LostSoul said:
I don't think the follow-the-clues mystery adventure is all that great. If your players miss a clue, or if they have to do something in order to keep playing the adventure, your game could bog down.
It's important to have multiple avenues, I think, that can lead to revelation. If one clue gets missed, there are alternatives.
I ran a one-shot a while back that was effectively a detective case - find out what's going on in the city, and put a stop to it. The problem was that the PCs were cartoony and bloodthirsty (at one point, two of the players stopped mid-sentence, looked at each other, and both erased the 'CN' on their sheets to write 'CE') - which was a lot of fun, but also meant that some of the important clues got lost when the NPCs who might be able to answer questions were brutally slaughtered.
In a couple of cases, a semi-allied necromancer was able to get some answers out of the bodies. But the wrap-up - where the PCs intercepted agents of the BBEG who'd come to collect some bodies and return to his Secret Lair - was severely endangered when those agents were (you guessed it) brutally slaughtered... making it harder to follow them back to the secret lair.
I had a backup plan - a little kid whose house overlooked the graveyard, and who'd seen them making these pickups before, and knew where the cart went afterwards. Unfortunately, the PCs thought the kid was spying on them, and before he could pass on this information, he was (yup) brutally slaughtered.
On the fly, I figured that the ponies pulling the cart had made this round trip so many times that they knew the way, and started to head back to the Secret Lair all by themselves... fortunately, the PCs realised this was their chance, and the ponies survived long enough to get the PCs to the climactic encounter...
-Hyp.
