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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5550961" data-attributes="member: 54877">Note that you are discussing from a totally different set of assumption than some of us were advocating.  What you say is fine if you want the patina of a mystery, but it is not a major focus of the adventure.  This is especially true if the players don't much like mystery solving.  Finally, it assumes that the players will need all or most of the clues (however many there are), if they are to solve the mystery.  If that is true, then your absolute maximum is seven clues, and you'll need to provide some of them in the same place.  And you'll need to be very concious of "unity of time and place" in the context of the adventure, so that the clues are all gathered at roughly the same time.  Limiting yourself to three is not a bad rule of thumb, in that environment. But if you want an actual mystery, as a major focus, possibly over more than one adventure, you have to accept that clues will be found over time.  Players will forget/misinterpret.  They will miss some (or you'll have to ham-handedly give them the missed ones, which has its own problems).  And this is all magnified if your players like mysteries.  So in that environment, you accept those as the parameters and work with it.  One of the most important things you can do is immediately drop any conceit that every clue matters--or even that any particular clue conclusively matters.  Making the mystery hard but the clues plentiful firmly breaks this conceit. Because games don't work like mystery novels.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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