[AuraTwilight]

Aura I don't think you understand how Bern's game worked. There's nothing that outright prevents George from being a culprit, if there was, Erika's theory could be denied.

As for the purple text, it's not a red, so if George and Maria are culprits all their purple texts mean nothing.

The real problem with Kylon's theory is that it doesn't explain how the closed room were created, unless I missed something. So it doesn't really work unless he fixes that.

You...misunderstood the point I was making. George and Maria can't both be culprits because only one set of parents can be still alive; it's pretty much set up so that one branch family is guilty, and with Maria's we have the problem of an open space.

And, frankly, Erika's argument, while logically valid, goes against the spirit of Bern's game.

This doesn't seem to have disproved anything I said. All I'm reading is justification for the rules. I already said they're well justified, and brilliant rules. However, even reading your post I can easily reason out that they're not ''realistic''. What other setting would allow one to heartlessly pick fun at murders and guess the culprit and take it as a challenge? Fantasy, if the police went into some house, and started getting excited over a crime, trying to take it as a challenge to find the culprit, needless to say they wouldn't be very good police. Even if the story is written to ''mesh'' with the rules and hide them, it's still the same as covering up guts in the body of a beautiful corpse. To say this is to say something like God's divine plan is working at hand in real life, but events are happening to make it seem like nothing supernatural is happening, so we can dismiss it for being supernatural.(Lets not bring god into this I was only using an example).

It's like you're not understanding a word I'm saying.

The author forging a story to go a certain way, even if it is not realistic, is not the same as using supernatural elements to solve a mystery. Even if an author is weaving a story a certain way, everything that happens in a Mystery story could happen in real life, no matter how improbable.

Fantasy has unspoken rules to it to, it's just that they're easily changed to adapt to a setting. They don't have a widely accepted list like mystery though, because in the end no one really needs them.

You demonstrate that you still misunderstand what I mean by Fantasy not having 'rules'. You can do ANYTHING in a Fantasy, and there's no real rules you can breach that would make it a 'bad fantasy' (save for rules that would break any story, like 'no deus ex machinas').

Fantasy has wide expectations as well, that can almost be considered rules, one of them would pretty much be: Elves must be of a noble race, if an elf is to be ''evil'', they must be of a branching race, such as a ''dark elf''. Hating humans does not make an elf evil, it makes them neutral, humans are not the center of the world. But defeating that and making a unique and brilliant setting that changes that general pattern makes it funner.

That matters nothing. There are many settings where elves are impish, asshole sprites much like fairies. There are many stories where humans ARE the center of the world. There are countless fantasies that simply don't have elves in them. What you listed aren't rules, it's just people being lazy and copying Tolkein or Dungeons and Dragons. The reader doesn't read about a good dark elf or an evil 'high elf', and go "This is bullshit, the whole Fantasy is ruined now" as they would a Mystery.