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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 9621740">Also [USER=6785785]@hawkeyefan[/USER] just to further illustrate my point and show this isn't about saying one way is better than the other. I am planning an adventure for my RBRB  game. Normally this system is very traditional in terms of how things are resolved. But I want a session that feels like a two hour Shaw Brothers movie with a four act structure. And I have been talking to my players about ways of managing it because it does have a central mystery. It isn't a mystery adventure but there is a mysterious piece of information at its core. It is based on the movie Killer Darts The premise is the players are orphans whose parents were killed by a master who wielded golden darts. They were too young to remember anything but have vague recollections of names and people. At the start of play, they are in the care of a kind master who found them and raised them. The story to play out is them discovering their parents killer (s) and developing the skill to contend with them.I presented three approaches to the player: 1) A real mystery adventure that simply operates on an accelerated timeline, divided effectively into four quarters, 2) A randomized approach where acts are introduced randomly and where the central mystery is solved randomly (ie. anyone in adventure could have been their parent's killers), and 3) an approach like hill folk where they have power to narrate things through dialogue that shape the backstory (and the reveal wouldn't come till later but would likely arise and be shaped from something one of the player's decides)All three of these seemed like fun to me. And they all had advantages and disadvantages in terms of agency. But number 1 is a real mystery to be solved in the sense that there are facts to it established at the start that the players can navigate. That information informs everything. The players could try go guess on who killed their parents, act on that information and be right or wrong. The NPCs behavior, their dialogue, their reason for doing things are all informed by that backstory. It is something that 'really' happened and isn;t going to be modified during play. Again this isn't a better way to play. But the core experience is one where the players have a sense that there is real information they are trying to discover about what happened</blockquote>

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