Cool. And this struck me as really nice. The Wire campaign. Let's say you were going to prep that with your players. Care to share some thoughts on the nuts and bolts of what you'd do.
Good question. Not sure I have a great answer because I haven't actually run a campaign like that, but a few thoughts:
(1) I'm not sure the "here's a list of cases for you to choose from" is actually a great way to prep for a campaign because the format is pretty much guaranteed to waste prep (whatever cases they don't pursue).
But it might work well for a play-by-post game where all the PCs are acting independently. People can claim an available case from the list of cases. Dynamics to explore:
- If a case has been hanging around too long, your supervisor is going to assign it to someone randomly. We need to get the board black.
- I'd probably randomize the arrival of new cases.
- Figuring out some way of encouraging people to cooperate on cases would be useful. (This might be a mechanical issue: If a single character is unlikely to have all the investigatory skills they need, then they'll need to seek out other PCs with expertise to help them.) Having supervisors force partnerships onto cases which have been lagging would also be an option.
- I'd definitely play into the competitive aspect of the case board. Who's solved the most cases? Give some social competition incentive for people to stay engaged with the game.
You could use similar techniques in a face-to-face game if you have a large group of players and only some of the players are present at each session. (Like a West Marches campaign, except you pick a case you want to investigate when you schedule the session.)
(2) I'd want to develop the equivalent of random encounter tables for generating cases. Not as the be-all and end-all of case design, but as a conceptual stirrer and improv tool. Things like: "type of clue", a list of character types to generate victims and suspects, etc.
(3) While keeping a fair seeding of "random encounter" cases (random homicides, etc.), I'd also design 3-4 different but interconnected criminal cartels and maybe a serial killer and then spike the active cases with various crimes that will hook the PCs into the current schemes of these cartels. Look at
Don't Prep Plots and
Node-Based Scenario Design for ways to structure this type of design.
Link the cartels to city hall; the teamsters; a local congressman; a major corporation; etc.
(4) Don't forget the departmental politics. I'm not entirely sure how I'd structure this prep, but at the very least you'd want 4-6 interesting NPCs with competitive goals to serve as grist for the mill. Promotions and demotions should be part of the dynamic for the PCs.
And that's pretty much it. I'm guessing it would take 25-30 pages of prep to get started and then you could expand from there. (5 pages for the campaign structure + player briefing; 1 page outline for each of the conspiracies; 2-3 pages for each of 6 starting cases; some other miscellaneous notes.)
If I was trying to prep a campaign like this for a single group of characters, I'd want two things:
(1) A system for creating case content on the fly. Even keeping my case prep to 1-2 page outlines, I still wouldn't want to waste 50-75% of my prep time on cases the PCs don't pursue. I'd be looking for an improv structure that would feed me answers to questions like, "What type of clue is it?" A document. "Where does it lead?" A new location. "What location?" Abandoned warehouse.
(2) A system for allowing NPCs to clear some of the case backlog the PCs aren't interested in. (But having superior officers lean on them to take cases they don't want would still be part and parcel of the setting.)
