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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 8416836" data-attributes="member: 6785785">I don't think "solving the problem" is a certainty. The resolution of the situation (in this case, the revelation of who done it) is going to come about as a result of play, but that doesn't mean that it will go the way the players want. Far from it. If the entire point of the scenario is a murder mystery style whodunit, then it may not be such a good match. But it depends on which specific game you're playing, and a lot of other factors. So just to kind of offer an example that's not an RPG......there's an old show called "Columbo" and it's about a detective solving a mystery. But it's different than many detective shows because the show starts by showing you exactly who did the deed. Who did it is never in doubt; instead, the show is about how Columbo pieces things together in order to figure it out. That's very different from your classic detective scenario where the entirety of the fiction is building toward the revelation of who's guilty. It approaches the idea of detective fiction from a different angle than what's typical. So I think you have to approach a PbtA game similarly. The point is less about who did it than it is about the fallout of the whole event, so you should proceed with that in mind.I couldn't say for sure, honestly. There are so many PbtA games now that it's possible there are some that tackle mysteries in a more direct manner. I know Monster of the Week by reputation only; I've never played it and only read a bit of it. My understanding is that there are moves about uncovering facts and lore that you may expect in this genre (I'm thinking of the show Supernatural and the like, where the protagonists need to learn of the monster's vulnerability or some such in order to prevail). I can say that I ran a Blades in the Dark campaign that deviated from the norm in that it used the Bluecoat and Inspector playbooks (which are the Cops and Detectives of that setting) rather than the standard Scoundrel playbooks, and that took some different approaches to play and GMing. I'd say that campaign was very much a learning process for me as it forced me to come at police procedural elements in a different way in order to make them interesting as a game. The Between is a new take on PbtA and it incorporates rules on how to implement mysteries which is in turn lifted from the Brindlewood Bay game (which is basically Murder She Wrote meets Cthulhu). I haven't run that game yet, but its approach to mysteries may be what you're looking for. [USER=6993955]@Fenris-77[/USER] is pretty familiar with those rules, so he may have more to offer about that game specifically.</blockquote>

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