Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9625063" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Sure, some clues can be simply excluding certain categories or indicating certain categories, e.g. a footprint in the victim's blood from a woman's shoe would naturally promote suspicion of the female suspects and reduce suspicion of the male suspects.But there are two things here that complicate this if there truly isn't an answer until someone or something decides the answer:1. False clues. Take the aforementioned footprint. A clue like that would be a pretty dramatic mistake for a culprit to make, especially if they had otherwise been particularly fastidious--so it could be a false clue, placed by the real culprit to throw off the scent. If there is no answer until something decides the answer, the clue cannot be true or false until there is in fact an answer. But that means the exact same evidence could be evidence for OR evidence against, and there's literally no possible way to know because there isn't anything to know yet. That's a problem for, y'know, solving a mystery.2. One of the principle ideas of a well-written mystery, as opposed to a poorly-written one, is that it's supposed to be at least reasonably possible that a smart, perceptive reader could determine the solution without needing to be psychic or omniscient. You are correct that inference and circumstantial evidence are often involved; earlier, I specifically mentioned "deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning" because all three are involved in most crime-solving efforts. (Indeed, in many mysteries, the only way they can prove the crime is to do something that causes a person to confess.) But if there is no answer until it is decided, whatever it is that does the deciding, it literally isn't possible for a player to solve the mystery, no matter how perceptive or smart they might be, no more than you can solve an equation with free variables or the like. The information to do the solving simply doesn't exist.Like, let me give you an example. Duke Black is slain at a masquerade ball, which is locked down by the police, and the party of detectives (who were invited on a lark by a noble friend of theirs), and the murderer is almost surely still on the premises. The Duke's body was found stabbed. His masquerade mask is missing, and the knife is an ordinary dinner knife, held with a napkin so it has no fingerprints.The party finds the following clues:1. The knife actually penetrated the Duke's sternum, which would require quite a lot of force, so only a very strong person could have stabbed him that way.2. The mask was found in Countess Green's room.3. The Duke's son Adam, now the new Duke, had crippling gambling debts, but he can pay them off now.4. The knife was taken from the table where Countess Green, Adam Black, the Duke's old friend Lord Grey, and his physician, Dr. Crimson.These clues certainly put suspicion off of Lady Black, the Duke's elderly widow, and his butler Timothy Trevelyan...if they are true clues, not false ones. How can the players know? It's unlikely all of them are true clues. E.g. if Countess Green killed him (implied by finding the mask in her room) then the Adam's debts are a red herring. If Adam killed his father, then the mask in the Countess' room is an effort to throw people off Adam's scent.How can anyone solve this? There isn't an answer, so the clues are neither true nor false, they just are...pieces of evidence that are known. It can't be solved unless and until something is established which either (a) specifies which suspect(s) actually did the dirty deed, or (b) specifies all but one of the potential suspects who couldn't have killed the Duke. But in the moment that last piece is put in place which established who did it...the players didn't solve it. Something--a single player, a collective player effort, an effort of all the participants GM included, a roll, a card, whatever--established the guilt. It wasn't the evidence that led them to that conclusion; it was the procedures, whatever those procedures might be, which made it so someone was and always was the murderer, even though nobody could have known that prior to that moment, even in principle.</blockquote>

Verification