Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 6806492" data-attributes="member: 27160">I don't think I miss your meaning, but I need perhaps to explain my own a little more completely to make that clearer (one way or the other).When I talk about "clever" clues what I have in mind are clues that, when looked at a particular way or together with other available information, are supposed to point unambiguously to one specific perpetrator. I almost never come across this in real life - the usual sort of "clue" is one that eliminates one suspect from the list of possible suspects or adds a suspect to the said list. As a result I think of specifically incriminating clues that are found in combination as rather contrived or "clever"; I don't really think they feature in real investigations at all often, but that does not mean that they could or should not be explored in the context of an RPG. Their usual abode is logic puzzles and murder mystery books, so the desire to achieve their extension to RPGs seems quite natural, in fact.Now, the reason I think this sort of "clue" structure tends to fall flat is that players either don't notice the clues (because they are not as evident as their author imagines them to be), or that they are not as unambiguous as their author believes them to be (or, at least, are not seen as unambiguous by the players). This can either lead to baffled and frustrated players (and characters!) in the first case - avoided by mystery writers by simply having the "genius" investigator notice the clues which they themselves have planted - or by the players/characters reaching the wrong conclusion in the second case - avoided by the mystery writer by having their primary character just as blind to the ambiguity as they are, which is kind of hard to avoid doing...Getting the right answer is satisfying, of course, but getting a "wrong" answer can be not only "un-fun" but also intensely frustrating if you can see ambiguity that the author is apparently blind to*. I think it is also unrealistic, in the sense that what is generally left at the end of an investigation is some element of ambiguity. You might be wrong, but you will probably never know - although some investigations are "proved" wrong years or even decades after the fact.So, do I think there is a type of game here that can only be done with pre-authoring? Yes - but it's only a subset of the "investigation" genre, and I think it's chancy at best to get "right". For some, the effort required to get it "right" may very well be worthwhile - good luck to them. To me, it seems like too much effort/risk for too little gain.*: Edit to add - I take it as given that one key feature of this sort of pre-authored mystery is that you can know absolutely at the end of play whether or not you were "right". If this is not a desired feature, then I see much less benefit from the pre-authoring.</blockquote>

Verification