Just watched the first couple episodes of Fringe. Now I’m pondering how I’d tweak the standard MotW formula to handle a mystery like that.
There was no Kick Some Ass evident in the mysteries; the point was to figure out what was going on, then contain the problem before it could spread. There wasn’t actually a monster to kill. Naturally, there was plenty of Investigate A Mystery, and we had techno-flavored Use Magic of a sort.
Any thoughts? Michael, I know you briefly touched on this, and I’m sure that X-Files (if not Fringe itself) was definitely a style of game you had in mind, as a type of mystery to run.
I think the main thing is that the mission isn’t about defeating a monster, but instead working out what’s going on.
That changes up the mystery generation:
– Instead of thinking up a monster and what it’s doing, you think up a weird phenomenon and then work out how it affects the people and place around it.
– The countdown will be about worsening effects of the phenomenon and/or people’s reactions to it, rather than an advancing plan.
– Combat is going to be generally less important.
– You may want to consider breaking up the investigation and read a situation moves to focus more on discovering things about the weird phenomena.
That makes a lot of sense. So the mystery gets finished when they’ve wrapped up the loose ends in the fiction, it sounds like.
Yes, that’s how I’d do it.
You can even leave it up to the team when they head back to base and report to their boss (assuming a Fringe/X-Files setup). If they left something festering, that’s just fodder for more mysteries later on.
We also had some really good robust conversation about running Fringe-like mysteries here: https://plus.google.com/116717584408386390013/posts/LTNXrRn25fW
Love it! Also, as I’m watching the show and thinking of it in MotW terms, I’m starting to parse out what playbook everyone’s using.
It’s pretty dead-on obvious that Walter is the Expert, down to the Dark Past move. 😀 And I’m pretty sure Olivia is the Professional. At this point in the show, I can’t tell what Peter is, though…he doesn’t seem mundane enough to be a mundane.
And for future reference, Fred Hicks and friends have been thinking about this, here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+FredHicks/posts/N8AP2dQMyA7