Why do you play games other than D&D?

[SableWyvern]

I don't know if would make a difference to anyone, but I would be happy to rephrase my original statement to something like this:

In Brindlewood Bay, the players are not solving a mystery, but are playing characters who do.

I think that's more accurate to my intent than my original phrasing, and may be more palatable to those who originally disagreed with me.

 

[pemerton]

none, but actual investigations tend to have actual persons doing a specific thing in a specific way and either the investigators discover this, or they fail.

In the absence of an actual murder to investigate the equivalent would be for the GM to set up a predetermined mystery / crime for the players to solve.

<snip>

The difference is that the DM did not set up a predetermined mystery that the players either discover or fail at discovering, the way an investigation of a real life crime would

The epistemic situation of an investigator isn't changed by the fact that there is an "external" truth. They have no access to that truth other than by uncovering clues, finding patterns, forming conjectures, and doing their best to make sense of it all. Whereas the position of players in the sort of game you describe is that the players can ask the author if they got the answer that the author intended; that's why I compared it to a crossword puzzle (or any other clue-based puzzle where the author has written the puzzle with an intended solution). This capacity to get authorial confirmation; or to be critiqued by the author for failing to solve the puzzle; makes a CoC-type module pretty different from the actual process of solving a mystery.

By focusing on correctness/truth, you are focusing on something which is the main point of difference between solving a mystery and playing a CoC scenario. (This is also why I made the comparison to Agatha Christie.) Whereas Brindlewood Bay, as described by @Fenris-77 and @Arilyn, foregrounds the epistemic position of an investigator, in which correctness is not available in any unmediated "authorial" fashion.

it’s not arbitrary in the sense that any nonsense is equally convincing to the players, even if the die roll were to say it is the correct answer because they collected enough clues at that point. It is arbitrary in that the die roll decides whether it is the solution even if the theory feels pretty unconvincing

"Unconvincing" to whom? As @Fenris-77 posted, if players are making conjectures that they find implausible, that's not a system problem.

If you mean "unconvincing to some external audience", well so what? Was every explanation ever of a murder that took place convincing to those people? Sometimes the best theory of how a murder occurred isn't the one that you or I would arrive at left to our own devices.

 

[mamba]

"Unconvincing" to whom? As @Fenris-77 posted, if players are making conjectures that they find implausible, that's not a system problem

unconvincing to the players, most players have no audience so I would not worry about that.

If the players make an unconvincing case but the die roll says ‘this is the correct solution’ I do find that somewhat unsatisfying, but I guess it is in line with Agatha Christie’s answers to how it was done

 

[soviet]

The epistemic situation of an investigator isn't changed by the fact that there is an "external" truth. They have no access to that truth other than by uncovering clues, finding patterns, forming conjectures, and doing their best to make sense of it all. Whereas the position of players in the sort of game you describe is that the players can ask the author if they got the answer that the author intended; that's why I compared it to a crossword puzzle (or any other clue-based puzzle where the author has written the puzzle with an intended solution). This capacity to get authorial confirmation; or to be critiqued by the author for failing to solve the puzzle; makes a CoC-type module pretty different from the actual process of solving a mystery.

By focusing on correctness/truth, you are focusing on something which is the main point of difference between solving a mystery and playing a CoC scenario. (This is also why I made the comparison to Agatha Christie.) Whereas Brindlewood Bay, as described by @Fenris-77 and @Arilyn, foregrounds the epistemic position of an investigator, in which correctness is not available in any unmediated "authorial" fashion.

I haven't played the games being discussed but I work as an investigator in real life and I've definitely learned that you never (or almost never) really know 100% what's happened. You can build evidence and see patterns and figure out broadly what happened and how, but there are always little details that you don't understand or that don't quite fit. Real life is complicated. Even when matters go to court you sometimes wonder if there is some bizarre explanation they might be able to provide that blows your theory out of the water. Even when people plead guilty or (in civil matters) choose not to contest, it's rarely accompanied by a confession and there are always questions left unanswered. So, there is never a word of God moment when you know definitively 'this is what happened, and how, and why'.

I remember one part of my training was a timed exercise involving a bunch of suspects and then a complex network of 'if a then b, if c then not d' type clues. Basically if you took a top-down approach and tried to put all the clues into a formula and then see which suspect it matched, you would run out of time. The only way to solve it was to just pick a suspect and work through the questions until you ruled them out, then pick another suspect and work through the questions until you ruled them out, and so on until you either got a match or you ran out of time.

 

[pemerton]

@soviet That's a very interesting post!

I'm not an investigator, but I am an academic lawyer. And have also worked on mainstream epistemology to the Masters research level. Which is the perspective that I'm brining to bear: the fact that truth is (typically) mind-independent is an interesting and important thing; but it's not a thing that shapes the receipt of and reasoning about evidence, because the investigator can't step "outside" of their epistemic "location" to confirm correctness via a god's-eye-view/"authorial" perspective.

(The key work that shaped my thinking on this is AJ Ayer's discussion of William James's theory of truth in The Origins of Pragmatism.)

 

[pemerton]

If the players make an unconvincing case but the die roll says ‘this is the correct solution’ I do find that somewhat unsatisfying

Have you had this happen in play? I mean, why would players propose a solution that they think isn't correct?

 

[mamba]

Have you had this happen in play? I mean, why would players propose a solution that they think isn't correct?

no, haven’t played this. As to why, because it is the best they got, because one player convinced two more but the remaining two find it unconvincing and would acquit as part of a jury, because they know there is no real answer and have fun with something silly, plenty of options

 

[hawkeyefan]

But then a die roll decides whether their theory is correct and the DM never really set up a predetermined puzzle with one specific solution / murderer, and that is where it does not match up with actual investigations.

Actual investigations don’t have a DM.

it doesn’t to me, which is not meant to imply that BB fails at its goal or is not fun to play, only that I see a difference between these two cases

I do, too. In one, I’m playing through the GM’s predetermined story and in the other I’m not.

In Brindlewood Bay, the players are not solving a mystery, but are playing characters who do.

But this applies to any investigation based game.

In Call of Cthulhu, the players are not solving a mystery, but are playing characters who do.

 

[SableWyvern]

In Call of Cthulhu, the players are not solving a mystery, but are playing characters who do.

The players in a Call of Cthulhu game can absolutely solve puzzles and mysteries, in a very similar fashion to how they would if playing an escape room game. For many people, this is literally part of the appeal of investigative games -- actually, as a person in the real world, solving puzzle (while doing so in character). That they are doing this through the characters in the game doesn't change this fact. This doesn't mean the characters aren't also solving the puzzle.

Conversely, a lot of people would not be happy with an escape room game where there was not a clear correct answer to the final puzzle, but "success" or "failure" came down to a random check. In this case, the players are not actually solving a puzzle at all.

 

[pemerton]

In Call of Cthulhu, the players are not solving a mystery, but are playing characters who do.

In CoC, the players are definitely playing characters who (try to) solve a mystery.

In some CoC play, that's the bulk of what the players are doing. The rest - consequences, victory/defeat, etc - is really colour that is provided by the GM and provides context for the players' play of their PCs. I've played this sort of CoC, at conventions, with varying degrees of player ability to actually shape what comes next. It can be a lot of fun with a good GM, because CoC lends itself to compelling colour and characters.

In some CoC play, the players - while playing characters who try to solve a mystery - are also trying to solve a puzzle, in the sense that they know the GM has authored a mystery and placed clues to it, and they are trying to use the methods of the game to (i) oblige the GM to disclose the clues (in CoC this is normally fictional positioning-based) and then (ii) use those clues to infer to the answer that the GM pre-authored. I haven't done much of this sort of play in CoC, but have done a bit of it in other systems (including D&D).

Of the two processes I've identified, (i) goes back to the beginnings of classic D&D play, and using fictional positioning (eg listening carefully at a dungeon door) to oblige the GM to reveal pre-authored backstory. A lot of complaints about how investigation scenarios can fail to work as hoped revolve around this issue - basically, what if the players don't put themselves into the right fictional position? - and related issues, like using the fictional position to trigger a die roll, which if it fails means the players still don't get the backstory information they were fictionally positioned to obtain. GUMSHOE is one solution to this; fairly hard railroading of players through the fictional material is another one, that is not necessarily incompatible, and (from my reading) is pretty common in D&D scenarios with mysteries.

The second process, (ii) above - that is, using the clues to infer the GM's pre-authored answer - seems to me to have as its closest non-RPG relative some sorts of parlour games. That's why I think the comparison to Agatha Christie is not inapt.