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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9624304" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Would you argue Clue (which I believe is called Cluedo in the Commonwealth) doesn't have a killer, weapon, and location that objectively exists independent of player choice, even though no one authored that choice in the usual way the game is played? (That is, you shuffle and draw one character, one weapon, and one location and put them in the evidence envelope.)Clue/Cluedo is a game where you, as the player, do in fact actually solve a mystery. I read your LP summary of Cthulhu Dark, and I would argue that that is very close to being the players themselves solving a mystery, but it falls short. They played people who were solving a mystery--that I do not in any way dispute. But reading your summary did not come across to me as people assembling evidence, evaluating that evidence, excluding invalid possibilities and re-evaluating previously overlooked possibilities, etc. I would certainly call what they did an adventure, and it was an adventure prompted by trying to learn why someone disappeared.Maybe a better way of saying it, what you described was an investigation, but it wasn't a mystery-solving experience for the players. An investigation need not be a mystery, but every mystery-solving experience is necessarily an investigation (if perhaps an informal one). They certainly investigated, they looked for leads, they asked questions, etc. But the actions they took did not look to me like players solving a mystery. They looked like players portraying mystery-solvers, and enjoying the process of that portrayal.So...I don't think the conclusion of the mystery needs to be authored by anyone, that's just one of the more convenient ways to do it. Instead, I expect that it has some kind of specific, defined answer. Ironically, the way your described situation seemed to approach a mystery was the fact that you--as the GM--had decided why the Earl was missing. That's the moment there became a defined answer, and it was one you authored, albeit not prior-to-the-start-of-play. Or at least that's how it read to me; perhaps I have badly misunderstood your process.I will say, this has given me a lovely idea for the next time I want to deploy a mystery in my DW game. Specifically, I intend to use the Clue/Cluedo method--that way, I can't be "forcing" anything toward anything, because I don't know the truth any more than the players do, at least up to a certain point. (That is, I assume for a satisfying conclusion I will need to know what the truth was at some point, and possibly a bit before the players do.)The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borromean_rings" target="_blank">three (classic) Borromean rings</a> are not in any way linked to one another. Remove one, and the other two fall away. Yet they are still a linkage, and collectively bind even though they pairwise do not: the linkage only forms from a higher-order interaction, not from the individual interactions.Just because it was done as a group, where no individual person nor even any pair of people could be said to have sole authorship, doesn't mean it was never established. As noted above, something can be established in such a way that nobody knows it and nobody chose/authored/picked/etc. it, but it is nonetheless established. Until there is an established truth(-within-the-fiction), there can be no mystery, because any result(-within-the-fiction) is equally valid. If we know Mrs. White and Mr. Green were both out of the manor at the time, that still means Prof. Plum and Miss Scarlet could equally be the murderer, and without an established truth(-within-the-fiction), the two accusations are of precisely equal worth and merit.</blockquote>

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