“That’s the real question isn’t it: why? The how and the who is just scenery for the public. Oswald, Ruby, Cuba, The Mafia, keeps ’em guessing like some kind of parlor game, prevents ’em from asking the most important question: why?” – JFK

This weekend, I spent some time reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book, What the Dog Saw. If you’re not familiar with Gladwell, he is the author of The Tipping Point, The Outliers and the host of an excellent podcast, Revisionist History. I really like Gladwell and he brings up some excellent points of view about the unspoken (or at least underappreciated) factors that contribute to success. I don’t always agree with him, but I do admire the fact he makes me think. His podcast, in particular, has made me vow to never play golf in my lifetime based on his observations. This particular book I read this weekend is a collection of his essays during his time at the New Yorker, and one of them struck a chord of me that I wanted to discuss in his article about Enron, “Open Secrets”. (You can read it here, by the way. It’s a good read).

One of the things in the article I found most interesting is the concept of mysteries vs. puzzles, and the difference between the two. He references Gregory Treverton, a national security expert, who makes the distinction between puzzles and mysteries in that puzzles have cleancut solutions and stem from the absence of information – you discover the information, you solve the puzzle. Mysteries, however, are based on uncertainty – they require judgments based on the information provided (which can often be too much information, and part of the challenge is based on weighing what information is valuable and what is a distraction). In the book, Gladwell references the location of Osama bin Laden being a puzzle at the time because those seeking him did not have enough information (This piece as written in 2007, by the way). Gladwell, however, suggests that what would occur in Iraq after the removal of Sadam Hussein was a mystery because, despite a plethora of conjecture, information, and strategy, there was no way to accurately know what would occur. (Maybe not even in hindsight).

When we’re building certain types of storylines for our players, creating suitable mysteries becomes a challenge (especially when your players are crafty little devils). There’s a school of thought that suggests that GM’s should never revise a mystery’s outcome because… well there’s lot of reasons proposed by this theory – you’re cheating them out of the possibility of being wrong, you’re railroading them to a conclusion, there’s a lot of points brought up. Whether you agree with that or not is a different topic, but I’d like to bring up a secondary concept to consider – the separation of riddles vs. mysteries when developing your narrative.

Treverton wrote an article about this in the Smithsonian Magazine, Risks and Riddles. (I also recommend reading this.) In it, he has an interesting quotation – “Solving puzzles is useful for detection. But framing mysteries is necessary for prevention.” But it’s also an interesting concept that mysteries also frame why certain things weren’t prevented – why things happened or didn’t happen. Going back to the quote from the movie, JFK, it poses some interesting questions when you use the Kennedy assassination as a working example. The puzzle aspect is clear – How did the shooting take place? But the mystery is even more complex, the deeper you go into it. Who was Oswald, really? Why was this allowed to happen?  So much information, much of it conflicting in one form or another, that totally obfuscates how something like that would be allowed to take place, which is a much deeper question to pose.

Seriously, don’t go into that Oliver Stone rabbit hole too deeply. Instead, let’s make this a practical exercise – think about what you’re posing to your players – are you providing them puzzles or mysteries? Puzzles should be clearly defined based on information or a lack thereof. If you’re posing a puzzle to your players, that’s the best way to consider it. But the concept of a mystery is when the answer to the puzzle, providing the needed information, provides no closure to the questions at hand. Sure, they get it… but what does it mean and how the hell did you get there?

Slight spoilers about to occur – If you have read/seen Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, the puzzle starts with who killed Edward Ratchett on a moving train in the middle of the night. But the mystery, the true mystery lies in trying to figure why the murderers did what they did. The evidence points to a conclusion, but the conclusion makes no sense on the surface (despite answering the puzzle). Where does one go from there? The answer to that mystery is what really provides closure to the narrative.

This doesn’t work for everyone, of course – ultimately the meat of the television series CSI is meant strictly as an exploration of the puzzle aspect. However, they always provide closure of how things got there, usually in the interrogation room in the last five minutes of the program. Players can also put blinders on to solving the problem without answering the mystery. (“Welp. I solved it. Give me my XP.”) In that kind of scenario, it helps to create disbelief in the authority figures that would acknowledge a true resolution despite the evidence – “Yeah, his fingerprints are on the weapon, but we have no motive and he has an airtight alibi.” Make the players earn the motive to resolve the mystery as well as the puzzle at hand. Even the most solid bit of evidence can be ruled as inadmissible.

So my final thoughts are making sure to separate the puzzle from the mystery in your narrative – your puzzles should have a clear answer, but the mystery should remain soft around the edges. Answering one, doesn’t necessarily solve the other (nor should it). And a final quotation, this time from The Prisoner – “Questions are a burden to others, answers are a prison to oneself.”

Food for thought. Good luck.