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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9623528" data-attributes="member: 42582">Perhaps ironically given the subject matter, the bit that I have bolded is a red herring: in the fiction of any RPG that is not wildly absurdist in its themes, it is the case that any mystery has an "objective reality" within the fiction - a body was found somewhere, killed by someone for whatever reason, etc.So I will focus on the first part of your post, which talks about the GM having authored some fiction: that so-and-so killed so-and-so for such-and-such reason, etc; with a principal goal of play being for the players, by making the sorts of moves a RPG permits them to make (ie declaring actions for their PCs), to learn whatever it is that the GM authored.You claim that that is a real mystery, "really or actually solving something", and contrast that with RPGing where "the solution to the mystery hasn't been determined (= authored) yet and is discovered in play".That claim is, in my view, false. If you read my reply to [USER=6790260]@EzekielRaiden[/USER] upthread, you'll see that your claim here rests on a failure to appreciate the full range of possibilities in RPGing.Here's a mystery or two: what is the smallest prime number greater than 1,000,111,222,333,444? And how many factors does the natural number that immediately precedes it have?I don't know the answer to either question. I'm guessing that you don't either. But there is any answer, and I know people (academic mathematicians) who are well-versed in the techniques for working out the answer even if no one has yet written the answer down or worked it out before.What makes this possible, in mathematics, is that there are intimate relationships between what is the case and establishing what is the case.There are RPGs that also establish those sorts of relationships. Not as mathematics does, via necessary inference and logical relationships. But via compelling implications within a fiction that are built up, over the course of play, by a series of techniques designed to give rise to them.</blockquote>

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