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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fenris-77" data-source="post: 8416859" data-attributes="member: 6993955">OK, a quick(-ish) precis of the Brindlewood Bay mystery mechanics, which are pretty much ported directly to The Between, which is otherwise mostly PbtA in terms of design ethos and mechanics. I'll use the verbiage from The Between because that's the iteration I'm most familiar with.So, every threat in The Between (think of a threat as similar to a monster in MotW) has 20 clues written for it as well as several questions (the answers to which 'solve' parts of the mystery, and are called Opportunities) and which have a complexity of (mostly) 2-8 and also the aforementioned associated Opportunity.The clues are evocatively and specifically written to scaffold and enhance whatever the theme of that particular threat is. So a threat based on a fire-starting ghost would have a lot of smoke, flame and whatnot sorts of clues. Finding clues is a product of several moves in the game but primarily the Information move (a pretty standard 2d6 PbtA roll with the 6-/7-9 and 10+ results). There is another move called Answer a Question where the players have a freewheeling conversation about how the clues they have might fit together and posit a theory about a question from the threat, at which point they roll (standard 2d6 again), adding the number of clues they have found and subtracting the complexity of the question. On a 10+ their theory is correct, on 7-9 its correct but with added danger or complications, and on a 6 or less it's incorrect and more clues must be gathered.The mystery in this system comes from the interplay of evocative places and people, and how the characters chose to approach the mystery at hand. The clues aren't tied to locations, but are given as the result of a successful roll, so what's important there is the framing of both the investigation and the clue in terms of fictional positioning (the Gm decides that clue would make sense/be awesome here). As you can see there is no pre-determined answer for the players to find, just a series of questions that help frame the mystery rather than solve it.  When they answer a question successfully they get to frame the opportunity, which answers part of the mystery and then move on to the next question. Most threats have two or three questions, so this isn't an interminable process.This can all seem a little nebulous without an exemplar, and I have a couple of threats lying around I can show as examples if anyone's interested. The Between a very cool system and I have nothing but wonderful things to say about Jason Cordova, the author.</blockquote>

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