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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9623197" data-attributes="member: 6790260">The three points may not be perfectly coherently described, but the fundamental disconnect remains.There is a clear difference between any two of:1. Portraying Sherlock Holmes in a stage adaptation of Hound of the Baskervilles (or any other specific mystery)2. Reading a Sherlock Holmes mystery you've never read before, trying to figure out the real perpetrator as you read3. Writing a Sherlock Holmes "whodunnit" yourself, which you hope someone else might enjoy reading and solvingOnly #2 actually involves the personal act of "solve a mystery". #1 doesn't involve any solving because the task the person is attempting to complete is performance, not mystery-solving. #3 doesn't involve any solving, because the person in question already knows the answer in advance; they are instead producing a mystery for someone else to solve.I don't see why these three don't correspond to the pure "no-myth" detective game/experience (you're portraying a detective, but you aren't doing mystery-solving; you're telling a detective story, but you aren't doing detective work yourself), a "some-myth" detective game/experience (you are both portraying a detective trying to solve a mystery, and also doing mystery-solving yourself), and finally a player-authorship of a mystery and then deciding what the solution was on the basis of past fiction and the like.I have never seen any of these things that actually achieve what you describe--doesn't mean they aren't there, I'm just not sure what in particular you're talking about that could achieve this.Separately, I don't see how those constraints lead to the thing that seems necessary to me here. To solve a mystery as a player, the player needs to be able to reason about evidence, verify whether that evidence is reliable, and build a case that pursues the truth. How can there be a truth if it's genuinely not determinate until someone declares it so? Whether they declare it in a way that conforms to prior experience or not, it's still being declared, not being revealed. Whether there are or aren't rules that shape the choice, if there is no truth, there can be no mystery.Like...consider a math test. It isn't and can't be a test to the person who wrote it, because they need to know what the answers to the questions are in order to grade the test. It is a test to a student, because there is a knowable answer (against which their performance can be compared). You could, of course, have a game where you are acting as a student who is taking a test, and follow rules and the established fiction to decide what the warranted result of finishing the test would be, but the player isn't personally doing the process of take-a-test, they are narrating a story about someone who is taking a test, and what consequences might follow from the taking of that test.I'm not saying this is in any way an invalid way to play games, it absolutely is perfectly fine. But I can entirely understand why a person would say, "I want to be personally doing the task of solve-a-mystery, in addition to playing a character who is solving a mystery."</blockquote>

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