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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9623164" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't agree with this.(I mean, off course you can define "sincere mystery" by stipulation, and then your claim will be tautologically true; but given that you (i) are intending to capture something by the phrase that we all have a sense of independent of your coining of the term, and (ii) are intending the rest of your post to have explanatory power rather than being mere tautology, I am comfortable saying that I disagree.)One reason I disagree is because your (2) is not coherent. You label it as a truth within the fiction; but then explicate that in terms of non-fictional states of affairs like when the fiction was written.To see what I am getting at, consider the character Wolverine. Obviously, it was always true within the fiction that he has some-or-other given name. But the readers didn't know that name until Chris Claremont wrote a little exchange with another (then relatively minor) character who addressed him as Logan (I believe this was in Uncanny X-Men 140, the Wendigo issue). The fact that Claremont didn't know what name he was going to give Wolverine until he wrote it, doesn't mean that there was no mystery about Wolverine's real name.Perhaps by (2) you simply mean, pre-authorship of the answer to the mystery, prior to the play of the mystery starting. Which has nothing to do with in-fiction matters and all is about procedures at the table.If that is what you mean by (2) then it is false: it is possible to have a mystery which is genuine but not pre-authored. Your analogy to a novel, where the answer can't be a mystery to the author, is inapt because it is possible to have a way of providing answers that is not analogous to writing a novel (either solely, or collectively as a group).Obviously I am not [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER]. But I think the answer to your question is much the same as the explanation, in response to [USER=6790260]@EzekielRaiden[/USER], of how an answer to a mystery can be generated without it needing to be pre-authored and yet without it being simply authorial fiat in the moment of play.To be clear, I don't have in mind here the Brindlewood Bay techniques, which I'm not that familiar with. (I've heard a bit about it, but have never played or read it.)I'm thinking of the techniques that are used in a game like Burning Wheel or Apocalypse World, which can oblige the GM to narrate things under constraints, which include constraints about following from the fiction already-established in play.</blockquote>

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