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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JonM" data-source="post: 8250265" data-attributes="member: 6796515">I just wanted to pop in and say "thank you" for some of these posts (especially, Hawkeyefan's, which really brought things home, for me) and to Arilyn, for starting the thread, in the first place. While I have only rarely made my presence known, in the other Story Now discussions, I've been a curious lurker, for a while. During this time, it seemed to me that there were two specific types of fiction that could be problematic for Story Now. I'll go into the first of these, in a moment, but the second is superhero adventures.The problem is that, in most genres, heroes tend to be quite proactive, which lends itself well to the Story Now approach. Some types of stories, such as heists, push this even further, since, in RPG terms, the GM really just has to get the ball rolling, and, after that, spends most of the rest of the adventure just reacting to the players. I guess I've been running heists more or less Story Now almost from day one and didn't even know it. However, in most traditional superhero stories, the situation is reversed. The villains (and other problems) tend to be the proactive elements, and the protagonists tend to be mostly reactive. This, to me, seemed like a problem, for low- to no-prep Story Now, with the GM leaving the instigation to the players.Reading some of these examples, however, I can see that I may have overstated the problem by assuming that Story Now = no prep. If we assume that it is "legitimate" to prep some villains with strong motivations, then come up with the barest skeletons of goals that call back to those motivations, then just sit back and see what the players do about it, reacting to their reactions, as it were... Well, that I can get my head around. Heck, I've occasionally run superhero games exactly that way. I always start off making a roster of NPCs with good strong motivations, because I just love doing that, and I consider it to be the GM's most important and time-efficient prep job. From there, I'm often pretty traditional, making plans and maps and the whole nine yards. But, occasionally, I just grab a villain, ask him "what are you doing, today?" and run with that - no other prep. So, I guess that's pretty Story Now.I'm afraid that your reward for answering questions so well is going to be another question, though, because this brings me back to my first problematic type of story, that I alluded to earlier: mysteries. By this, I mean real whodunnits, with suspects, motivations, clues, red herrings, unexpected twists, and so forth, not just the run-of-the-mill "I wonder where the werewolf is hiding" type of questions that come up all the time, in RPGs.Traditional mysteries, to me, are always a special case. I run them only occasionally, because they are high-effort high-reward - that is, they take a lot of work, but, when done properly, can have the players talking about them months or even years later. But therein lies the problem: high-effort, in this case, translates to major prep. I usually have to come up with lots of NPCs, locations, past events, possible points of confusion, etc. I have to plan out everything that happened, to make sure there are no contradictions and that, once the mystery is solved, it will all make satisfying sense. A mystery that lacks a satisfying sense of resolution is a pretty lame mystery.So, my question, of course, is: how do you handle this, in Story Now? Or is this just a type of story best avoided, in Story Now?BTW, I do have one possible answer, but, I'll warn you, in advance, that I don't especially like it. You could just come up with a crime and a few NPCs and let the players have at it. Don't even bother figuring out the culprit - just roll with it, and settle on one, based logically on what the players turn up. In fact, I've done exactly that, a couple of times, and it was... okay. Just okay. More or less. But it lacked the layering and nuance and, ultimately, sense of satisfaction of a more carefully thought out mystery, and I'm sure it wasn't especially memorable. It also left me in perpetual minor anxiety that, afterwards, one of the players would suddenly say, "Hey, wait a minute... It couldn't have been X, because of Y..." I'm pretty good at improvising and juggling stuff, in my head, but nobody is perfect, especially under those conditions. And, while my players may sometimes guess that I'm winging it, nobody wants their versimilitude ruined by confirming it, in such an unfortunate way.So, can a Story Now approach handle solid, entertaining, satisfying mysteries and, if so, how?</blockquote>

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