All the forms of genre fiction have attracted the ire of academics and elites, dubbed as pablum: fantasy, adventure and romance nothing but escapism, horror and suspense just penny dreadfuls more like a ghost train than literature, erotica just pornography. There is one that has attracted the least however and shaken it off every time, that remains almost inexplicably high brow despite its endless repeats, inescapable formula and unending popularity: the murder mystery. Perhaps it is because in it is the most intimate of connections between writer and reader, where the author makes a sincere promise not to cheat but also promises to cheat as much as possible. Exactly like the puzzle setter, the goal is not to mystify but to guide, step by step, to the solution and that requires delicate care of and affection towards the reader. That makes the bond stronger, the voice clearer and the craft more obvious – and the reader more forgiving of sins, more ready to exalt triumphs. The escapist can lose us at any moment, because our suspension of belief is so fragile; we stand, arms crossed, cynicism bared and unbelief brandished, ready to doubt your happy endings. But when we do a crossword we are a team, with trust, because we know that the puzzler must want us to solve the riddle, they need us to meet them half way.

It is said that animation and puppetry and the theatre work so well because they don’t completely trick our eyes; we willingly forget that we are in seats in front of a stage and could break the illusion at any time, and that conscious seduction, that self surrender is more intoxicating than the verisimilitude of the cinema. Just so is the mystery: we arrive on the doorstep of the house or murder, shivering and cold, demanding not to be seduced and lied to and misdirected and all our protestations are false. Come in, says the spider to the fly. I shall tell you no lies, they lie. I know you won’t, we lie back.

And the dance begins.

Of course, all stories are lies, yes. The real world doesn’t have beginnings and ends, no characters or plots; even cause and effect is rare. But murder mysteries are much more so a lie. Similarly, all games are lie: we force ourselves to accept arbitrary rules and restrictions, deliberately making it hard on ourselves, and entering into this situation with the full pretense that we want to destroy our best friends and win absolutely nothing of consequence. But roleplaying games are much more so a lie. In the traditional mould, as much as the GM must oppose and attack the characters, he does not want to crush them utterly, nor do they truly want zero opposition. The dragon should die, every time, but not without some good rolls, and the dragon must be there. If the dungeon was just empty and the treasure lying on the floor, where would be the fun? So we all pretend that the GM was trying to stop us from getting the treasure and we might really have died.

I suspect that deep down, the reason we’ve had forty years of the same arguments about dice fudging, reading the adventure, roleplaying vs rollplaying and narrativism vs gamism is that all of those discussions are about the exact same thing: how strong the lie is, and how much we pretend it is real. If we fudge the dice we might end up giving the game away; but of course if we don’t we might be suggesting this isn’t about shared storytelling at all. Roleplaying games are an absolute artifice: we pretend to be playing a tactical skirmish miniatures game in order to tell a story, but we actually end up with a weak version of both so that we keep the pretense up. If the story gets too much like a story, then we’d stop believing it is really us in the driving seat and that we might really truly die; but if it gets too much like a game we get a little itchy because then it might feel like all these dice mechanics don’t mean anything and we’re just kidding ourselves. So much work to stop us seeing the man behind the curtain – who is us.

In general, the murder mystery in RPGs has always failed, because it puts pressure on exactly this issue. The murder mystery in fiction requires a puzzle setter and a puzzle solver. Transferring that to RPGs means you have really only three options. Firstly, the GM becomes the puzzle setter, and the players must winkle out the solution. This fraught with peril because unlike fiction, players have far more agency and might solve things very quickly indeed. The GM then risks breaking the precious kayfabe described above if they change their mind when the players get too close. Second, the GM makes it whomever the players suspect, whether this happens behind the scenes, inside the GM’s head, or explicitly through mechanics. This works but destroys all the appeal of the murder mystery, because there can be no puzzle, and thus no suspense. The closest thing can be creating open ended suggestiveness, that you can hand off to other players to complete.

The third option is sort of a jumble of the two, using minigames and such to add more mechanical suspense. As different as it is to most games, this is what Partners does as well. Instead of the offers coming from players guessing/suggesting, it comes from dice or cards or tic tac toe, lining up things until the mechanics make the final reveal. This lacks a puzzle, but it does at least have suspense. It’s amazing in Partners when we don’t know who did it until that last card falls, and when a card reveals something none of us had guessed about the protagonists. That is the reason we play shared storytelling games as a whole: to build stories that could not be built with just one person, or even with just a few: good mechanics should add another voice that also throws out ideas and lets us combine all three voices into something that could never have been built alone. That is always my goal in design, really: to ensure that there are lots of voices, able to build together and surprise each other. The suspense comes from not knowing where the story will end up.

I think in general, most RPGs don’t do well with suspense, because they try to create it inside the game. Will the dragon kill you? Will you get the treasure? Those aren’t suspenseful questions. It is like asking “will you solve the crossword puzzle?”. Chances are you will. The suspense is elsewhere, it lies in “what does this clue mean, and how do I unlock its answer.” Too many RPGs want us to feel the suspense of do we kill the dragon when there are so many better suspenses to be had in different ways. In Prime Time Adventures and Pendragon we roll to see if we give in to our darker natures or not. In Smallville we don’t know if we will win in an argument with our friend or lose ourselves in the process. In Partners, you don’t know how the cards will fall and what secrets they will reveal. You’ll generate a best friend and then draw a dark ambition and all of a sudden the best friend has become something new, someone hiding in the shadows, wanting to be more. The suspense is in the story reveals of information: in character, not in plot.

As I keep harping on about, I’m kind of done with traditional roleplaying structures precisely because there is no suspense whatsoever in will we kill the dragon or will I roll a 20. But there is so so very very much suspense in the question of if I start telling a story and you finish it (or the dice do one or the other), neither of us knows what the story will be. That’s actually where I really started my love of RPGs too: I didn’t play nearly as much as I rolled up character after character, desperate to create things my brain could not create on its own. Desperate for the suspense of the reveal, the knowledge at the end of the random table.

Here, too, is an intimate relationship. When I hand off the random tables, I must take absolute care with my audience. I must trust they will be able to fill in the gaps and explain the inexplicable. They trust that I will give them just enough ideas that they do not struggle, but not so much I talk over them. It isn’t a puzzle, but it is an exercise. A game to play with friends. And like a crossword, it is infinitely repeatable. But unlike a crossword, there is no pretense. I’ve given you a puzzle yes, and I want you to solve it, but I’ve stopped pretending that I’m trying to kill you with a dragon. And I like that too. I’m tired of how much RPGs pretend, and shuffle about pretending oh so much that we all might die or the story might not end, that evil might triumph and good fail. Such roleplaying is, perhaps, better left to the boudoir, or to children who still believe the monster is really just about to get them.

What I’m doing is in the storygame/rpg space, for want of a better marketing niche, but I think it’s a much better mechanic overall. And I don’t think I’m nearly as alone here as you might at first believe. While the standard rpg mode persists, more and more solo and oracle games are appearing, and they want it my way. They know they don’t need to pretend the GM is anything but a storyteller, throwing out offers, and that games work better that way. I think deep down a lot of players are very tired of pretending, and would rather some actual suspense. And the way to that is through actual shared storytelling mechanics, not to the miniature wargaming of D&D.

It’s time, perhaps, to rethink this whole thing, cast off the Floor Wars, and do this properly.