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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 8250462" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Let me say this about myself.I've played Clue a ton.  I've played through probably 20 of the Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective Series."Is this a satisfying 'whodunnit' mystery in which it feels that skullful play has led to a satisfying reveal" depends upon many factors.1)  Clue entirely lacks depth.  There is no visceral impact from the reveal.  Its fun, but it (the play and the results) is nested in nothing more than inferrence + guessing + understanding the rules.  There are no stakes and there are no deeper implications to any instantiation of play.2)  The variance in the Sherlock Holmes episodes are WILDLY swingy in terms of both (a) "does it feel like skillful play could/did lead to a successful and interesting reveal" and (b) if there is a visceral sense of the result of play being nested in something of depth/impact.I can say (100 % and without hesitation) that the sort of mysteries that have been operationalized and resolved in the Story Now games I run are more broadly rewarding with more deeper implications than Clue and are profoundly more consistently rewarding from both a skilled play perspective and a "nested in something of depth/impact" than the Sherlock Holmes games.Now a few of those Sherlock Holmes entries were absolutely fantastic from both a skilled play perspective and a "nested in something of depth/impact" perspective.  There was a sense of the game following us around, of coherency in the operationalizing of us putting together the clues, and the "keep score" (against Holmes solving of the mystery) felt like there were stakes.But my personal anecdote and the anecdote of the people who have played those games and simultaneously played in Story Now games I've run yield the same result.  The best done Sherlock Holmes games (a) felt like our Story Now play except (b) the visceral impact of the reveal wasn't anchored in something deeper (because the shared imagined space of those games is vastly more finite, therefore the impact and stakes are less visceral, than that of our Story Now games).EDIT - if its not clear what I'm getting at here, I'm saying there is a cognitive framing effect ("but there is extra-player volition in the form of a GM that gives shape, persistence, and continuity/coherency to mysteries that isn't/can't be there in Story Now games!") that is an artifact of the person who is orienting toward the play.  It isn't an objective artifact of the play itself.Put another way, there is likely something kindred with The Alexandrian's "dissociative mechanics" thesis happening here.</blockquote>

Verification