the fictional world until the GM’s decisions are revealed to them.
hawkeyefan
Legend
Well, no… sometimes it’s directly from your words. But like I said, if you’re okay with it, then cool!
Bedrockgames
I post in the voice of Christopher Walken
This realy is going to be style dependent so I probably shouldn't speak generally. But I would say when I run a mystery like this, if the point is for the players to solve it, I am not going to alter core facts about the mystery. I never said you would alter that stuff. I said you would adapt to what the players are doing. So for example, I may have a note that the suspect who committed the murder was having an affair with the victim's wife and that there is a letter in a desk from her to him. But maybe I didn't think of a few other ways this kind of information could have gotten out. So if the players propose something like, checking a phone for text messages, surely there is a chance there would be a text message exchange between them. So a GM might simply decide there was, roll, etc. There is just a lot of stuff that can come up that is more than the GM simply revealing notes as the players prompt them
I mean play involves the GM prepping and probably taking notes. But you can't reduce this style of play to "players prompt GM to reveal contents of his notes". Sure you can see why people are finding this an unsatisfactory explanation of what is going on
Bedrockgames
I post in the voice of Christopher Walken
They are different because in one you are solving the solution of a mystery and in another you are creating the solution it as it goes. I did describe both how the game works and use the term real to draw a distinction. I am not going to stop using real because I think it is useful. But like I said, the GM preps the mystery details: the who, the what, etc. There is also a lot of other details like NPCs, the actual geography where this is happening, any other relevant background information. The GM needs to think of where clues can likely be found. And this helps produce the scenario that the players explore. And the point is to really solve the mystery the GM has created. Are notes important? Yes. But are many other aspects of play.
We've been over this and I have explained, even said in my post, it isn't actually manifesting in reality. But they are really solving the mystery. The mystery is a real thing to be solved. And I know you don't like that language but I believe it is important because for 90 percent of gamers they will know what I mean when I say that and it will help them run the game in that way. And they are not just guessing. Like I said the background information and details create a model that can be explored in the way a dungeon can be explored even though it doesn't actually exist and this creates a good emulation of the process of going through a mystery and gathering information until you either put that information together and solve the thing or force the solution out in some other way (this is tabletop RPG after all so we can't rule out the party just going Jack Bauer and extracting information from people by force)
hawkeyefan
Legend
No need. I understand @pemerton ’s take on railroads. I also tend to agree with his assessment that they generally be avoided.
This, on the other hand, is as clear as mud to me:
I mean, I get that there’s a story that will happen… but he also said the players can choose their own goals. I can’t really make sense of what is being said or how it fits with other things he’s said.
deleuzian_kernel
Adventurer
@Bedrockgames @Crimson Longinus @Micah Sweet
A question for you:
What does it mean to "solve" an investigation scenario under the light of a pre-established, pre-written mystery backstory?
Is it when the players correctly guess the culprit's identity? Is it when they reconstruct the entire sequence of events the GM prepared? What if they miss half of it, but still catch the culprit — is that a solved mystery? Or what if they uncover the full backstory, but only after the GM spoon-feeds it to them through exposition to finish off the session? Is that a “solution”?
Is it when they take action against the culprit and bring them to justice? What if they do that without understanding the full context. Is that still "solving" the mystery? What if they kill the wrong suspect but uncover the actual backstory later?
Is it when the players themselves understand the backstory, or when their characters do? What if the players piece it together out of character, maybe a week after, but the PCs never quite grasped the full picture? Is that a solved mystery?
What if the players correctly identify the culprit, but the culprit escapes? Is the mystery “solved” at that point? Or does it only count if they both discover the answer and successfully confront or apprehend them?
What if they expose the entire backstory, piece it together beautifully, but the culprit dies offscreen, or flees to another country, or is killed by someone else before they can act (This would be bad play in story now, but maybe acceptable in a more neutral style)? Is that still considered solving the mystery?
What if the players solve the mystery too late. They figure out who did it, but by then, more people have died, more crimes have been committed, and now those events have opened up entirely new mysteries? Is the original mystery still "solved" in any meaningful sense, or has the investigation simply unfolded into a larger, evolving situation that can’t be neatly boxed into whether they cracked the initial case?
These ideas about what constitutes “solving” a mystery aren’t some essential truth. We’ve inherited them from the structure of crime fiction, particularly 20th-century detective stories, where everything is designed to converge on a singular solution that retroactively justifies the plot. Fiction can and often does operate under those laws, but it doesn't have to. Today, we have plenty of modern examples where resolution isn’t as neatly constructed. Where mysteries linger, where solutions are partial, messy, or even absent, and the focus shifts to how the investigation transforms the people involved or reshapes the world around them. I’m thinking of True Detective, where the investigation leaves threads unresolved and the emotional, moral, and personal fallout becomes the real resolution. Or Zodiac, where the investigation spans decades without closure, and the mystery’s weight lies in the obsessive toll it takes on the investigators.
That the old methodology may look and feel like “reality” and like the modern judicial system, but that is no coincidence. The detective genre has always been entangled with a cultural fantasy about closure, accountability, and truth being singular, discoverable, and legally actionable. But that is a fiction — both in literature and in life. And when we import that structure uncritically into RPG play, we mistake a literary convention for a necessary structure of play.
What I’m trying to get at is that there is no such thing as “solving” a mystery outside of the broader act of resolving a situation, or if you let me rephrase, providing resolution to an ongoing and shifting situation in an RPG. This implies that the definitive "solution" to the same pre-written mystery could look VERY VERY DIFFERENT depending on who you ask.
So my question, again, is what does it mean to "solve" an investigation scenario, and as a follow up, who decides that?
A question for you:
What does it mean to "solve" an investigation scenario under the light of a pre-established, pre-written mystery backstory?
Is it when the players correctly guess the culprit's identity? Is it when they reconstruct the entire sequence of events the GM prepared? What if they miss half of it, but still catch the culprit — is that a solved mystery? Or what if they uncover the full backstory, but only after the GM spoon-feeds it to them through exposition to finish off the session? Is that a “solution”?
Is it when they take action against the culprit and bring them to justice? What if they do that without understanding the full context. Is that still "solving" the mystery? What if they kill the wrong suspect but uncover the actual backstory later?
Is it when the players themselves understand the backstory, or when their characters do? What if the players piece it together out of character, maybe a week after, but the PCs never quite grasped the full picture? Is that a solved mystery?
What if the players correctly identify the culprit, but the culprit escapes? Is the mystery “solved” at that point? Or does it only count if they both discover the answer and successfully confront or apprehend them?
What if they expose the entire backstory, piece it together beautifully, but the culprit dies offscreen, or flees to another country, or is killed by someone else before they can act (This would be bad play in story now, but maybe acceptable in a more neutral style)? Is that still considered solving the mystery?
What if the players solve the mystery too late. They figure out who did it, but by then, more people have died, more crimes have been committed, and now those events have opened up entirely new mysteries? Is the original mystery still "solved" in any meaningful sense, or has the investigation simply unfolded into a larger, evolving situation that can’t be neatly boxed into whether they cracked the initial case?
These ideas about what constitutes “solving” a mystery aren’t some essential truth. We’ve inherited them from the structure of crime fiction, particularly 20th-century detective stories, where everything is designed to converge on a singular solution that retroactively justifies the plot. Fiction can and often does operate under those laws, but it doesn't have to. Today, we have plenty of modern examples where resolution isn’t as neatly constructed. Where mysteries linger, where solutions are partial, messy, or even absent, and the focus shifts to how the investigation transforms the people involved or reshapes the world around them. I’m thinking of True Detective, where the investigation leaves threads unresolved and the emotional, moral, and personal fallout becomes the real resolution. Or Zodiac, where the investigation spans decades without closure, and the mystery’s weight lies in the obsessive toll it takes on the investigators.
That the old methodology may look and feel like “reality” and like the modern judicial system, but that is no coincidence. The detective genre has always been entangled with a cultural fantasy about closure, accountability, and truth being singular, discoverable, and legally actionable. But that is a fiction — both in literature and in life. And when we import that structure uncritically into RPG play, we mistake a literary convention for a necessary structure of play.
What I’m trying to get at is that there is no such thing as “solving” a mystery outside of the broader act of resolving a situation, or if you let me rephrase, providing resolution to an ongoing and shifting situation in an RPG. This implies that the definitive "solution" to the same pre-written mystery could look VERY VERY DIFFERENT depending on who you ask.
So my question, again, is what does it mean to "solve" an investigation scenario, and as a follow up, who decides that?
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Bedrockgames
I post in the voice of Christopher Walken
I think this is at the heart of a lot of the problems we have communicating in these threads. Which is some of us use much different language and even have a completely different way of how we would describe the process of a game working. There is a lot of reasons for that. But the reason I don't analyses the way you and Pemerton do, is I think this method leads to missing important elements. It feels like it over- essentializes things. I mean you can describe things hesitantly about a process out of convenience, for example when rulebooks say an RPG is about the the GM asking what do you do? The players saying what they do, then the GM trying to resolve that. But I think you miss a lot of nuances and variation in how things play out. Even down to stuff like goals. I don't think most campaigns or systems have focused goals. Most get used to serve a variety of goals, often multiple goals at the same time, because you have a group of players all interested in different aspects of play. So I can describe this stuff as best I can, but I cannot adopt your language, your approach, because it just isn't how I think about these things (and it isn't how I want to think about these things)
Bedrockgames
I post in the voice of Christopher Walken
I think it is very obvious what it means. It doesn't mean they are going to succeed or succeed fully. But it does mean even if they didn't solve it, the answer exists and could be discovered if they GM just decided to tell them what they missed.
