City of Mist ?

[Guts]

It seems like a fusion of Fate and PbtA. Anyone read or played it?

[Jefepato]

I've read it. I somewhat regret paying money for the book, but I did.

I really like the concept and flavor. "Noir mystery with superpowers based on myth and legend" is kind of a bizarre fusion of ideas, but I'm digging it.

But it's still PbtA, which interests me not at all, largely for reasons this forum has discussed at length. I've been meaning for a while to make a thread here and ask two related questions:

1) How do you actually run a good mystery game in tabletop RPGs?
2) What, if any, system would actually work for the City of Mist concept? I feel like a lot of typical supers games don't exactly fit. (I like Mutants and Masterminds, despite all its flaws, but I'm not sure how to base a game around mystery in a system where someone could spend a few points and crank their Investigation skill to godly levels.)

[Blicero]

1) How do you actually run a good mystery game in tabletop RPGs?

You could probably do worse than starting with the advice given by the TheAlexandrian dude: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/15 ... -mysteries

I also recently discovered that the guy who did Stars Without Numbers released his own OSR-adjacent Call of Cthulhu hack called Silent Legions (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/14 ... nt-Legions). From the blurb:

Silent Legions is built to help the GM create investigative adventures with minimal strain. Within these pages you'll find a modular set of templates and adventure guides that help you snap together an evening's intrepid investigation and fit it neatly into your campaign setting.

I haven't read the book, so I don't want to attest to its quality, but people on the internet generally seem to have favorable perspectives on Sine Nomine's stuff.

[Guts]

I'll echo the recommendation on The Alexander blog articles.

And I've found a detailed analysis of the game here:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/adventurer ... r-set/amp/

While the setting looks very interesting, the fusion of PbtA with Fate-like stuff apparently gives weird results, and the moves also seem on the weak side. I'll reserve judgement when I actually read it, but I admit my excitement has faded after reading this review.

[Guts]

Found the description below in another forum. It seems the game requires a degree of system mastery that I'm not really willing to commit these days. Well, I think I'll pass.

I think City of Mist requires a much higher degree of player mastery than any other PbtA game, and more than most games in general, especially in chargen. Because the Themes and Power Tags appear to be Moves and Powers to a novice player, it's very jarring to have spent all that time on them and then to discover in play that the Power Tags aren't remotely Moves or Powers.

The Moves themselves are also pretty complicated for a PbtA game. The names aren't really intuitive, and they're very mechanical. They do things like give Juice or Tier, which is codified language that has to be defined or understood. It's ultimately a pretty complicated game.

When one has slowed down, invested time in really examining not only the Moves but all of the intricacies of how the game works (including Crack, Fade, Attention, and Flipside -- again, all mechanics that have no intuitive value and need definition and understanding to interact with), then one can be rewarded with a finely-tuned game engine that can be made to perform. But most players don't have that level of system mastery during chargen. Especially PbtA players. I see this over and over again in chargen, where people buzz away building their Power Tags, completely unaware of how those Tags are going to interact with Moves (generally not well). People make investigators who will never do well on an Investigate Move, or fighters who will never be able to generate much in the way of Tiers of damage. And who get very frustrated when they start playing the game, because they thought they were building a character that they really weren't.

It's not remotely an easy game. It's evident even in the way they name their chapters. Their chapter titles obfuscate the content of the chapter, favoring style over substance. I don't mean that as an indictment, so much as an illustration of how, at the most basic level, the game really expects the players to digest the whole game before they can play it.