A Question Of Agency?

[hawkeyefan]

I think what's most difficult is tying it to the here and now. A mystery on its own is not what I would consider a playable scenario. There need to be real stakes and real decisions to be made by the players. It should not just be about figuring out what already happened. It should be input in how things are about to happen.

That's fair, too! Looking at the Star Trek game, that was something missing as well. The entire game was for us as the crew of a starship to solve this mystery and then once we did, it was over.

There was nothing compelling us to find this out before X happens, or anything like that. In isolation like that, it really fell flat for me.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Its really just a mind map and some point form notes. I just already knew I needed faces, places, movement, and physical clues. Once you start I find new ideas tend to pop up as an organic part of the process.

How I do things in terms of diagrams and models for prep is sometimes I will map out the events that happened and draw lines to obvious clues stemming from those events. Obviously this usually tie to locations, so then I transfer those clues to location entries (but having that map is important I find for tracking all the facts about the mystery while you are preparing other material: that way you don't insert a contradictory clue in an NPC entry or something)

 

[hawkeyefan]

The sticking point for me is whether I am actually solving the mystery or not. I think for there to be a real mystery, with real clues, to solve as a game or puzzle, you need to have those concrete details hammered out first. What happens in the course of play, this does not need to be hammered out first. Who did it, where, when, why, etc. all that is the stuff that needs to be detailed by the GM before the game for this kind of mystery to solved. So it isn't just about challenge. You can challenge me with a more amorphous mystery and tough foes. But the challenge I want is to pit my brain against a scenario where an objective crime or situation has occurred, and I have to solve it. I do think there will always be gray areas (for example the GM may realize something naturally would have happened, that he hadn't thought of before, due to players investigating and questioning certain things). But anything the Gm makes up on the fly needs to honor the backstory that was established and the clues that came from that backstory, for it to be the kind of play I am describing.

Okay, gotcha. The area at the end is kind of what I was asking about. If I was to try and play a scenario like this and tailor it so that it suited my preferences as a GM, I'd probably only loosely establish the details. I think you need to have some in place for sure....the victim or equivalent, and the perpetrator. Any obvious details found on the scene like the murder weapon or the like.

Beyond that kind of stuff, I think I'd mostly prefer to leave the rest of it open, and allow the players to determine the angles of investigation, and then I'd likely try to have clues emerge accordingly. I think that might work and deliver something closer to how I prefer to GM. It actually reminds me of a Blades campaign I ran, which I think I'll post about to see what people think, as it's related to this in some ways.

I get it may not be your cup of tea. I get you may get frustrated if you don't solve the mystery. Plenty of us have engaged this style and been perfectly satisfied (and can accept some mysteries will be easier and some will be harder). Again, if it isn't your style that is fine. But this style of play is far from impossible to pull of or to enjoy.

Yeah, I get it. Honestly, you don't need to continually defend this.....it's totally my preference, and I think I've been pretty clear about that. There's nothing wrong with this style of play, all of my comments are filtered through my perceptions and my preferences, and those are no more valid than anyone else's.

I'd honestly prefer to hear examples from your game that show how this can be engaging. Like an example of one that went well, or how you approach it (which you just shared a little of in response to Fenris).

 

[hawkeyefan]

So I have an example that kind of touches on some of these ideas.

I ran a campaign of Blades in the Dark where investigation was a key component. It was actually a campaign using the playtest for playing the game as the Bluecoats of the Watch, the police of the setting. There are some mechanical changes to the game to facilitate this, but more importantly, the approach has to be very different.

The key difference, I think, is that a crew of scoundrels tends to be challenging the system, fighting against the powers that be to take what they want, but a crew of Bluecoats is a part of the system, and they are working toward resolving some disruption to the system.

When we decided to give this a try, an idea occurred to me to have this campaign be investigating the same players crew from our first Blades Campaign. So they would be playing the task force of police that was assigned to deal with the rise of their gang from our earlier campaign. I was thinking about how to do this, and I decided against it. But then, in our session zero, the players all seemed to have that same idea....they all wanted to be taking on their earlier crew. So we decided to do it.

I was worried that it would not go well because Blades as a system kind of expects many details to not be set ahead of time, and in this case many would be.

The challenges were:

(1) how to play out an investigation when the players already know a lot of the details of the situation; how do you play to find out if everybody already pretty much knows?
(2) how to handle gap between what the players know and what the characters should know; the Bluecoat PCs would have resources at their disposal, but the criminal former PCs aren't exactly household names in the setting. They were very careful about being unknown.
(3) how to not feel like we're just working our way through things we already know like a checklist; I didn't want this to just be a kind of gimmick sightseeing tour type of game- just seeing the previous campaign's locations and characters from another perspective. That was an interesting angle, but I didn't want that to be all the game was.

How I addressed each of these was:

(1) There are always greater forces at work in Doskvol, and so I took some of the unanswered questions from our initial campaign, and made them relevant to what was actually going on. So the investigation didn't focus on "who" the criminal crew was or "how" they rose to power, because that was what our earlier campaign was about. It became more about "why".
(2) I didn't hold most of the "known" elements back; the cohorts and former PCs were mostly established on a kind of suspect board, like you'd see in a cop show. The players knew who they were, or at least had a good idea, and we quickly filled in many of the blanks to bring the PCs up to speed on the basics. This also kind of retroactively added to the histories and characterization of the former PCs, which was an interesting byproduct. We found out more about the old PCs as the new PCs investigated them. For instance, the Lurk from the original crew had been an orphan and lived in an orphanage and that's where he learned his thieving skills. That kind of thing.
(3) I think opening the investigation up to the idea of there being a larger conspiracy or situation at play as mentioned in (1) really helped in this regard. What more was going on? What was behind this crew's rise beyond their own ambition? Those became the true unknowns, even to me as the GM, and that's what let us play to find out.

I think that this campaign wound up going very well, overall. There were certainly a few rough spots as we kind of dealt with, or learned to deal with, the challenges unique to the approach we were taking. Things certainly got better as we went along and realized the challenge points and could kind of work around them or otherwise deal with them.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't think this is a fair assessment of clue. It approximates the feel of a mystery by providing a game, if I recall correctly, based largely on the process of elimination. There is still some mental challenge there, and its simplicity is its appeal. Like I said, there were much deeper bookshelf mystery games made in the 70s (I have an aunt with shelves of them) and they were often better at getting at the sort of mystery solving game I am talking about. But that doesn't make clue a bad game or a bad mystery game. Clue is perennially popular I think because it is a very easy, fast, and fun way to do mystery but with broad appeal.

Clue is exactly nothing but a 'process of elimination' game, but it has no clues in it. That is the 'clues' are simply 3 variables which can each take on one of several values (location, weapon, perpetrator). Each player simply guesses different combinations until they have eliminated all but the correct answer. There is a modicum of skill which consists of noting the various guesses. Careful tracking of eliminations can get you to the answer in the least amount of time, but there is one fairly obvious optimum strategy. Most germane to the current discussion there is no 'fiction' involved (at least which matters). Nobody is questioned, no clues are actually gathered, and nothing either mechanically or fictionally justifies one's guesses, nor explains fictionally the mechanism of eliminating the different solutions, cards are simply revealed to do that. The point being, it isn't possible (except by bad record keeping) to be mislead or 'miss a clue', etc. So the game has nothing to teach us about RPG mysteries.

I guess you could say that, to the degree that Clue serves to provide the feel of a mystery, then you could model an RPG mystery process on it. This may suffice for whomever is not particularly interested in really 'playing detective' and simply wants to run around to different locations making vaguely 'crime solution-like statements' and having the fun of eventually being right. Dressed up well, this may in fact be quite sufficient in many cases, and is probably better than a more straightforward process which ends with the players totally stumped and unable to move forward.

So, I kind of agree with you, Clue does provide a model. Just don't be fooled into thinking it is a model of actually solving a mystery!

 

[Lanefan]

Yeah, I invented it, it is in a huge dungeon that is 'explained' as "Ancient ruined dwarf city that various squatters have hacked on." I guess one was a particularly sadistic evil wizard... I don't recall an inspiration from other material for this part. I also don't tend to read a lot of modules/dungeons since I like making up my own stuff, so I am not sure where I would have gotten an idea for it. Anyway, it was definitely something I invented before about 1994, since it was part of at least one 2e campaign I ran with people I lived with back then.

OK, cool. What I met was much more recent - maybe in the 2010-2012 range.

I've got tons of modules as I like mining them for ideas (or sometimes running them stock, if they fit what I'm doing, to save me some work), and I don't recall seeing this idea anywhere. That said, there were also gobs of modules and mini-modules in Dungeon magazine, which I largely avoided, thus I easily could have missed it there.

I also doubt anyone copied it from me. A bunch of people have had the pleasure of stumbling into that maze, but I don't think any of them have gone to the trouble of publishing any RPG material, nor writing about it, etc. There is one person on EnWorld that was in the 4e campaign where it featured, though I don't think she's very active these days.

So you invented it for 2e and then ran it back for 4e? Nice!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

If that is the case and if I understand then this is definitely different than the example I provided of the witnesses on the street. In that case the players are simply going to place the GM didn't expect (to peoples houses on the street) and asking if anyone saw anything. The GM thinking about this, decides yes there was a gunshot in the street, certainly it is plausible someone who lived on the street saw the event or saw the suspect fleeing. What information that person might have the GM either decides or rolls based on some sense of the likelihood. But nothing about the event they witnessed is changed by this, and nothing really is changed. The GM is brining enabling their exploration of the mystery by going beyond the notes for it, but being true to the backstory and events that transpired.

Yeah, I think that would be a quite viable way to go, and if feels both realistic and sensible. This doesn't seem like it needs any kind of narrative play really, just the basic ability of the GM to extrapolate a known fact to its subsidiary consequences. In the case of things like 'magic' this might get more tricky of course...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

One of the main complaints about node based design is that it's a recipe for a railroad (to quote @pemerton from upstream). To an extent that's a fair criticism too. One the other hand, if you're talking about a mystery or a conspiracy there are, by their very nature, going to be a finite number of clues, a finite number of things to find out. Where node based design goes off the rails for me is to tie clue X specifically to location A. Sure, there's the three clue rule too, but that doesn't cover locations that aren't on the concept map. So I make room in my game for off piste players by using clue tables that I can roll on for all those unexpected player moves, and those clues tend to index the core nexus points of the mystery and are only partially defined, so the same result could be rolled a couple of times to produce and still work - identical basic content but set dressing improvised based on the the fiction. The use of tables also saves me from charges of illusionism and forces me to be more honest in adjudication.

POTENTIALLY another way to do it, and maybe this is another way of saying the same thing, is to have 'meta-clues' which are simply clues which steer play back to the really direct clues. So, if you miss the murder weapon at the scene somehow, then forensics tells you later what to go look for. If some handwriting would clue you in, then some NPC analyzes it and lets you know it was significant if you missed it somehow, etc. These meta-clues are not guaranteed to be uncovered either, you still have to do legwork, but they would tend to 'fail safe' the solving of the core mystery to an extent. These might be generated on the fly too by a GM. This would make the core mystery a definite 'fact' established at the start (it was Mustard in the Library with the Pipe Wrench) but you get another chance to 'pick up the ball'. This might even work with something like the 4e SC framework, where the number of times a save like this is brought into play is related to mechanical progress in the challenge. You could probably work out something close to FitD's clock methodology as well.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Clue is exactly nothing but a 'process of elimination' game, but it has no clues in it. That is the 'clues' are simply 3 variables which can each take on one of several values (location, weapon, perpetrator). Each player simply guesses different combinations until they have eliminated all but the correct answer. There is a modicum of skill which consists of noting the various guesses. Careful tracking of eliminations can get you to the answer in the least amount of time, but there is one fairly obvious optimum strategy. Most germane to the current discussion there is no 'fiction' involved (at least which matters). Nobody is questioned, no clues are actually gathered, and nothing either mechanically or fictionally justifies one's guesses, nor explains fictionally the mechanism of eliminating the different solutions, cards are simply revealed to do that. The point being, it isn't possible (except by bad record keeping) to be mislead or 'miss a clue', etc. So the game has nothing to teach us about RPG mysteries.

I guess you could say that, to the degree that Clue serves to provide the feel of a mystery, then you could model an RPG mystery process on it. This may suffice for whomever is not particularly interested in really 'playing detective' and simply wants to run around to different locations making vaguely 'crime solution-like statements' and having the fun of eventually being right. Dressed up well, this may in fact be quite sufficient in many cases, and is probably better than a more straightforward process which ends with the players totally stumped and unable to move forward.

So, I kind of agree with you, Clue does provide a model. Just don't be fooled into thinking it is a model of actually solving a mystery!

I wasn't saying it would work as a resolution or model for mystery in RPGs. I was just saying it is a fun game and people like it. And it is very simple: emulating the feel of mystery through the process of elimination (which has a certain Holmes-like quality to it). The kind of mysteries I am talking about in RPGs are much more about clue finding and analyzing. And for that there were plenty of in-depth bookshelf games that are fine alternatives to clue. My point is: simple fun board games are often popular precisely because they are not as in-depth---and that gives them broader appeal. To take that into RPG territory, I think what I am advocating for, and what you are advocating for, are both highly specialized modes of play. We could both highly please two narrow audiences if we made games doing exactly what we are talking about. But a mystery game that wants the whole hobby as its audience is going to have to be less specialized, and be able to appeal not just to you and me, but other people as well. So if WOTC did a 5E mystery version of D&D (and for all I know they have done it and I missed it), I would expect it to only to include sprinklings of what I am talking about.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

OK, cool. What I met was much more recent - maybe in the 2010-2012 range.

I've got tons of modules as I like mining them for ideas (or sometimes running them stock, if they fit what I'm doing, to save me some work), and I don't recall seeing this idea anywhere. That said, there were also gobs of modules and mini-modules in Dungeon magazine, which I largely avoided, thus I easily could have missed it there.

So you invented it for 2e and then ran it back for 4e? Nice!

Yeah, I do tend to revisit a lot of stuff in D&D campaigns, since we created a stupid amount of material back in the day. Also, I'm just a rat bastard when it comes to torturing players, and that was such an especially effective little gimmick. The Gelatinous Cubes cycling around the maze make it even more amusing (and explain how it all stays nice and clean of course).