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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9624131" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is an interesting observation, but I think it actually sells short some of the other parts of your post, which focus on some distinctive features of the RPG medium in an insightful way.I'm thinking of stuff like this:The last time I ran a classic GM-backstory-based whodunnit was 4-and-a-half years ago, for a family birthday.I adapted the scenario from an old copy of the Traveller Digest: the murder takes place on a starship while it is jump-space, which establishes that no one got on or got off. The actual play and resolution was entirely freeform: I wrote up PC descriptions, the players each adopted one of them, and  I, as GM, played the other 2 or 3 characters. I was trying to shovel my "clues" out the door as the players, playing their PCs, spoke to one another and to the PCs.In the end they didn't solve the mystery: they picked up all the clues (two dinners to the stateroom; two sets of every outfit in the wardrobe) but didn't draw the link to identical twins.It was fun. It certainly didn't feel any more real, to me as GM, than the Victorian London hijinks of the Cthulhu Dark episode I linked to upthread. The "whodunnit" contrivance, and my role as GM shovelling out those clues, didn't feel as real as Appleby the butler trying to work out what had happened to his Earl, while gradually becoming addicted to laudanum-based "nerve tonic".</blockquote>