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Yeah, we will unsurprisingly disagree on the first thing, but I do think that fairly straight trad play, possibly verging into a more 'neo trad' style, isn't that far off in most respects from Narrativist play. Baker repeatedly makes this point in the AW text. There are some areas where the...

In any realistic analysis of how play happens in actual games, these are basically the same thing. AT MOST a GM here may find themselves constrained by things established but unrevealed. Even then the GM decided that stuff at some point. This brings up another point made by some posters...

The Alarm spell fiat COULD be doing so. Without discussion of actual play at a detailed enough level to discern the relevant facts we cannot say. Now between TB2e and D&D 5e what we can discuss in a general way is the contents of the rules, and the structure of play, the process, which they...

Right, I don't have opinions on what happens at anyone's games, or hold judgement on their aesthetics, outside of having personal tastes of course. I do think there's a tendency in many discussions of the like of this thread though to resist analysis. Back when I took a step back and dug into...

Well, this is what is cool about 1000 Arrows, who knows what will happen if they meet again? Some bonds will be checked against. If Hino tries to murder you, the GM will, undoubtedly pose this as a goal with a cost, and it will require something like an Indulge Your Obsession move. They could...

I would say that you probably wouldn't play Cthulhu Dark in that case. Trail of Cthulhu might work better, since it's a variant of Gumshoe, which I understand is specifically designed to do mystery stories. However, my understanding of ToC/Gumshoe is that the requisite clues are presented to the...

Are they 'together?', this is not your Pappy's D&D... BitD positions the PCs as a crew, as simply a fact. Beyond that the milieu and genre assumptions, etc all work within that context. However, nothing really forces the crew members to be all chummy friends, skullduggery is common in Doskvol...

Yeah, that seems like a viable approach. It could work fine in D&D, where action adventure, or exploration are central activities. My CoC GMing just ran out of gas at a certain point. That system provides little alternative, and the genre is basically mysteries of a certain sort. You can try to...

I'd just note that, IME, a vast majority of these sorts of "follow the bread crumbs" things fail. Masks of Nyarlathotep is like the ultimate poster child. I've run it, played it, yet to see it, or any other CoC module, really run through. Inevitably the GM has to drop clues, introduce additional...

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.

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 ;)

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...

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...

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

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...

It's turtles, all the way down. Your not dealing with any facts or constraints. This is why calling world building and trad GMing 'simulation' doesn't fly. None of this is analogous to anything, there's no logic to say what is or is not correct. There's just turtles (made up stuff).

But this has none of the character of solving a mystery at all. How are the characters validating these guesses. Why are they guessing anything at all? The whole thing is simply a lampshade for a parlor game that is a logic puzzle. It can tell us nothing about the questions at hand here.

Right, so real-world detectives are going to look at everything as contingent and possibly ambiguous. Solving any realistic mystery is NOT LIKE SOLVING A PUZZLE. It is going to be a lot of intuition, guesswork, humility, and mostly the gathering of a mass of small individually insignificant...

Reference the symbolism of my avatar for the gist of my reaction to this. 🐢🐢

I don't see a conflict between these things, and I suspect that you do because you have a view of what 'prep' is which is rather different from what Baker did when he wrote AW2e. Baker's prep is pretty loose. It's not about establishing a lot of hard facts. It also ALL happens AFTER session 1...