using freeform "question-answering" moves in fiction-first games

 

Edward Gorey <3

Jason Cordova: big genius. one of the more interesting indie designers imo. I steal his ideas, gut them, smear their blood into blogpost. you read it. we kiss. 

the big one from Brindlewood Bay and The Between is the "answer a question" move or the "theorize" move or something like that. More or less, those games are about solving mysteries. but the work (or fun if that's your speed) of actually constructing a mystery is offloaded from the gm, who instead has the easier (in my opinion more fun) of setting a Complexity rating to the mystery and creating a list of thematically appropriate and suitably interesting capital C Clues.

players get Clues as rewards for investigating and exploring stuff, and then, when they have enough Clues, they can initiates a game phase where they start to discuss the solution to the mystery or question, creating connecting the dots between Clues they'd gathered and generating conclusions and associations as they come to mind. 

When they've reached a consensus, they make a roll (2d6 + Clues incorporated into the answer or otherwise explained away, - the Complexity of the mystery/question) and then consult a pbta type chart where:

10+ means the player's conclusions are correct and can be acted on

7-9 the players theories are correct but with some unpleasant complication or oversight

6- incorrect + some additional unpleasantness

to be super clear, this isn't a behind-the-scenes roll; it's foregrounded; that the players are generating the solution to the mystery themselves is part of the buy-in for these games, and the challenge lies in compellingly connecting desperate evocative elements.

i think that a lot of fiction first OSR/NSR/FKR/??? people are going to have a negative gut reaction to the idea of incorporating something like this into their games; it's suuuper narrative-y obviously, and it's easy to see how it could shatter the illusion of a coherent world separate from the players and their characters.

however, it's not that different then what happens a lot in games of that type. particularly with the recent penchant for dark-souls-y storytelling in the fiction-first scene, the idea of players frequently going over the rumors, items, names, and other bits of lore that they've accumulated and forming theories about the world with no final authority to tell them yes or no should be pretty familiar. 

 In fact, that's like 90% of the allure of the dark souls approach; by placing the story elements in the player's hands and letting people muck about for themselves, Fromsoft ended up developing a community with deep attachment to lore that they've dedicated months to researching and puzzling over. 

plus, if you've been running games for a minute (even games with a ton of well-documented simulation style elements) and you tell me you've never covertly replaced one of your own ideas with a player theory, i'll believe you, but i won't respect you. 

anyway, deriving meaning from randomness has been a hallmark of fiction first games for a long time; traditionally it's a role reserved for the GM and their cache of random generators, but i see no issue in sharing the fun with my players, especially since Cordova's games explicitly call for the GM to take part in the discussion themselves, since they have as little of an idea about the "truth" of the mystery as anyone else. 

to the point, i'm running a Starling and Shrike apocalyptic mercenary detective game with a ton of established history and lore, but i'm still using this method for mysteries. so far, so good. it lets me play a lot more fast and loose and cuts back on my prep while also getting my players a lot more invested in the setting and locales they've been investigating than they've been in previous mystery games i've run.

 once my Dungeon23 is finished, i think i'll run it in a similar way. i've been writing rooms using the Big Oracle with complete disdain for cohesion, letting themes emerge organically, and rather than try to prune it in post, i think i'll just throw my players in there and let their monkey pattern-brains do what they do best: make meaning.