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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pauper" data-source="post: 7462613" data-attributes="member: 17607">Well, I said I disagreed with you slightly. (I even put the italics in the original post.) To me, that means I agree with you on most stuff. But this...True -- I was the one who said it wasn't an insurmountable problem.But based on iserith's comment, it's reasonable that if you're saying "be careful" to a new DM, you're basically discouraging that DM from trying out the mechanic. To me, even a new DM should be able to work through any issues using the mechanic as we're describing, which is, again, why I say it's not an "insurmountable problem". Not to claim that you said it was, but simply to point out that it's not as thorny as, say, trying to incorporate a romantic sub-plot between a PC and NPC. *That's* something I'd never suggest a newbie DM try to pull off without a good deal of player buy-in, and particularly not in D&D, where the mechanics are entirely orthagonal to that sort of sub-plot. (Blue Rose, on the other hand...)I can't speak for the original poster, but my experience is that, if I'm running a series of investigation scenes, there's not a whole lot of combat going on. And unless the investigation is "finding the entrance to the dungeon", there's not going to be a whole series of challenging combats immediately following the investigation -- there may be a big fight with the evil cult, but either that fight will end that part of the adventure, or the head cultist will escape and the party can rest up (recharging their abilities) before going after him. Your mileage may vary, of course, and the point is well taken.Well, the original example involved how much information to give based on the use of Detect Magic; I only pointed out the GUMSHOE connection because, though D&D doesn't use its skill system to create an 'investigative pool', you can get much the same effect from spell use -- spell slots are a limited resource that, applied in the right way and at the right moment can grant additional insight into investigation scenes.You could use the D&D skill proficiency system the same way GUMSHOE uses actually possessing an Investigation skill; if you're proficient, then you automatically get all the relevant information to the investigation you're pursuing. But D&D doesn't have the 'pool' aspect of GUMSHOE to help route around the problem of having information and not really knowing what to do with it. In your own game, you could kit-bash a skill pool system to graft onto the D&D skill system, but that doesn't help if you're running an Adventurers League game, for instance.I'm not saying DMs have to do this; it just seems worth exploring for DMs who find running investigation scenes challenging in the core D&D system.--Pauper</blockquote>

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