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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8171878" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yes, but interestingly you don't 'solve a mystery' in Clue. There is actually no explanation of what the clues are. In fact, amusingly Clue has no clues at all! You simply reveal cards without the slightest explanation of how the investigation is carried out, or what it consists of. Why is it not possible that Mr Mustard did it in the Study? We have no idea, this is not addressed. So Clue is not a model for a mystery game at all, and in fact it is a pretty silly game with as much sophistication as Tic, Tac, Toe when you get right down to it.I don't really see how Ironsworn helps much either. It is a thoroughly narrativist game in which the players invent the fiction, or else it is generated via 'oracles'. The 'fulfilling oaths' part is a structured set of GOALS that the players, through their PCs, construct, but the rules don't really address how you achieve them, except through the mechanics of play. It is in these actual mechanics that a pure mystery story game would have to deal with a mystery. In order for that game to achieve success by the criteria of the 'traditional' non-narrativists in this discusion it would have to involve a fixed answer to a mystery which can only be revealed by either specific player declarations "I search the dresser." or mediated through skill checks which resolve those actions "I do a thorough search and roll an X on my Search skill check." Frankly, I don't see that the above approach will ever avoid the pitfalls of "its too simple" or "its too complicated." Any given mystery MIGHT manage to fall in the 'sweet spot', but that spot is going to be different for every set of players and GM. So writing one would be pure hit and miss. Thus any rules which would produce reliable success at a session would need to 'calibrate'. However, the mere fact of that calibration is anathema to some, as it implies a game architecture in which there is some roughly fixed overall probability of success which doesn't map too closely to the approach taken by the players. This undermines any goal of building a system where the players both reliably enjoy solving a challenging mystery, AND feel like solving said mystery was a genuine challenge and not a pretense.For these reasons I conclude that the most sensible design paradigm for such a game (or subsystem of an existing game if you will) would be a narrativist approach, a kind of Story Now in which the focus was moved from purely "can we follow the clues and solve the mystery" to some kind of social and psychological, or political/other implications and ramifications arise in the course of trying to solve this particular mystery. I think we've already discussed some examples of such story lines.Ah, given that I was never really sucked into that whole genre much I guess I never knew there were TWO different RPGs covering the same IP. I remember the earlier SotC based one as being favorably received. I've never played any SotC-based games, but I did read through the core rules way back when. It seemed like a fairly reasonable system core for this kind of thing.I'm thinking that a PbtA might work pretty well too. You could spin that a few different ways. Focus on the social conflicts, on the 'police procedure' aspect, or perhaps on the internal mental state of the 'detective' (ala a lot of 'film noir' detective pictures). I'm sure there would be other possibilities as well that would work with a playbook centered system like that. It sounds like the 'playbook-like Mantles' you mention would be pretty suitable to this kind of psychological 'grey area' sort of game.</blockquote>

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