#RPGaDay2025 - 14 Mystery


 

I love a good mystery, I love not knowing where a story will end, or discovering ideas later that reframe the path that has just been walked. Anything that adds strangeness to a setting is a cool addition, but I think that addition of something cool should be an extra, the mystery and the unknown will often lead to dissatisfaction, confusion, and unease if there isn’t some type of closure at the end of it all.

I don’t need all of my mysteries solved, I don’t need it all sorted out… that’s just not life. There’s probably a good sweet spot for how much needs to be left as a mystery at the end of a story to get good closure. Howevere that’s going to var from group to group, from gen re to genre, and from story the story. The original Alien movie, had far more unresolved questions at it’s end than it had answers. Where did the aliens come from? What was their purpose? What was the agenda behind the company they worked for? Did the company know more than they were letting on? What about the bonus situation? A lot of those questions were gradually resolved in later movies and the whole thing started to lose its mystery and mystique.

I probably work on the idea of three conclusions to mysteries in a game, closed conclusions, resolvables, and unresolvables.

-A closed conclusion ties up nicely.

-A resolvable can be brought back in a later game session to conclude then.

-An unresolvable will remain a mystery. There is no indication of how an unresolvable will turn into a resolvable, let alone get closed up and concluded. But that’s not to say that it might not happen later.

In a one-shot session, I try to make sure at around half of the main conclusions end up closed. It gives a sense of satisfaction, but leaves lingering questions in case players do want to come back for more. In a campaign session, I’ll roughly start with equal thirds… more begins unresolved, but with a few things concluded to help players realise that their actions are making a difference…there’s plenty unresolved to pull things along… and as the campaign moves through multiple sessions toward it’s conclusion, more of the tale gets resolved until we get to the point where more than half of it fits neatly in a closed conclusion.

A lot of my game design is geared toward that model too.

 

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