Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9829327" data-attributes="member: 42582">The epistemic situation of an investigator isn't changed by the fact that there is an "external" truth. They have no access to that truth other than by uncovering clues, finding patterns, forming conjectures, and doing their best to make sense of it all. Whereas the position of players in the sort of game you describe is that the players can ask the author if they got the answer that the author intended; that's why I compared it to a crossword puzzle (or any other clue-based puzzle where the author has written the puzzle with an intended solution). This capacity to get authorial confirmation; or to be critiqued by the author for failing to solve the puzzle; makes a CoC-type module pretty different from the actual process of solving a mystery.By focusing on correctness/truth, you are focusing on something which is the main point of difference between solving a mystery and playing a CoC scenario. (This is also why I made the comparison to Agatha Christie.) Whereas Brindlewood Bay, as described by [USER=6993955]@Fenris-77[/USER] and [USER=6816042]@Arilyn[/USER], foregrounds the epistemic position of an investigator, in which correctness is not available in any unmediated "authorial" fashion."Unconvincing" to whom? As [USER=6993955]@Fenris-77[/USER] posted, if players are making conjectures that they find implausible, that's not a system problem.If you mean "unconvincing to some external audience", well so what? Was every explanation ever of a murder that took place convincing to those people? Sometimes the best theory of how a murder occurred isn't the one that you or I would arrive at left to our own devices.</blockquote>

Verification