Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5554668" data-attributes="member: 54877">No, the limit of 7, for the style Jeff was advocating, was based on the idea that the average person can't keep in their head at once more than 7 parts of a whole. So if you want to play a style where every clue is practically crucial, then your reasonable limit is 7. You will then need to back away from that limit, because of the various problems already discussed -- multiple sessions, misunderstandings between DM and players, etc. At its most extreme, if you really wanted to run that style and wanted 7 clues--then you would probably need to put all 7 clues in one place, have them found and acted upon immediately. Perhaps there is a large chamber with a few exits from which to choose, and all 7 clues are in the chamber.  In contrast, what I was advocating was another style altogether, where clues are found over time--maybe many months of real time. I once successfully ran a mystery of this nature where the last relevant clue was found over a calender year after the first such clue, and the solution was not discovered over 18 months after the mystery was first engaged. (Obviously, this was not the only story arc going. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />) Once you decide to run that style, however, all of those issues with numbers of clues and possibly confusing circumstances do not merely disappear. So you use lots of clues and make none of them crucial. In that long mystery story arc, there were somewhere around 25-30 clues. The party determined the answer with only 5-7 of those clues. (I don't remember exactly.) They didn't even know there was a mystery to solve until they had the first couple of clues. Well, they didn't know anything about that particular mystery. They know that any given time, there are clues lying around to several mysteries, which they can pursue if it interests them. They find something odd, they file it away in their notes until it fits with something else later. Part of the fun is deciding which clues go with which mysteries. <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=";)" /> Not that I'm a purist about this.  Once they get on the hunt of a particular mystery, they start working hard to unbury more clues.  They more they get, the more they know where they want to look next.  At some point, they get the clue that lets them intuit the answer.  They then only need a bit more information to make it all fall into place, via deduction, roleplaying, or more direct means. From their perspective, a clue or two is crucial.  But they could just have easily pursued the solution in several other ways, some that don't even come out.</blockquote>

Verification