Don't worry - there was no apology coming. (Just assuming I'm going to apologize and then nobly absolving me of the need to do it? Wow... just, wow... No, not elitist, at all...)
He wasn't, he was saying there was nothing to apologize for. However, reading elitism into the statement that your response was not exceptional and required no apology maybe does require an apology.
Right. Second try.
I do think you've made your questions much clearer this time, but I think they demonstrate that you missed the thrust of my posts. Up until today, I had no orientation toward Story Now mysteries. None at all. I wasn't even sure the improv mysteries I had run would be considered Story Now (although, based on your descriptions, I am now inclined to think they would be). As I said earlier, I simply wanted to know if anyone considered it possible to run a traditional Mystery genre story, using the Story Now approach, without sacrificing either one for the other. And, if so, how they'd done it and how it went. Period. No preconceived notions, when I made the first post. No orientation.
I'm pretty sure they wouldn't, largely because I'm pretty sure that you, the GM, were improving things for the players, and not centering those on what the PCs were and were doing. A key way to tell you're not in Story Now is if the players are often asking you questions to find out about the mystery/setting/scene. In Story Now, they declare actions, and those become the focus for evolving the scene, not what the GM thinks is going on.
To give an example, my Blades group was investigating a haunted house, and I described a creepy hallway with a creepy painting (among some other mood setting things). Now, the difference between approaches is that in trad play, the players could ask about the painting and I, as GM, could make up something, maybe that it's possessed, or that it's nothing. The players learn this by asking me about the painting and obliging me to tell them something. In Story Now, however, this is different. One of my players declared that he thought that painting would be a good acquisition for a friend interested in the occult (this PC was trying to switch vices to obligation, and this furthered this). I now had the option of agreeing, and saying that it would, or challenging this assertion -- I cannot, in Blades, refuse this kind of action declaration. So, we rolled a check, which the player failed, and that resulted in me narrating that the painting was indeed haunted, as the player suspected, but now it was trying to suck him into the painting, surely to a horrible fate! Play proceeded. Had the player succeeded, though, the painting would have been worth something to his occult-collecting friend, and the player would have successfully acquired it. In this play, the player isn't asking me questions about the scene/setting/mystery and obliging me to tell them things, but they're making bold action declarations and testing to see if they are true.
Now, to actually answer your questions (given that, at this point, I'm starting to form an opinion), my sense is that part of the atmosphere, if you will, of a traditional Mystery, involves the feeling of "ah! so that's what happened", ideally sweetened by the fact that some earlier assumptions turned out to be wrong. And that might be the problem. Because the "ah!" part can work, in Story Now, with the added bonus that the GM may get to experience it, too. But the "sweetened by the fact that some earlier assumptions turned out to be wrong" part, which adds to the atmosphere, nuance and layering? That I'm less sure about.
Happens all the time, though.
I mean, I guess you could throw in some some sort of chance of "oh, here's the answer - no wait, we're wrong - plot twist!" This would then lead to a new round of investigation, to find the real answer, and so on. But I suspect that might feel a bit artificial, to a lot of players. Which damages the atmosphere.
This would, in fact, be very bad Story Now play, because this is GM Force -- which is when the GM pushes an outcome regardless of the actions/successes of the PCs. GM Force is not a bad thing -- it's actually required if you're running most published modules, for instance -- but it is something anathema to Story Now play.
Now, I could be wrong about all of this. But, at this point, your own comments lead me to think, as I said earlier, that Story Now may not exactly be operating from a position of strength, with the Mystery genre. Which is fine. It doesn't mean there is anything wrong with it, in any other context.
It does mystery awesomely, but it doesn't do pre-planned who-dun-its at all. Clarity about what you mean with "mystery" seems to be the problem here -- you're mixing the whole thing up in a bag, but seem to really mean "do the players learn about my clever mystery," which, yes, Story Now games absolutely do not do at all. It's the opposite of the intent, really. That doesn't mean that you can't have some very nice mysteries, but they're going to be organically grown through play, and plot twists are going to happen the same way.
I provided an example of a mystery as it occurred in my game above, and you seem to have skipped any comment on it at all. Do you see how that mystery occurred -- it ended up asking "who is behind the alchemical formula, what does it do, and how can we stop it?" The answers to that were cultists trying to manifest their god, creates super vessels for ghostly possession by concentrating the field locally creating large instabilities to aid the manifestation, and they didn't, but it didn't go off as intended, either.
