A game of Trail of Cthulhu over the weekend got me thinking again about the Gumshoe system from Pelgrane Press. This isn't going to be a review as much as it will be a discussion of play experiences and general thoughts about the game. I went over the reasons why I thought that the Gumshoe system was a good system in my previous piece about the game, but I will likely go over some of the same ground again in this piece.
We have a group of local friends who meet once a month, or so, for one shots (or couple of shots) to try out various games and styles of play. Over the last few months we've played from Call of Cthulhu to Fate Accelerated to Shadowrun 5E to this Trail of Cthulhu game. The casual approach is nice because we don't have to worry about who will show up from month to month, and we get to play a lot of different games that we might not otherwise get to play. The nice thing is that we have a pretty strong group of GMs within the group, with varied interests, who really can make our casual approach sing.
The GM this weekend, for Trail of Cthulhu, was Geoffrey, and he's a really good GM who has run a couple of games in the past, so I was looking forward to seeing what he did with this. I have played a lot of Call of Cthulhu over the years. A lot. Because of this I had skipped over the Trail of Cthulhu, because I have always identified Lovecraftian role-playing with BRP (the Basic Role-Playing system from Chaosium). That isn't the case anymore.
As I mentioned in my previous column, one of the things that has attracted me to Gumshoe is how it handles skills. Nothing really kills a game session for me, as a player or a GM, as much as time wasted because players have to roll again and again against their character's skills in order to do something important that advances the story. One of the central concepts of the Gumshoe rules are what is called Investigative Abilities. These abilities are what allow the characters to find out information about what is going on around them. If your character has the right investigative ability for the situation at hand, they are able to get the clue or the information for the task at hand.
Now, this doesn't mean that the GM just rattles everything off and allows the characters to go on to the next point in the story without any sort of conflict. Having the information and knowing what to do with that information are two different things. Once the clues are revealed it is the General Abilities of the character that allow the players to try to figure out what to do next. Gumshoe uses a simple d6 roll (against a base difficulty of 4) to determine success. You can "spend" points from the ratings of the character's general abilities to modify these rolls (the points being refreshed according to the type of game that you are playing).
Now, a couple of things. This isn't some sort of "instant win" or "just feed the players information" kind of system. If the investigative abilities of the characters aren't useful to the investigation at hand, then your group is going to have a hard time picking up clues because their knowledge just isn't relevant to the situation at hand. For example, if you have a group of librarians in an investigation in a military compound they might end up having a more difficult time finding clues than a group of military investigators.
The other thing is that you still have to figure out what to do with the clues. It is possible, through a bad die roll on a general ability, for your characters to go off in the wrong direction. It is also possible for the players to willfully go in a direction that has nothing to do with the clues, something players are often all too willing to do.
Getting back to our play, we played The Murderer of Thomas Fell, a Free RPG Day adventure that is also available as a free PDF on the Pelgrane Press website. I won't go into too much detail about the adventure itself, because the details can be a massive spoiler as to the identity of the murderer of the title, and that can impact people who haven't yet played the adventure. I will say this: The Murderer of Thomas Fell is probably one of the most brutal Lovecraftian adventures that I have ever played. It is also insidious in a psychological manner, like the horror stories of writers like Kathe Koja or Caitlin R. Kiernan. If you are a fan of any of those writers you will enjoy this adventure. Horror role-playing tends to be more of an emotional wringer than traditional fantasy, so we're calibrated for a different kind of enjoy than a lot of other gamers.
Geoffrey, our GM, did a good job of dispensing the information that our characters needed to keep things rolling. Being that it was a one shot adventure, with pre-generated characters, that meant that we had a good spread of investigative abilities between the characters to keep thing rolling. The reveals hooked our characters and kept them pushing towards the inventible reveal of who Thomas Fell's murderer was.
In some ways, playing Gumshoe is like playing a Fate game. In a Fate game you get the most benefit from the system when you actively engage the system, spending Fate Points and taking actions that cause you to regain them. In a Gumshoe game it helps to do the same thing, use the spends of your character's investigative and general abilities to get your character through tough situations (particularly in a one shot!). Too often gamers get into the mindset that resources like these should be hoarded "just in case" you might need them later. More often than not that "later" will end up being too late.
Points in Scuffling, Weapons and Firearms are particularly helpful to your characters. With a single d6 roll, chances of success are decent but it is really good to have a couple of extra points to put into an important roll. Our characters were battered and bruised by the end of the evening but using the points in our combat-oriented general abilities got all of us to the end of the adventure relatively physically intact.
Mentally intact was a different matter. This is where the Stability rules for Trail of Cthulhu came into play. Despite having Sanity rules patterned after those in Call of Cthulhu, it was the Stability rules that we interacted with the most. Stability is what allows the characters to resist shock or stressful situations, and encountering Lovecraftian nastiness can be very stressful indeed. Our group was pretty lucky, in that we were able to avoid a lot of the stress through successful Stability rolls. Until, of course, we didn't. Even your character's Stability rating can be used as a spend, but who would purposefully lower their Stability to fend off stresses?
While the Gumshoe system was created by Robin Laws, the ideas of Trail of Cthulhu are something that could only have filtered through the mind of designer Ken Hite. Few other designers are capable of that mélange of Lovecraftian horror and conspiratorial weirdness that Hite can bring to a role-playing game. The genre of Lovecraftian horror in role-playing games is defined by Call of Cthulhu, and it isn't often that a defining game can be outdone, but Hite's Trail of Cthulhu manages to do that. With Trail of Cthulhu Ken Hite redefines how people can play role-playing games with Lovecraftian themes.
Now if you want a Gumshoe game that is a little less intensive than the horror stuff being produced by Pelgrane Press, I suggest checking into Evil Hat Production's game of teen-aged sleuths Bubblegumshoe. If you're into television shows like Veronica Mars or books like The Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew, then this might be the less stressful game for you. Bubblegumshoe is also a lot less granular and lethal than another Gumshoe game, like Trail of Cthulhu. The game also adds the concept of relationships to the rules. The relationships in Bubblegumshoe, much like how aspects can sometimes work in the Fate rules, tie your characters to supporting characters and, to a lesser extent, to the greater world of the setting. Bubblegumshoe is an interesting twist on the Gumshoe rules, and shows how well they can be adapted to other types of investigative genres.
There is also an SRD of the rules that is available, but they are meant more for rules development than actual play.
Our group enjoyed playing the Gumshoe rules in Trail of Cthulhu and have talked about moving on to Night's Black Agents at some point before the end of the year. Another of Hite's games using the system. This game deals with vampires and espionage, one of those peanut butter/chocolate combinations that sounds great together.
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