Nah, Mafia/Werewolf is actually a third option, and served by games that exist outside "our" roleplaying industry. Look into murder mystery party games for that.
By "mystery-shaped storytelling" I mean more stuff like Brindlewood Bay, InSpectres, Technoir... stuff where even who did it and how just isn't decided at the start.
Concerning decoupling clues from locations, though, that only sometimes makes sense. It's commonplace for a piece of evidence to only be meaningful in a particular context, and sometimes that context is the location in which it's found.
That being said, if you can't move a clue, it becomes more important to make sure there are multiple ways to learn about it. Maybe if the PCs don't see the muddy footprint in the garden, the gardener did.
Not everyone "in our hobby" is actually deep into it like us, nor do non-D&D games have multi-million-dollar marketing machines so people outside of the inner circle actually understand that these games exist. And remember, this was before it was common knowledge that EVERYTHING has a community online. They might well have honestly thought that if it's not advertised, it doesn't exist, and therefore their game was totally the first competition for D&D EVAR (when it absolutely wasn't).
Given that almost no games other than D&D, Vampire (and perhaps other WoD games), and *maybe* Call of Cthulhu made it into general public awareness, and that indeed many people didn't (and still don't!) recognize that there is an actual category of analog games called "RPGs", it's not so weird in context.
I'll note that the 90s is also when the fight over the term "RPG" between CRPGs and TTRPGs really started causing our hobby problems.
@Ziggurat When putting a settlement on a map that you don't expect the party to go anywhere near soon, you only really need three pieces of info (beyond its location, anyway):
Name
Size (city/town/village)
Product (apples, silk, sheep, etc.) or service (government, knowledge, trade hub, etc.)
Why a product or service? It helps establish how trade happens, gives the town a reputation for the group to hear, gives you a hook from which to improvise NPCs from there, and so on.
It's not that he replaced it, it's that he built on it. The Reverse Three Clue Rule used in his node-based design articles ("if the players have at least three clues, they'll draw at least one conclusion") is a corollary, not a refutation of his previous advice.
The main way it's changed since he wrote this article (and since he wrote his Node-Based Design series, for that matter) is that he distinguishes between clues and leads, which he didn't at the time.
@Atlas48 First off, know from the outset whether you want to run a genuine mystery scenario, with an actual truth under the hood where the point is to overcome the challenge of finding that truth, or engage in mystery-*shaped* storytelling where the goal is to end up with a tale that resembles a mystery from the outside while not actually taxing the players' brains. Advice varies wildly depending on which you're doing.
@subtext
Rod of Tattoos: As an attack, you can point this rod at someone within 30' and imagine a still image on an exposed patch of that person's skin. This will cause the desired image to appear on the person's skin for 1 minute.
If you maintain concentration on the effect for the full minute, without the rod leaving your grasp and without you or the subject leaving range of each other, the image becomes permanent, unless removed by Remove Curse.
The rod functions up to three times per day.
@subtext What degree and kind of silliness are you looking for? Merely not useful to adventurers, embarrassing in some way, implausible that they'd even exist...?
@superkret @andrew0 An emotional distance from those still mortal, especially those who are going to die soon — even those whose fate they could change through simple measures.
@Shkshkshk @grasshopper_mouse As far as my own media childhood goes:
Play some of Square/Squaresoft's various JRPGs from before the Square Enix merger.
Watch some awesome cartoons that got tragically cancelled before they could finish. (ABC's "SatAM" Sonic the Hedgehog, Pirates of Dark Water... technically Thundercats 2011 is too late for my childhood, but it's the same idea).
That'll give you a good summary.
@Rhaxapopouetl That doesn't really seem compatible with "roll to see if your theory is correct at the end"...