Search results

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...

Yeah, when I played there were various clocks, entanglement roll stuff, rivals, etc. We Yeah, it was not especially the hill I was eager to die on. I'm pretty leery of that terminology, but whatever, if BRG wants to use it, then it's pointless to argue about. IMHO all play is so many layers...

I think it's fine to let the world grind forward, to a degree. And Doskvol is filled with factions, characters, entities, geography, lore, etc. so plenty would presumably be going on behind the scenes. You can think of stuff like that as basically the time dimension of the setting. But I would...

Nobody is talking about any old constraints producing a mystery.

I don't know what game does this. PbtA games, which are a pretty common model for Narrativist play, are actually pretty conventional in terms of parsing out responsibility for saying things, and the basic conversational loop. WHAT the GM says, WHY, and the degree to which the game explicates...

Well, when we were in D/T or info gathering/free play we just had what we decided we needed. I'd tell the GM I was going down to the fighting pits to talk to my contact there about whatever. Of course I was armed, and might have noted having some other resources. If it devolved into major...

The game basically just presents a GM authored set of challenges, which then have to be adjudicated by this GM, with pass/fail mechanics that are also entirely up to the GM to decide. All sorts of things go wrong IME. I mean, the game is playable if you are fairly well-versed in the correct...

But how is 5e different? It runs into the very same issues 1e did, and has no better answers for them, overall. As for BitD, it's certainly a system designed around a specific kind of play. In general I think you can handle most situations by its standard conflict rules, a clock, or a fortune roll.

Right, I am just pointing out that literally determining what the answer to the mystery is may not be the actual fun and goal. It may be necessary for the game to go forward, but as with our M:tG games, getting the answer may simply be a driver, not the real goal.

I could equally guess an answer in some hypothetical Narrativist game and turn out to be correct, couldn't I?

You may certainly play a different game, one with more depth, but the game that 1e presents rules for, and other contemporary versions, focus on 'crawls'. Problematically, once you desert that crawl format, the rules are mostly left behind, or become (as the OP discussed) much less suitable...

Yeah, I think it is basically a distinction without a difference. That is, we could easily see an entire story arc, or campaign, in the same light as this mystery. I suspect that this is in fact how many games work. So we can see, in the mystery game microcosm, what the fundamental differences...

So powerful in fact that there is a class of them, which includes all the non-trivial examples, which are self-referential, and thus can be applied to reasoning about themselves. It is thus very difficult to construe any of higher math, which ultimately entails even 'simple' arithmetic as...

Again, as a mathematician, I find your certainty unwarranted. You are expressing one of a number of equally interesting points of view on this topic.

I'm not sure I agree with that. I agree that the players being able, at some point, to recount at least part of what the GM wrote COULD BE a significant part of the experience. Honestly, we play a lot of Magic the Gathering using the Commander format. This is a pretty non-competitive format...

I think this usage just becomes less and less useful when you think about it. Everything in play is equally real by this measure. We really sit at a table and really play, etc. Facts about a mystery equally become real in all play. So what we focus on is when, how, by whom, for what reason, etc.

While I think Plato's position on this is certainly less popular than it was back in the day, it's not one we can really dismiss. Interestingly it kind of resurfaces in things like cosmology. Is logic a characteristic of reality? These are valid questions with implications at that level.