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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 8250816"><p>I would say there is basically two approaches to who-dunit and investigations: skilled play and creative play. Skilled play is there is a thing that happened, which establishes stuff like trails of clues and the skill is in finding, analyzing and putting together of those clues to figure out what happened (and the clues don't all have to be generated before play as the players might come up with an angle of investigation that is sound, even though the GM hadn't thought of it, but the event being investigated needs to be fleshed out prior to play). Creative approaches would be more the story now approach but also  stuff like how the Tarokka deck in Ravenloft used to work. These were fortune telling cards and a lot of Ravenloft adventures were mysteries and investigations. The deck could be used to feed players information about objective content that was generated prior to play or by the GM, but there was also a method for having the tarokka deck generate those details (i.e. this card will reveal the location of the big evil's lair, etc). Both approaches are fine. I did a session of drama system recently where we had a murder investion and one of the challenges for me, because I am more accustomed to the skilled play approach, was realizing there were certain details about the murder that weren't pinned down and really couldn't be pinned down until they came up in the scenes. While it didn't feel like skilled play solving of a mystery (because we weren't really solving anything so much as coming up with what happened ourselves) it was a really great mystery story in the end. So both approaches are trying to emulate a genre, but in different ways.</p></blockquote><p></p>

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