I think the analogue in a RPG of "beating the detective" is figuring it out before the GM reveals it in a way that counts as a loss for the PCs (and so for the players too).It's a tricky line to walk (but I'm sure you and your players enjoyed it): The pleasures of ratiocination mysteries (IMO) are either you beat the detective to the solution, or you follow the detective's thoughts as they explain the solution; the former seems difficult without some sort of clock, and the latter doesn't seem tenable to me in a TRPG.
That's probably about right. I don't know that an actual clock is necessary--the sense of diminishing time before something goes bad might work well enough. Certainly the other (lesser?) pleasure of the genre--following along with the detective as they solve the mystery--is not going to translate to TRPG play.I think the analogue in a RPG of "beating the detective" is figuring it out before the GM reveals it in a way that counts as a loss for the PCs (and so for the players too).
Yeah. The PCs in my mystery had received a trustworthy divination that told them the merchant wasn't a murderer, so they knew it was someone else. The witness-type evidence they developed worked out well--as I think you are saying would be likely. I can see how maybe some physical-type evidence could be made to work in play, if you have players who can make the leaps (the head is bashed in, but there's no blood spatter, so it was done with one blow, so the killer is really (plausibly superhumanly) strong), and using something like Insight/Sense Motive to see if someone is lying seems to make sense; but I agree there are kinds of detective-type activity that are hard to make go as part of play, and letting skill checks take care of the inferences seems more likely than not to lead to the players being in "watch the detective figure it out" mode.I don't think my kidnapping mystery would have slowed down Poirot for very long! I also think it's hard to do physical evidence or personality/behaviour-type evidence in a RPG because that has to be conveyed via the spoken word which tends to foreground the stuff that the detective should be inferring.
Mysteries can be tough.
About a year ago, my group played some of Modiphius’s Star Trek Adventures. A buddy of mine is a big Trek fan and wanted to run it, and despite nit being a big Trek fan myself, I’m always happy to take a break from the GM seat and play a bit.
I bounced off of this game in almost every way possible. Some of the mechanics were pretty interesting, and they have a kind of lifepath character generation method that’s cool, but everything else felt very predetermined.
This was not helped by one of the scenarios that he ran us through. It’s a published one, but I couldn’t say in what product. It’s a mystery. There’s been what appears to have been an accident with some experiment, and some scientists are dead. The goal of the scenario is to piece together bits of info to try and get to the actual truth.
It basically became a case of the PCs asking questions of different NPCs and some answers were gated behind rolls. So it’s just a slow crawl to ultimately solving the mystery.
It was brutal.
I don’t think it was just the scenario. The GM who ran it is a very by the book kind of GM. He’s run countless hours of public games at a game store for a wide variety of players. I think this has conditioned him to always stick with prewritten adventures. So that was part of it too. Plus, my kind of chafing at the Star Trek constraints, which is my own thing.
Before playing that game, I already tended to avoid games or scenarios that involve that kind of “whodunnit” mystery. That game pretty much convinced me to never mess with it again. I’m sure it can be done, but for me it’s a risk/reward thing.
@hawkeyefan That's kinda a worst-cast scenario, and one of the failure-states I was trying to avoid. Even though the mystery-adjacent scenario I ran worked out pretty well, I'm still leery of them in general.
Of course, I also have never been able to make sense of any published adventures, so I don't run them.
I knew what was going on and who was doing it and why, and I knew (at least mostly) how they were going about it. I didn't know how the PCs were going to approach the situation, and I didn't know how they'd handle things--and it was at least in principle possible that they'd be able to demonstrate the merchant was innocent without digging up and triggering the larger problem.So from a GMing perspective, my takeaway is two things. First, if I already know everything that's going to happen in play, then I've erred. There needs to be things that are and can only be determined by the players at the time of play. I've very much embraced the "play to find out" mindset for the GM.
As I said, I kinda ad-libbed myself into running that mystery. The merchant hired the party to escort him to the dwarven stronghold, and I ended up needing reason/s for him to be persona non grata there. I didn't think the PCs would continue with the job if he was guilty, so he wasn't. So, if he wasn't guilty, something else needed to be going on, and that something else was what the party ended up finding as they were solving what looked like a whodunit.Second, why run this kind of scenario given how risky it would be to devolve into a railroad, when even if I manage it perfectly, it'll likely be as well received as any other scenario? And I'm certainly not averse to investigation based scenarios.....but the "whodunnit" style just requires so much predetermination by the GM that I don't see the reward being worth the risk. The juice isn't worth the squeeze.
That sounds true for detective fiction, but I'm not sure it's true for mysteries in RPGs. Personally, I think the main draw is straight up the joy of finding things out. Plus a side order of feeling clever.
I agree with the post, overall, but I think "if you know what you are trying to do with it" includes--at least--knowing what the players want to get out of it, and having a pretty good sense of how challenging to make it to give them the level of challenge they want (which means knowing how good they are at figuring out stuff). I'm pretty sure you meant that--it seems to be in the subtext of your post--but in this instance making the implicit explicit hurts no one, IMO.This is an adventure structure I have used a lot, and done well, if you know what you are trying to do with it, it works great.