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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9623486" data-attributes="member: 42582">None of 1, 2 or 3 is playing a RPG.Your #1 is about following a script. It has little in common with any non-degenerate RPGing.Playing a traditional CoC mystery session has something in common with #2, but as I posted upthread it sells the experience short to treat it as identical.Solving a mystery in a RPG like Burning Wheel or Apocalypse World has little in common with any of 1, 2 or 3 beyond the fact that there is a fiction that includes characters trying to solve a mystery. In particular it is not like 3: because the RPG analogue of 3 is the "writers' room", not BW/AW-esque RPGing.How many exams have you set, and marked?I've set dozens and dozens (multiple per year for over 20 years). I've marked thousands. It's rare for an answer to notice some aspect of the solution that I did not - there's a reason I'm the teacher and not the student. But on rare occasions it does happen: there are students who are better lawyers, and/or better philosophers, than I am.Now my field is not mathematics, but there can clearly be examples in that field too. Here's a true story that is in the neighbourhood: a friend of mine, who is a mathematician, was once sent a paper to referee. My friend read the paper: it proved X, conjectured that X might entail Y, but also conjectured that establishing Y from X would be challenging. My friend, who is a brilliant mathematician and certainly stronger than the author of the paper he was reviewing, derived Y from X, and then wondered whether or not to include the derivation in his referee's report.So we can imagine a maths exam that asks the student to prove A. And the stand-out student proves the more general B instead, and shows that A follows from B.Now maths is low-hanging fruit for my point, because it is a domain in which (i) there are truths that no one knows yet, but (ii) there are procedures that are known, and that can take people to some of those unknown truths via deductively valid pathways (I say "some of those" for Godel reasons).I do not assert that RPGing in AW or BW will generate material that entails a solution to the mystery with the strength in which entailment holds in mathematics. But I do assert that RPGing in AW or BW can generate material that points to a solution to they mystery with a type of viscerality that is real and can be experienced by those at the table.In the 1950s and 1960 - in the latter days of logical positivism, ordinary language philosophy and Wittgensteinianism - people wrote essays on the "hardness" of the logical and mathematical "must" - as in, if I have 2 apples and collect another 2 apples, than it must be the case that I have 4 apples. I don't work in literary criticism, so I don't know if there is a corresponding genre of essays on the hardness of the imaginary "must" - given that this has happened, and that this has happened, and given that this character is struggling with this sort of thing while this other character is driven by that sort of thing, it must be the case that the fiction includes, or resolves as, such-and-such. But that is how the RPGing that I am talking about works.The key to the difference from your #3 is that (i) there are multiple participants, each of whom has distinct duties and distinct permissions when it comes to introducing content into the shared fiction, and (ii) there are procedures which means that no single participant is guaranteed to be able to introduce whatever they want into the fiction, even within the scope of their role.</blockquote>

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