Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9625010" data-attributes="member: 6790260">How can clues point at anything if there isn't anything to point at? That's where I'm getting stuck here. Your "Oh yes, of course this is what happened" (emphasis in original) is precisely what seems to interfere with the possibility of the players (NOT the characters, very specifically the players) doing a mystery-solve. Again, I refer back to my "X+Y=7" thing above: I don't see how one is "solving for X" by selecting Y values, whether that selection is done directly (some participant picking a Y as part of play) or indirectly (various participants excluding values of Y until only one, or I guess none, remain). Instead, that looks transparently to me like picking an X value via picking a Y value, or picking an X value by excluding all-but-one Y value.To re-use pemerton's next-prime-number example from above, instead of the question being, "What is the first prime after <many-digit-long number>?" it's saying "What is the first prime number after the unknown integer Y?" and then giving various people varying degrees of control over which Y is chosen to plug into the question. As soon as you select a value for Y, there is one and only one answer, but until you have, there is no answer at all, because that answer depends on a free variable.* I cannot structure this process as anything other than, "Because you selected Y, you selected the prime X that is the answer." In other words, you caused the answer to be X, by choosing Y. If you are the cause of the answer being (say) 103, then I don't really believe you solved the mystery; instead, you picked one answer out of the field of equally-valid answers and declared that that answer was "the" answer. Whether that declaration is made by a single person or by a group doesn't matter. It's still an answer declared, a "all those other equally-valid answers are wrong because I/we said so".*This is actually a thing in first-order logic. A statement with a free variable simply lacks a truth-value. Like how, say, the sound of middle C on a piano lacks visible color (synaesthesia aside). The presence of the free variable nixes the possibility of a truth (or falsehood), and thus I'm stuck wondering how you can have evidence for a thing that lacks a truth-value.Oh, this part I don't mind at all. I actually find it quite delightful, so long as the group can...well, for lack of a better term, prevent a criticality event. A stable game arises from spawning off enough new leads to keep things rolling. Too few, and the game grinds to a halt whenever the players need a reason to Go Forth And Do Stuff. Too many, however, and the game becomes an unmanagable mass of way too many things to remember and process. My DW game kinda fell into that, and I've been slowly working to trim it down just a little so that we maintain that steady-state reaction.Whether it is beneficial to the PCs or not isn't really relevant to me. I understand why it might be to others, but that's orthogonal to my line of inquiry here.Oh, believe me, I'm not paying any attention to their comments on this one, so I'm just not engaged with that in any way.</blockquote>

Verification