GM fiat - an illustration

[Bedrockgames]

Also something that keeps coming up is that we are saying style X is uniquely objective. I don't know where this is coming from, but that isn't my read of our position at all. We are just talking about the difference between games where a mystery is treated as an objective thing that can be explored and discovered and approached more like the Hillfolk example I gave. And I have tried to avoid comment on systems I don't feel I adequately understand, and said there seems to be plenty of gray areas as well.

Something like this came up as well when we were talking about sandboxes in another thread some time ago but one largely with the same posters in it. I think one of use made the point that sandboxes are about giving players the most freedom and agency possible. And this was interpreted as us claiming exclusive ownership of those things. But I don't think that is what we were doing at all. The point wasn't that you can't have agency and freedom in other games. It was that the whole thing driving what a sandbox is, is the player's ability to go in any direction they want, try anything, ignore any leads, etc. A way of describing that is giving them the most freedom possible. That doesn't mean there aren't other styles or type of RPGs that can also be described that way (even if it means something slightly different or greatly different but uses the same natural language)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The medium is conversational. The object of conversation is stuff that is jointly imagined. And, in the classic CoC-type of play, the correctness condition for anyone else's imagining is that it conforms to what the GM has imagined.

It is jointly imagined. I don't think anyone disagrees with that. However, I reject that all possible jointly-imagined things are compatible with a player doing a mystery-solve.

Some jointly-imagined things are. Others are not. I read your Cthulhu Dark rules. One of the explicit rules in it was that any player can assert that another player's roll fails if it would be more interesting to do so. If they do assert so, and it is not disagreeable to the rest of the group, this happens.

That is a level of control over the fictional space incompatible with mystery-solving as I understand it.

Furthermore, as has been the case with nearly all of your responses, you keep defaulting to 100% pure GM-authorship of the mystery. I don't require that. I've explicitly said as much numerous times. You can have a genuine mystery where even the GM does not know what the answer is, only so long as SOMETHING is the answer that cannot be changed by anyone's hand--not even the GM's.

Yes, this means I want to solve logic puzzles. I consider that the quintessential activity of attempting to solve a mystery story before you hear the reveal. I consider that personal, in-my-own-head logic-puzzle-solving task both extremely satisfying when I can pull it off (which, sadly, is far rarer than I like!), and I consider that activity, puzzling through a tricky situation, to be precisely analogous to what a real-world investigator (or scientist, or mathematician, or various other things) is doing when they are attempting to learn/prove something new about our real actual world. Hence, it is one of the exceedingly rare cases where the thing done in the head of Ezekiel, the human being sitting before his monitor at ungodly hours due to insomnia, precisely matches the thing done in the head of Lord Finley Strange, the sleuthing son of the Right Honorable the Baron Strange (mostly being dragged around by his utterly irrepressible best friend, Lady Eliza York, only child of the suo jure Duchess of York.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

My point was the way some people in these threads talks about RPGs very much reminds me of music theorists who would minimize, degrade or dismiss rap when it comes to certain styles of play. Things like music theory or RPG theory can be used to illuminate, but can also be wielded to obscure, to favor one approach over an another, etc.

My purpose is, was, and always will be to illuminate. Hence why I prefer to avoid vagueness when I can. Precision, accuracy, and clarity permit light to fall where it did not fall before. “Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us.” (Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, or Urne Burial.)

Hence, to respond to a request for clarity or precision with, "I can't. It's not possible. You can't communicate about this in this way, because it's not possible to express the experience in words"....does not in any way come across as a desire to avoid obscurantism. It very much comes across as an assertion that obscurantism is the only possible option.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Clue(do) is not "pawn stance". Clue(do) has no fiction, no player characters, and hence no stance.

As has already been posted, multiple times, Clue(do) is simply a logic puzzle turned into a board/parlour game, with the flavour text of a murder mystery overlaid.

The pawns have names, the board represents a house, the cards don't just say, "clue 1, clue 2, etc". Looks like fiction to me, minimal as it is.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The pawns have names, the board represents a house, the cards don't just say, "clue 1, clue 2, etc". Looks like fiction to me, minimal as it is.

Yeah, that was more or less why I saw it that way. There is a paper-thin layer of fiction pasted over the "solve a logic puzzle where the solution was randomly selected but guaranteed to be discoverable with enough effort." That paper-thin layer of fiction rarely, if ever, extends to thinking of yourself in any way as the character. The character is simply the thing that allows you to have a place on the board--and you can (and should!) accuse your own character of having committed the crime if you think you did it, because the goal is to win by solving the logic puzzle first, not to actually play a murderer trying to get away with murder.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Yeah, that was more or less why I saw it that way. There is a paper-thin layer of fiction pasted over the "solve a logic puzzle where the solution was randomly selected but guaranteed to be discoverable with enough effort." That paper-thin layer of fiction rarely, if ever, extends to thinking of yourself in any way as the character. The character is simply the thing that allows you to have a place on the board--and you can (and should!) accuse your own character of having committed the crime if you think you did it, because the goal is to win by solving the logic puzzle first, not to actually play a murderer trying to get away with murder.

Yeah, though when I play it with my roleplayer friends, we actually do adopt the personas of the characters; it is way more entertaining that way. Not that this affects the outcome of the game.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This has been my point all along. It isn't wrong, but it definitely feels reductive and odd way to describe it

To me, it is the way you describe something for which you don't have a lot of respect, and having a lot of experience with that thing doesn't change that.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

To me, it is the way you describe something for which you don't have a lot of respect, and having a lot of experience with that thing doesn't change that.

I presume you do have a lot of respect for it, then?

If so, would you be willing to give your best attempt at such a description?

 

[Bedrockgames]

My purpose is, was, and always will be to illuminate. Hence why I prefer to avoid vagueness when I can. Precision, accuracy, and clarity permit light to fall where it did not fall before. “Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us.” (Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, or Urne Burial.)

Hence, to respond to a request for clarity or precision with, "I can't. It's not possible. You can't communicate about this in this way, because it's not possible to express the experience in words"....does not in any way come across as a desire to avoid obscurantism. It very much comes across as an assertion that obscurantism is the only possible option.

But how is it illuminating if it feels like it is dismissive of entire styles of play, and feels like it favors others. It is like saying "all the blues is twelve bars and pentatonic scales, it doesn't achieve the full richness and complexity of the structure and harmonic organization of baroque and classical". Blues musicians would object. They might also say "you aren't wrong, we use pentatonic scales and 12 bars but there is so much more going on". And many of them may not be able to articulate to the critique because lots of blues musicians are not versed in music theory (and many would even consider learning music theory to not be helpful because they have their own language for talking about the music)*. Now I am not saying you are saying that. I am not even trying to litigate what specific posters have said. But things like this often seem to come up in these discussions, even if they are just vague and kind of backhanded.


*Note I am not saying you can't join music theory and the blues, two of my guitar teachers growing up were blues musicians who had great command of music theory

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yeah, that was more or less why I saw it that way. There is a paper-thin layer of fiction pasted over the "solve a logic puzzle where the solution was randomly selected but guaranteed to be discoverable with enough effort." That paper-thin layer of fiction rarely, if ever, extends to thinking of yourself in any way as the character. The character is simply the thing that allows you to have a place on the board--and you can (and should!) accuse your own character of having committed the crime if you think you did it, because the goal is to win by solving the logic puzzle first, not to actually play a murderer trying to get away with murder.

Absolutely. I'm just being clear that the claim "Clue(do) has no fiction" is factually wrong.