NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="deleuzian_kernel" data-source="post: 9624046" data-attributes="member: 7036985">[USER=85555]@Bedrockgames[/USER] [USER=7025508]@Crimson Longinus[/USER] [USER=6747251]@Micah Sweet[/USER]A question for you:What does it mean to "solve" an investigation scenario under the light of a pre-established, pre-written mystery backstory?Is it when the players correctly guess the culprit's identity? Is it when they reconstruct the entire sequence of events the GM prepared? What if they miss half of it, but still catch the culprit — is that a solved mystery? Or what if they uncover the full backstory, but only after the GM spoon-feeds it to them through exposition to finish off the session? Is that a “solution”?Is it when they take action against the culprit and bring them to justice? What if they do that without understanding the full context. Is that still "solving" the mystery? What if they kill the wrong suspect but uncover the actual backstory later?Is it when the players themselves understand the backstory, or when their characters do? What if the players piece it together out of character, maybe a week after, but the PCs never quite grasped the full picture? Is that a solved mystery?What if the players correctly identify the culprit, but the culprit escapes? Is the mystery “solved” at that point? Or does it only count if they both discover the answer and successfully confront or apprehend them?What if they expose the entire backstory, piece it together beautifully, but the culprit dies offscreen, or flees to another country, or is killed by someone else before they can act (This would be bad play in story now, but maybe acceptable in a more neutral style)? Is that still considered solving the mystery?What if the players solve the mystery too late. They figure out who did it, but by then, more people have died, more crimes have been committed, and now those events have opened up entirely new mysteries? Is the original mystery still "solved" in any meaningful sense, or has the investigation simply unfolded into a larger, evolving situation that can’t be neatly boxed into whether they cracked the initial case?These ideas about what constitutes “solving” a mystery aren’t some essential truth. We’ve inherited them from the structure of crime fiction, particularly 20th-century detective stories, where everything is designed to converge on a singular solution that retroactively justifies the plot. Fiction can and often does operate under those laws, but it doesn't have to. Today, we have plenty of modern examples where resolution isn’t as neatly constructed. Where mysteries linger, where solutions are partial, messy, or even absent, and the focus shifts to how the investigation transforms the people involved or reshapes the world around them. I’m thinking of True Detective, where the investigation leaves threads unresolved and the emotional, moral, and personal fallout becomes the real resolution. Or Zodiac, where the investigation spans decades without closure, and the mystery’s weight lies in the obsessive toll it takes on the investigators.That the old methodology may look and feel like “reality” and like the modern judicial system, but that is no coincidence. The detective genre has always been entangled with a cultural fantasy about closure, accountability, and truth being singular, discoverable, and legally actionable. But that is a fiction — both in literature and in life. And when we import that structure uncritically into RPG play, we mistake a literary convention for a necessary structure of play.What I’m trying to get at is that there is no such thing as “solving” a mystery outside of the broader act of resolving a situation, or if you let me rephrase, providing resolution to an ongoing and shifting situation in an RPG. This implies that the definitive "solution" to the same pre-written mystery could look VERY VERY DIFFERENT depending on who you ask.So my question, again, is what does it mean to "solve" an investigation scenario, and as a follow up, who decides that?</blockquote>

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