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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 9621676">And this is always kind of the point when we talk about something's 'realness' or objectivity in a setting. None of us think the thing actually exists, it is that these things have been objectively set down or modeled (in the mind of the GM or in their notes) so that they are discoverable properly through exploration. If from the very beginning, Master Little Wing was the one who killed the son of Purple Cloud, and the GM knows Master Little Wing did so by strangling Purple Cloud's son with a Guzheng string, taken from teh Guzheng in the inner courtyard. And that Long Winded Huang saw Master Little Wing put the string back into said Guzheng. And the GM has all other kinds of details like times, other possible suspects, alibis, a timeline in his mind of Master Little Wing's actions that day, the build up to the murder, its motive, what Master Little Wing has said to different people since, etc. That all provides stuff that players can make informed choices about and informed guesses about as they investigate. That is a mystery that you can actually solve. You are emulating the act of solving a mystery. On the other hand there are approaches to play that aren't as interested in that. There is nothing wrong with those approaches but in this approach, the reason I brought it up, expanding agency to mean things you can do beyond your character, has the potential to disrupt agency. And this isn't just a hypothetical example, it happened to me when I ran Hillfolk by Cludging it to my Righteous Blood, Ruthless Blades campaign setting. I want to be clear here. I enjoyed using Hillfolk in this way. I also understand there are ways to do mysteries in Hillfolk that can get around this very concern. but the point is you have to address this area where meaningful choice in the mystery can be impacted. In our case, we were fine not worrying about that. We just realized this was something different than the players actually solving the mystery and that we were all going to discover the mystery together. But what that meant was, when I was playing various NPCs, and even potentially when the players even were playing their characters, we were not necessarily sure if that particular character was the murderer. Again, I get that things could have been done differently here to prevent this issue. And I was relatively new to running the system at the time (a friend who is a more veteran GM of the system gave me some pointers on managing mysteries). This isn't a criticism of Hillfolk (I think it is a highly immersive game personally and the only area where I noticed this was when we tried running a mystery). So I am not even saying you can't do this sort of thing in a more narrative game or in a game where these kinds of details and events are resolved differently. The point is that agency is not simply a spectrum of ever broadening agency the more power you give to players (whether that is power possessed by their character or by the player themself)</blockquote>

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