GM fiat - an illustration

[AbdulAlhazred]

This is what players must do to solve real mysteries in the game too.

I can't really comment on what is entailed in such an endeavor in your games, clearly. I will just note that other posters have made comparisons with Clue, and have talked about clues and mysteries in terms drawn largely from detective genre fiction. While I think emulating such fiction is valid, even excellent, as an agenda, I don't consider such fiction to contain much realism, or even a lot of logic.

Well, your game is just a game. So sure everything to you is crafted to work as a game.

Many of us others see a RPG as beyond the label of a game: something greater then the sum of it's parts.

Mmmmm, yeah. You might want to ply this on a less deeply experienced audience.

No.

You have a real mystery or you have a non-mystery game play activity made for game play to make the players feel like they are discovering new that has never been thought of by anyone before the player randomly used the game rules to make the randomness in front of them.

As opposed to the one where someone pulled it out of thin air. We can all do this talking down to each other, it's not going anywhere.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

If one can understand "prep" so differently, it would seem to me that it would behoove the authors to be more specific, rather than just using a generic word and presuming everyone agrees on what it means.

Dude, there's entire chapters of the book which do exactly that.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

....the logic puzzle IS the mystery-solving? I don't understand what your point is here.

I agree, it's solving a puzzle. To the degree that a Sudoku is a mystery, so is Clue. Neither one has any of the character of an investigation however.

So this begs the question, why do we do this stuff in an RPG? There are many ways to enjoy solving puzzles. I would posit that the point of this is the story, the unfolding of a narrative we create about solving a mystery. The actual mystery is secondary.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Very specific use of terminology can be used to promote a point of view quite effectively, especially if the terminology is less than transparent.

This might be true in some abstract but here's the problem, AW 2e spends HUNDREDS OF PAGES, explaining itself. Nothing is left to chance here. AW is the very model of full explication. One that IME no other RPG ever published has surpassed. So @EzekielRaiden 's point is meaningless, though I would never accuse another poster of deliberately misrepresenting anything...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Of course you are dealing with facts and constraints. You the DM makes them up for your game. In the case of simulating reality to an extent, the fact and constraints are an approximation of reality. Just because you don't place the same constraints on yourself that I do, doesn't mean that mine aren't there.

Of course you are dealing with turtles. You the DM carefully raised them from eggs. They actually hold the game world! Just because you are not serious enough to use genuine world turtles doesn't mean mine don't get the job done.

FTFY

 

[zakael19]

I guess another contrast I'd draw is in the tenor of the prep's statements about play. When I prepped for my 5e COTN mystery/plot thing, a lot of the play focused stuff was full of "If..." and "when..." statements. Eg: "If they talk to/make a perception check/succeed on an insight roll..." or "when they enter.../walk up to/hear." So all about conditionals around player actions.

My prep for Stonetop is "Threat's goal, instinct, actions (and here's a step of how those manifest in a way that's communicable to the players)" or "Questions we might answer during play," eg: "Will the Ranger mend fences with his boyfriend? Can the answers the Blessed seeks be found here? How will the family of the lost children react?"

 

[Bedrockgames]

I agree, it's solving a puzzle. To the degree that a Sudoku is a mystery, so is Clue. Neither one has any of the character of an investigation however.

You aren't just solving a puzzle you are solving a fictional mystery. The characters can follow leads, pick up the phone call people to ask questions, go to various institutions to ask around and look for clues, they can go to a crime scene, gather clues and follow those clues, etc. Anyone who has lived has investigated things. It is pretty easy to set up a scenario where something concrete happened, details about that are established, there are various leads, suspects, clues, etc and the PCs start following leads or look for leads and begin investigating.

Part of my issue with topics like this in the thread is it feels like arguing against Zeno's paradox at times, where very obvious and clear things people can do in an RPG, are questioned and broken down into constituent parts to prove they are impossible to do

 

[Maxperson]

Of course you are dealing with turtles. You the DM carefully raised them from eggs. They actually hold the game world! Just because you are not serious enough to use genuine world turtles doesn't mean mine don't get the job done.

FTFY

Pratchett, is that you?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm not really sure why thinking about consequences is such a bad thing here though. A nobleman spurned will react negatively. A nobleman served with speed and precision will react positively. A threat defeated might be destroyed entirely, or crippled, or merely driven away, or what-not; a threat the PCs couldn't, didn't, or wouldn't stop will get worse. That, I thought, was a huge part of why you draft Fronts in the first place?

I'm not sure I would say thinking about consequences is bad. In fact it seems implicit in practices like "make a move which follows" and the idea of a golden opportunity that DW talks about.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Nah. I can't believe you thought what you said in your last response to me. THAT is what makes no sense.

A criminal IS placing clues. They almost all do. It doesn't matter that it's not deliberate. They are placing them anyway. They place fingerprints. Shoe prints. DNA evidence. Camera evidence. And more.

Leaving clues for investigators to find is the same thing. Both criminals and DMs do it.

The deliberate aspect is exactly what I’m citing. The GM crafting a mystery is placing things with the intention that they are found. What they are doing, whether they admit it or not, is creating a scenario that they intend to be engaging as a game.

That is not what a criminal does. They’re not concerned with how much fun it will be for people to solve the crime. They’re not actively deciding what sorts of clues to leave behind. They’re not also somehow responsible for other factors like witnesses and the weather and the like.

It’s a bonkers comparison.