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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8250823" data-attributes="member: 42582">If mystery/whodunnit RPGing gets defined as the players resolve the GM's pre-authored plot, by engaging the fiction the GM has pre-authored and generating the narration from the GM that will reveal the necessary puzzle pieces - eg classic CoC modules are like this - then I think by definition it can't be done in Story Now. As these posters have noted:But as hawkeyefan says, we might be able to prise the notion of whodunnit RPGing away from the particular GM-driven methodology I described above.<a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/cthulhu-dark-another-session.658931/" target="_blank">I've run Cthuhlu Dark</a> in what I would call a Story Now fashion. There were clues, inferences, and moments of revelation. To use PbtA terminology, the GM needs to reveal unwelcome truths at appropriate points, and some of those unwelcome truths can be that earlier conjectures were mistaken.I don't understand why it would feel artificial for the GM to reveal the unwelcome truth that an earlier conjecture was false. In the Cthulhu Dark session I mentioned above, a PC found a topographic map. It turned out that in fact it wasn't a topographic map at all: it was a phrenological diagram of the skull of a hyena. And so the solution to the mystery wasn't somewhere else but rather were-hyenas in London.This is where I think [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER]'s remarks upthread about the weirdness of reality become relevant. If the system is reliable, then it should be producing a stead pacing dynamic (eg Cthulhu Dark uses a mixture of degrees of success/failure and sanity checks to do this) which allows the revelation of unwelcome truths to come at a steady pace. When I've GMed it I've also kept an eye on the clock, so early in the session I narrate upshots that keep things moving and open up possibilities, while later in the session I tend to narrate stuff that hones in on whatever the players are focusing on - which also becomes easier for the reasons that [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] has given upthread, that as more fiction is introduced options (a) through (d) and (f) have been winnowed out so it's either going to be (d) or (from left field) (g). (This is like a session-long, clue-based version of starting with a blank map and filling in blanks.)The couple of times my group has played Cthulhu Dark it's been relatively light-hearted and with somewhat cardboard cut-out PCs: the journalist, the legal secretary, the English butler, the longshoreman, etc. So their dramatic needs and struggles are not too complicated. But I think you're right that it has been what does the mystery mean for these PCs that has tended to be the focus of things. We've had the PCs enmeshed in the mystery - they've not been external to it and brought in simply as investigators.In that sense it has been (unsurprisingly) more like HPL's own Call of Cthulhu than a hardboiled detective story. I reckon that could be fun, and could also be done Story Now style, but you'd need a slightly more developed protagonist I think so that the right noir elements can be introduced to draw them in.</blockquote>

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