Pteryx the Puzzle Secretary

For me it’s not so much combat I’m looking for as competence (and due to this, D&D 5e irritates me for largely restricting competence to combat by various means). PBtA rubs me the wrong way primarily because, when combined with a system that makes “yes, but” the most common result, moves feel less like the things your character can do well and more like the things characters try to do despite not being good at them.

Also, PBtA games tend to dictate *who* your character is more than most.

@Rhaxapopouetl That doesn’t really seem compatible with “roll to see if your theory is correct at the end”…

Nah, Mafia/Werewolf is actually a third option, and served by games that exist outside “our” roleplaying industry. Look into murder mystery party games for that.

By “mystery-shaped storytelling” I mean more stuff like Brindlewood Bay, InSpectres, Technoir… stuff where even who did it and how just isn’t decided at the start.

Concerning decoupling clues from locations, though, that only sometimes makes sense. It’s commonplace for a piece of evidence to only be meaningful in a particular context, and sometimes that context is the location in which it’s found.

That being said, if you can’t move a clue, it becomes more important to make sure there are multiple ways to learn about it. Maybe if the PCs don’t see the muddy footprint in the garden, the gardener did.

Not everyone “in our hobby” is actually deep into it like us, nor do non-D&D games have multi-million-dollar marketing machines so people outside of the inner circle actually understand that these games exist. And remember, this was before it was common knowledge that EVERYTHING has a community online. They might well have honestly thought that if it’s not advertised, it doesn’t exist, and therefore their game was totally the first competition for D&D EVAR (when it absolutely wasn’t).

Given that almost no games other than D&D, Vampire (and perhaps other WoD games), and *maybe* Call of Cthulhu made it into general public awareness, and that indeed many people didn’t (and still don’t!) recognize that there is an actual category of analog games called “RPGs”, it’s not so weird in context.

I’ll note that the 90s is also when the fight over the term “RPG” between CRPGs and TTRPGs really started causing our hobby problems.

@Atlas48 First off, know from the outset whether you want to run a genuine mystery scenario, with an actual truth under the hood where the point is to overcome the challenge of finding that truth, or engage in mystery-*shaped* storytelling where the goal is to end up with a tale that resembles a mystery from the outside while not actually taxing the players’ brains. Advice varies wildly depending on which you’re doing.