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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 8171977" data-attributes="member: 6785785">Right. I agree that both approaches are fine in so far as they may be fun and the participants may be perfectly happy to play in such a way. All approaches are fine in that sense. I'm just trying to consider if different methods would suit a whodunnit style mystery as RPG. My experience with the Star Trek scenario, which had an apparent accident as the point of investigation, and then different clues or details that could be gathered from either investigating the scene of the accident or a couple of other locaitons, or from questioning the people involved, with all of these being resolved through Skill rolls (or whatever the game calls them!), was not very fun for me at all. I mean, I had fun in the sense that I was hanging with my friends and we had some laughs and so we all had fun. But the game in and of itself was not engaging for me as a player at all. I simply didn't feel like a detective or like I accomplished anything by piecing together the puzzle. Because this is a perfect example of "RPG as puzzle solving" that was mentioned earlier in the thread. Now, I'm not saying that I can never be engaged by that kind of game.....thinking about it now, I can likely rattle off several examples of that kind of play that I did feel was engaging.....but as the central focus of an entire session it left a lot to be desired. The mystery wasn't all that compelling and the use of game mechanics was not all that exciting. It wasn't terribly difficult to figure out, ultimately; any difficulty in that regard was more a case of format. Like I remember at one point someone saying somthing along the lines of "Oh wait, you said that engineer we spoke to went to academy with the victim right? Or was it the scientist?" which are the kinds of details that can be blurry in a game but no so when you're actually a detective experiencing interactions with people. Once we resolved any of those, and we had our characters engage in the right locations/NPCs to the correct extent, the answer became clear, and the culprit was revealed. The one bit of credit I will give this published scenario is that the actual culprit was not the most obvious choice.At the same time, I feel if the mystery were to be more complex, it would easily move into impossible to solve territory. So I think it's a tricky tightrope to walk as a RPG. I know other games address this in different ways....Gumshoe, notably, and some others that have been mentioned. [USER=6993955]@Fenris-77[/USER] provided a pretty interesting node based approach, which I think would probably map to the Gumshoe system pretty well. I've still seen plenty of criticisms of that kind of approach online, as well.Here is my question for you in this regard. What if the process for this was still all in the hands of the GM in the sense that the GM decides what happened and how, but doesn't actually commit to all of it before hand? Because it seems to me that your sticking point is looking at this as a challenge, and the satisfaction from overcoming the challenge. Do you think that in order for this to be challenging to players, all the relevant details or clues need to be established ahead of time? Or maybe only most of them? Or do you think that such a scenario can still be challenging to players if a GM is determining some of these things at the time of play?</blockquote>

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