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Message: <blockquote data-quote="prabe" data-source="post: 8170900" data-attributes="member: 7016699">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.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.</blockquote>