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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9627553" data-attributes="member: 6790260">The difference is that the thing you are describing is a discovery of the real truth. As in, the facts that were always there, waiting to be found, they just weren't accessible or visible or analyzed (etc., etc.) yet.The situation for a player is that you literally cannot reason from evidence that could be 100% legitimate OR 100% illegitimate and you have no idea which one it is until midway through the session. If the value of the evidence you already have is dependent on as-yet-unknown determinations that haven't happened yet, how can you actually SOLVE the mystery?You can certainly have the game generate an answer, but is that SOLVING, or is that simply producing an answer? I argue it is merely the latter--no purely-within-the-player's-thoughts solving is occurring.The thing I was responding to wasn't "90% pre-authored, 10% in-play". It was "bare minimum 50% in-play, and probably a lot more than that." Massive shifts--including both who did it, how it happened, when it happened, etc.--can occur which it is impossible even in principle to reason from, since you can't reason to the solution if there isn't a solution!I'm sure plenty of people don't really want to reason to the solution from the evidence, or they only wish to do so at a relatively abstracted distance. That's totally fine. I just see a gap between "solving a mystery means you can take the clues you have, reason from them, and then derive the answer" and "there are essential, whole-result-altering details that have no truth value until after a play process gives them one."It has nothing--nothing WHATEVER--to do with "one true way" or any of the other BS mudslinging you're doing here. I've said that several times. It has nothing, absolutely positively nothing, to do with whether "it will be terrible for the players, they'll hate it" etc., etc., etc. that you are shoving in my mouth as though I ever said ANYTHING like that.It is only and exclusively, are the PLAYERS solving a mystery when they do this?Because as far as I'm concerned, the answer is "no". And when I propose to GM a mystery-solving adventure with my players, I prefer that BOTH the characters AND the players be doing the actual actions of mystery-solving. There is absolutely, positively NOTHING wrong with doing a thing where the characters are doing the actions of mystery-solving and the players are not. The vast majority of gaming is like that: I don't have nearly the charm to woo a feylord, I don't have the strength to swing a greatsword, I don't have the constitution to drink a toxic brew and not break a sweat, etc., etc. But I do have, sometimes, the intelligence and perceptiveness to solve a mystery before the true answer is revealed, so long as the clues actually permit reasoning to the conclusion. Hence, since such an experience is one of the very few TTRPG things where my personal lived play-experience can 1:1 conform to my character's lived fictional experience, it's a place where I like to make that 1:1 correspondence possible unless doing so would be harmful to the experience in some other way.Okay. So you don't care about detail-fudging. I do. I think it's an extremely serious breach of GM-player interaction. The moment such an action becomes known to the players--and it eventually always will, the players collectively are smarter than the GM individually--it damages trust in a severe way that often cannot be repaired. After all, if you learn that someone was willing to secretly rewrite things once, and to actively hide this from you, how can you trust they won't do it again?Again. We are not talking 90/10. We are talking 50/50 at best, and probably more like 30/70. The example given was a missing-persons case where all of the following details had no answer until hours into the session:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Where the missing person actually was</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Who was hiding the missing person</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">What the nefarious actors actually wanted</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Whether the nefarious actors were even involved in the person going missing</li> </ul>That's a hell of a lot more than a ten percent marginalia.</blockquote>

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