Ask and Ye Shall Receive

Question: Your write-up of Mystery says that players can ask yes/no or short answer questions of Fate. Can you give me a basic framework of what you would consider appropriate questions for a Scion to ask Fate? What do you consider an unacceptable question/series of questions? Examples would be appreciated.

This is a pretty neat question, and examples are definitely helpful! Let's do a few.

Our goal with keeping Mystery questions simple is mostly for the players, not the characters themselves. PCs who use Mystery are not actually "asking questions", per se; rather, they are tapping into the mysteries and secrets of the universe and of Fate itself, learning things that they otherwise could not have known. How they stunt that is up to them - maybe they read secrets in runes, discover truths in the depths of drunkenness, hear the ancient wisdom of the stars or whatever else they might come up with - but they're never actually talking to or asking questions of Fate as if it were a person. The act of asking the Storyteller questions is a proxy system, not what's actually happening in the game.

So the exact wording of a Mystery question doesn't necessarily matter. The player isn't going to hoodwink extra information out of Fate with clever wordplay to make a question "count" more or anything like that, since an actual question isn't being asked of anyone, so instead the Storyteller's job is to figure out what information the player is actually trying to learn and how difficult it should be to discover. The simpler the question, the easier it is to tell what they're looking for and the more likely it is that it can be answered simply as well.

That doesn't mean every simple question is easily answered or only one "Mystery question"'s worth of answer, though, or that every complicated one can't be. These are the kinds of questions we usually encourage from players:

1) "Where is the closest Terra Incognita's entrance?"
2) "Can this puzzle be unraveled with non-magical means?"
3) "Who is the leader of the secret cabal of magicians?"
4) "What is the greatest weakness of the evil zombie leader?"
5) "What incentive could I give to Hera to convince her to act as my patron?"
6) "Is Set in the Underworld right now?"

These are all pretty simple and easy to go about answering. Most of them are short answers; #1 would be along the lines of "In a cave forty miles north of here," or "On the rocks where the Colossus once stood," while #3 should probably just be "Bob, the sinister TV salesman," #4 should be something along the lines of "He's vulnerable to the powers of healing and light," or "He has a soft spot on the back of his neck where he's less armored," and #5 might say, "She's looking for someone to go on a dangerous quest for her," or "She would accept a relic of five dots or higher in return," or whatever else the lady might want. The yes/no questions have a simple yes/no answer, although you might want to keep an eye out for whether or not that's actually what the player is trying to learn; for example, the answer to #5 up there is an easy yes or no, but the player asking #2 is probably actually asking how that puzzle can be unraveled non-magically and may need follow-up information that costs more questions. Remember that just like the player can't cheat with wordplay to get more questions out of this situation, the Storyteller likewise can't cheat to try to make a player waste questions uselessly; you're both working together to make sure the Scion's ability to dip into the mysteries of Fate yields useful information. If a player accidentally words a question poorly - like, for example, "Oh! Can I defeat the emperor with some kind of special strategy?" - it's your job to give her useful information about a strategy, not to glibly say, "Yes!" and then pat yourself on the back while she looks depressed over losing a question to poor wording.

With questions that are actually multiple questions - either because a player isn't great at wording them on the fly or is trying to shenanigans their way around the system by using a lot of semicolons and conjunctions - the Storyteller's job becomes to figure out what information they're looking for and how many "questions" that costs. Generally, the rule of thumb is that one piece of information = one question cost, so that in essence you're pretending the player did ask these questions in the correct phrasing and order to get maximum use out of them. For example, for #2 above, if you know that the puzzle can be solved via mortal means, that it requires a particular set of tools, that a particular mortal has the technical expertise to do it, and that it will take approximately a month longer to do it that way than it would to do it with magic, that's three pieces of information. We would say to the asker of #2, "Okay, to get the full lowdown on that will take three of your questions," and let them decide if they want to commit to that or decide to abandon that route of inquiry and ask about something else.

Unfortunately, a question being simple and direct doesn't always mean it's easy to answer, or that it should be answered. Some questions are clearly great mysteries of the universe and wouldn't be so if anyone with a single level of Mystery could just unravel them, and others may regard things, events or people who are part of Fate's grand design or possessed of great talents of subtlety themselves that shouldn't be immediately uncovered by any yutz who can roll a single success. In those cases, the Storyteller has to figure out how "expensive" a particular question should be, which really means how secret it is, how powerful the forces trying to hide it are, and how difficult it should be for this Scion at their current level to access.

Some examples of information that needs multiple questions to answer:

1) Where is the Tablet of Destinies hidden?
2) Who is that mysterious one-eyed old man who keeps appearing and watching me?
3) What secret plot is Tezcatlipoca up to right now?
4) What is Loki's motive for engineering Baldur's death?
5) What is the secret formula and process for creating Zeus' thunderbolts?

In the case of the first question, this is something that we know is secret even from most of the gods, and that would be enormously powerful and dangerous knowledge for anyone to have, so it clearly isn't easily accessible information even with Mystery. #2, 3 and 4 are cases of gods who are excellent at hiding their intentions and actions from everyone, some of whom are also masters of Fate as well, so again it would be overpowered for any Hero-level Scion to be able to uncover their grandiose Ultimate Manipulation plots with a single Mystery question, and therefore it probably costs a hefty amount to uncover their secrets. The final one is something that probably took Hephaestus and the cyclopes a huge amount of successes on their planning rolls to figure out, so it would be pretty broken if any kid with Mystery could duplicate it in a few seconds.

How much each of those might cost depends on how difficult it should be for the Scion you're dealing with to figure out that information; if you want it to be barely within his grasp if he really commits, set it at a level that he could achieve but only if he tries hard (e.g., if his average successes are 30, set it at 35 or 40 questions so that it's technically doable but difficult). If it's something that he really shouldn't be able to figure out right now, or that should be hard for anyone including gods to figure out, base it on that instead; for example, a god with maximum Occult and Mystery will average around 50 successes and could easily use resources to get even higher, so something that is a massive secret that even the gods don't know should probably be at least 100 or more questions.

One thing we do allow people to do, when shooting to find out giant state secrets that cost a lot of questions, is to blow a few successive uses of Mystery at the same time. For example, if a player rolls 25 Mystery questions and then asks about something that costs 100, they could either say, "Okay, that's out of my league, I'll ask about something else," or if it's really important to them decide to spend three more of their Mystery channels in one huge dump to get enough questions (or maybe only two more if they want to add Deeds or Channels). Often, players will want to save their Mystery uses for future story needs, but if they feel like it's worth it to invest everything, we'll let them pay for a few uses of Mystery in the same scene to get enough total questions to go for it.

Since you asked for a few questions that are not okay, we can provide some examples of those, too.

1) If I get caught sneaking into the imperial palace, will I be put in the dungeon?
2) Who is the mysterious Blue Demon, how do we find him, what is he planning and where is his hideout, and what's the best strategy for dealing with him when we confront him?
3) What's the best course of action for us now?
4) Where is my arch-enemy going to be on the fourteenth of July?
5) What does Manannan mac Lir think about the Morrigan?

These questions have a variety of different problems. #1 and #4 deal with events that are yet to come, which Mystery cannot answer; only Prophecy can provide glimpses of the future, so you simply have to remind players who ask these kinds of questions that they're outside Mystery's scope. #4, along with #2, also has the problem of trying to combine several questions into one, which we talked about above, so we would tell a player who asked either one that those were not single questions, and that it would cost at least four questions for #2, and possibly two for #4 (assuming the player was trying to sneak in knowledge of who their arch-enemy is if they didn't already know). #3 is basically unanswerable; there are too many options for a given group of Scions that could be the best choice, and while Fate certainly has plans for any given Scion, it doesn't know (or care) all the details at every juncture or what the Scions themselves might consider "best". Finally, #5 has many of the same problems of trying to ask about secrets belonging to other gods - its answer would give you the ability to literally eavesdrop on the minds of gods massively more powerful than yourself with very little difficulty, which is simply overpowered, and it's not really answerable anyway, since it's a very vague question and what any given person "thinks about" another is likely to change often and in subtle ways.

Again, don't penalize players for asking a bad question - it's easy for even quick-on-the-uptake players to misstep once in a while, and you never want to make them waste a question. Instead, let them know that that question doesn't work and suggest an alternative, or explain that while that's askable, it costs X amount of questions so they can consider if that's really what they want.

The most important thing to remember is that it's not player vs. Storyteller as antagonistic personalities interacting, but rather that both are working together to get the Scion using Mystery the best and most information for their divine powers.