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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aenghus" data-source="post: 7344550" data-attributes="member: 2656">I find mysteries are very hard to run in RPGs unless they are a total railroad, as the genre requires players to seek out clues and anomalies in the gameworld, and poke at the world to see what happens, and referees being human and fallible, with limited time to prepare, what they find some of the time is glitches in the simulation. Now these could be logical flaws, blind spots, errors of fact, continuity errors, etc and at least some of the time the players can't distinguish these unintended anomalies from actual clues.Now there's a variety of ways with dealing with such errors so they don't distract the players too much. Most of them disappear into the general noise of the game, in any case, but players can happen to obsess about a spurious clue that wasn't supposed to be there at all, and spin grandiose theories around the most ephemeral of leads. Personally, I often come clean and admit it was a mistake and there's nothing there. I've seen too many referees stubbornly drive their campaign off a cliff because they were unwilling to admit they made a mistake.IMO this is the difference between cause and effect in the real world and in a RPG, the real world doesn't glitch out over personal issues, but the gameworld might due to referee's lack of sleep, a bad day at work, or personal problems. In the real world properly conceived and executed experiments yield reliable predictable results, whereas in a conventional DM-run game that's too much to expect from most game systems or referees. RPGs aren't reliable simulations precisely because of the the squishy flawed fallible human in the loop.So when a PC can't find footprints where she expected to, it could be because they weren't there, or because they should have been there but there was a mistake in the adventure module, or because the referee made a mistake and missed that part of the module. Mysteries call players out to investigate clues and anomalies, some of which equate to the player pointing out the mistakes in the referee's worldbuilding and plotting. The intricacies of mystery plots make presenting them a difficult process. There are often typos and errors in printed scenarios, and self-written work can have errors as well. Human error is always a possibility.How each table deals with such errors varies a lot.</blockquote>

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