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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7342543" data-attributes="member: 42582">Clearly the dice are a limit. But in most games I'm familiar with, it's understood that losing a dice roll is different from having another participant stipulate that you fail.I don't see how this is meant to be disagreeing with me. Yes, the players can make other moves that may trigger the GM to narrate different bits of the pre-established shared fiction. That is not player agency over the shared fiction - it is the GM (or Ed Greenwood, or . . .) who establishes the shared fiction. The players are learning what that fiction is.In real life, the challenge of solving a mystery is collecting information by inspecting the environment, making inferences about what caused what, etc.In a RPG, the challenge of solving a mystery in the style you describe is making moves that lead the GM to narrate salient bits of fiction. CoC modules are exemplars of this. Player agency in this sort of adventure is rather limited, being largely confined to triggering the sequence of GM narrations. (To avoid distractions: this is not a criticism of CoC. I can enjoy playing CoC modules. But they don't give the player any significant agency in respect of the shared fiction.)It is possible to run a mystery scenario in which the players do have agency over the shared fiction (see eg <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?299440-Exploration-scenarios-my-experiment-last-Sunday" target="_blank">this actual play example</a>), but the techniques are different from what you describe.This was discussed rather extensively upthread.This sort of approach just emphasises the GM's control over outcomes - the GM is entitled to "block" by sticking to the original material, or to "say 'yes'" if s/he wants to by changing that material. As I posted uptreahd, this style of GMing means that player action declarations are really best understood as suggestions to the GM as to how the shared fiction might unfold.</blockquote>

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