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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9623087" data-attributes="member: 42582">But straight away this tells us a difference from actually solving a mystery.We could change the flavour of the game - say, make the cards be dossiers, embassies, and foreign agents - and now it becomes a game of working out how the military secrets were stolen (It was Sergei getting blackmail dirt on the military attaché in the US embassy in Istanbul.) But actually solving a mystery is not about collecting information within a finite problem-space to then draw a logical inference; and solving a murder doesn't necessarily involve the same sorts of inquiries as engaging in counter-espionage (not only are the forensics apt to be different; the interviews/interrogations are likely to be different also).To me, here is the most obvious difference between the information space involved in actually solving a mystery, and the play of a mystery-solving RPG: in real life, the perpetrator needs to be identified, and could - in principle - be just about anyone. But in a RPG, the players rely on the GM to put salient NPCs in front of them. This can be "lampshaded" in the same way that Agatha Christie-esque mysteries do (the last time I ran a murder mystery, it was on a Traveller-esque starship that was in jump space, so no one was able to board or depart the vessel). But the CoC modules that I mentioned upthread don't use those particular techniques - they just rely on the players' understanding that the GM will present to them, in some or other fashion, the necessary NPCs.This is not a criticism of RPG mystery solving. But I think it may be another reason why [USER=6785785]@hawkeyefan[/USER] is saying that, even when they are based around pre-authored backstoyr, these are not real mysteries. They are confined puzzles - not logic puzzles like Clue(do); but something in the same sort of neighbourhood.</blockquote>

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