I hate mysteries

[roguerouge]

Or you could hire a tracker?

That is funny, Cadfan, and I gave you XP, but my more serious complaint is against the Track feat itself. It's supposed to be like this signature ability for the class and it is ALWAYS superfluous. If it's going to be like that, I fail to see why we need it as a feat or featured class ability at all.

And, you'll note, that my actual adventure gives multiple ways of getting to the same source, as have my posts. But multiple ways, to my mind, should not be the same thing as overlapping ways. You should not be able to track if you don't actually have the ability to track. Maybe you get there based on gather information, based on divination spells, based on a clever ruse, or based on beating it out of someone. But you should not make a signature ability of a class routinely superfluous.

 

[Cadfan]

And, you'll note, that my actual adventure gives multiple ways of getting to the same source, as have my posts. But multiple ways, to my mind, should not be the same thing as overlapping ways. You should not be able to track if you don't actually have the ability to track. Maybe you get there based on gather information, based on divination spells, based on a clever ruse, or based on beating it out of someone. But you should not make a signature ability of a class routinely superfluous.

In that case, you agree with the posts you've been disagreeing with.

The PCs in a mystery always get a clue. They never fail to get a clue because of a low skill roll. If they fail a skill roll that would have gotten them a clue, they find the clue in some other manner.

Look, this really boils down to a basic, fundamental issue of DMing, and for that matter, of this forum: The PCs are supposed to win. But the PCs aren't supposed to know that they're supposed to win. Or, at the least, they're supposed to be able to suspend their disbelief, and pretend that they don't know that they're supposed to win. Saying "The pcs always get the clue no matter the outcome of the skill checks" openly admits that the PCs are supposed to win. Hearing this stated out loud drives some people nuts. When they hear someone say this sort of thing, they write lengthy posts decrying it. Sometimes they're polite, like you've been, and sometimes they're completely jerks about it and start ranting about how REAL roleplayers are hardcore enough to risk failure, and how kids these days are all soft, and need to walk uphill to school both ways in the snow, etc, etc, etc. And if you talk to them for a while, eventually it becomes clear that they really do game exactly the way that everyone else games.

 

[Lacyon]

The PCs in a mystery always get a clue. They never fail to get a clue because of a low skill roll. If they fail a skill roll that would have gotten them a clue, they find the clue in some other manner.

I suspect this thread would have been much less amusing (and somewhat less antagonistic) if you'd included "or some other clue" as an explicit possibility.

 

[Silent Cartographer]

Finally, an adventure can feel--indeed, be--very investigative without relying on super sluethiness. Most James Bond films are investigative in nature, but Bond is hardly Sherlock Holmes. His plotlines are generally pretty linear, and the clues are usually obtained through instinct and daring with just a dash of hardcore investigation. The Bond movie is a pretty good model for investigative adventuring in general--you start with a mystery, and end with the satisfaction of solving a mystery, but go through at a pace that's satisfying at the gaming table. (The clue-leads-to-action-leads-to-clue-leads-to-action-etc. format makes for good gaming as well.)

My example isn't D&D, but fits the James Bond example to a "T". Shadowrun adventure scenarios almost universally follow this formula. I ran a very successful SR2-SR3 (with a SR4 epilog) over the course of several years, during which the players fine-tuned their characters to a well-oiled velvet fist operation. They started off learning the ropes of standard 'legwork' stuff, pumping NPC contacts, etc. They worked up through hard-core interrogation and brute force methods and eventually developed agent provocateur strategies; compelling others to act on their behalf through bribery, kidnapping, extortion, informing, etc. All the characters developed non-combat roles related to investigation, whether it was the usual faceman skills, or hacking, or an extensive (exhaustive) network of contacts and informants. Of course, they were all still combat monsters, too, lol.

That may be too much modern flavor for D&D, but toned downed a bit and mixed in with the usual D&D tropes can make for some effective James Bond style fantasy investigation adventuring. My main 3.0 campaign was a Greyhawk Slavers 'adventure path' run Shadowrun style; the party started in Dyvers and were hired by various employers, leading them to eventually working for secretly for Tenser as their ultimate Mr. Johnson.

 

[ExploderWizard]

In that case, you agree with the posts you've been disagreeing with.

The PCs in a mystery always get a clue. They never fail to get a clue because of a low skill roll. If they fail a skill roll that would have gotten them a clue, they find the clue in some other manner.

Look, this really boils down to a basic, fundamental issue of DMing, and for that matter, of this forum: The PCs are supposed to win. But the PCs aren't supposed to know that they're supposed to win. Or, at the least, they're supposed to be able to suspend their disbelief, and pretend that they don't know that they're supposed to win.

This last bit isn't true for me at all. The PC's should get opportunities to win but victory is by no means assured. A DM doesn't have to lead PC's to victory by the nose to keep a mystery from stalling out.

If a particular group of players gets constantly fed the solution to all of thier problems then the group will get lazy and will come to depend on being fed information like zoo animals which leads to the DM having to keep doing more of the same.

I rely less on character skills to figure out clues and more on player input, which is something that the players always have control over. A good die roll might make some clues easier to find but an engaged inquisitive player will be able to gain some insight.

Players that don't care about details can let thier success ride on a die roll.

Oh yeah, and we had to solve riddles while standing on our heads, uphill both ways, in the snow.

 

[Silent Cartographer]

Also, for fantasy action-investigation style D&D, I consider our own Pkitty a master of the form, so I always keep an eye on his storyhour/campaign commentaries threads!

 

[jdrakeh]

For instance, you'll say: "You need to find the contact at the casino in order to speak to the mobster. You arrive at the casino. What do you do?" And suddenly the only thing they can come up with is "Ummm...I talk to the first person I see...I ask them if they know the gangster."

Assuming that the casino in the game is similar to a real-world casino (i.e., an enclosed space packed with hundreds or thousands of people like sardines in a can) and that the only description of the contact the PCs have is the one given above, I have to wonder what 'correct' approach to the situation that you propose is. Armed with no lead other than the extremely vague "There's a contact in this crowd of several hundred people!" I'd argue that the PCs have no clear choice other than to randomly question strangers in an attempt to generate their own leads. That's not a player intellect issue — it's a great example of poor adventure design, though.

Obviously, you also have one appropriate course of action in mind, seemingly one very specific path that the PCs must pursue in order to advance the story. Anchoring story advancement to one, single, clue or avenue of investigation will only ensure that the story never advances if that clue is never uncovered or if they PCs do something different (as you seem to have discovered). It's a tried and true way to bork a mystery adventure right up and, likewise, a big red flag indicating a poorly designed adventure (in fact, it's probably the single most cited complaint with regard to poor mystery adventure design).

So, in the proposed scenario, the PCs aren't getting any useful leads and are expected to divine a single, acceptable, pre-determined course of investigation or clue in order to advance the story. I suspect that your players straying off to do unrelated things (like have drinks with people they meet at the casino) is more an indicator of boredom or frustration with a poorly designed adventure, than it is a sign of their low intellect or disinterest in mysteries. It's their way of saying "This mystery sucks and we no longer care about it!"

 

[Nebulous]

I'm in the process of revamping an old adventure called "Steaks" for 4e. In a nutshell, the original featured a restaurant selling steaks that sell like hotcakes. The PCs are hired to find out why. It's a really simple premise, but i always remember that as being the funnest adventure with a lot of mystery. The end sort of left it open in many ways for the DM to decide exactly what the good townspeople were eating that whole time. It does offer some suggestions of course.

 

[Michael Silverbane]

I ran a mystery just today (well, the second half of the mystery that started last week). Here's how it played out... There are (sort of) some spoilers for the first Dawn of Defiance module in here, though I am not running that module.



One of the characters owed money to a crime lord, so he went to make his payment. Simple and straightforward. No mystery there. I'm getting to it.

While the characters were having their meeting with the crime lord (I used the droid Switch, gaffled out of the Dawn of Defiance campaign), he asked for a favor, which would eat up some of the character's debt. A friend of his on another space station had been kidnapped. The crime lord wanted the friend extracted and brought back, so that an eye could be kept on him. This is the mystery. The characters need to discover the identity of the kidnapper and the whereabouts of the kidnappee, so that they can do their stuff.

During the meeting, Switch's rival Ganga Lor bursts in, demanding that Switch hand over his share of the bounty. As it turns out, the characters have a bounty on their heads, and Switch used this fact as a way to draw Ganga Lor out into an open conflict, in the hopes that the characters would kill him. Battle ensued. Both Ganga Lor and Switch ended up fleeing from the fight. The characters took this opportunity to do some investigating. They didn't find a whole lot about Switch's operations (which is what the devious fiends were looking for) but they did find out about an asset of Switch's on the station on which the kidnapping had taken place.

Although they were unsure of whether or not they should actually be helping out this crime lord (whom they discovered had totally set them up as a cat's paw), they decided that they should at least go and get this guy unkidnapped, since it was the right thing to do (and also, since it was the adventure that I had prepared for them at the time). So... Off they went to Tansarii Point station.

Arriving at the station, they went straight to the contact, Lenny the Sleezebag. Lenny the Sleezebag believed that agents of the Black Sun were responsible for the kidnapping, since they were engaged in some heavy duty shenanigans on the station recently, and this fell pretty much right into their MO. Now, I had expected the players to check out the scene of the crime, which would have provided them with some additional clues, pointing them to a Black Sun hangout. They did not. Instead, they headed straight for some Black Sun mooks and started wailing on them, with questions. This was fine by me. not only did it allow the players to get out some of their aggressions, but it still furthered their goals. Also, it really riled the Black Sun up, so that there was going to be a reckoning.

All this beating up of mooks led the characters to the previously mentioned Black Sun hangout. Predictably, a battle ensued (though the character that owed money to Switch did try to sell him out to the underboss, which didn't really pan out). The characters were (more or less) victorious and, though they did not locate the kidnapped engineer that they were looking for, they did find another clue to his whereabouts. Following this clue led the characters to a starship battle, which yielded them their kidnap victim, and also a starship that was only moderately destroyed.

In the end, the characters decided to return the engineer to Switch, because the reward was just too valuable to pass up, and because they couldn't convince anyone else (besides Ganga Lor, who informed on them to the empire just as soon as he got a chance) to kill the conniving droid.

There were a couple of mini-mysteries in this adventure, as well... None of them were necessary to completing the adventure, but were just an extra bonus for the players. The first was that Switch was attempting to use them to do his dirty work (i.e. trying to kill off his rival). The second tied back to their previous adventure. They thwarted the empire and got an inquisitor interested in them (thus the bounty on their head). The inquisitor was using the force power Far Seeing to track them down, which was giving the force sensitives the willies. They found out that the Inquisitor was chasing them, and knew that the crime lord Ganga Lor had told him where they were heading, but they did not put together that the inquisitor followed them to the original station before there was any informing. I am going to continue to have the inquisitor show up where they are (or just were) until either they figure it out and deal with him, or until something really bad happens because of it (like, the inquisitor discovers the whereabout of the rest of the rebels that they hang out with).

In the previous adventure, there was also a side mystery that they failed to solve. There was a traitor (whom they are calling Darth Informant) that they failed to identify. It should lead to some more interesting adventures down the line, I hope.

Hopefully, this will help to illustrate how I think mysteries work best (and also more or less follows the action leads to clue leads to action bit from previous posts).

 

[roguerouge]

In that case, you agree with the posts you've been disagreeing with.

The PCs in a mystery always get a clue. They never fail to get a clue because of a low skill roll. If they fail a skill roll that would have gotten them a clue, they find the clue in some other manner.

Look, this really boils down to a basic, fundamental issue of DMing, and for that matter, of this forum: The PCs are supposed to win. But the PCs aren't supposed to know that they're supposed to win. Or, at the least, they're supposed to be able to suspend their disbelief, and pretend that they don't know that they're supposed to win. Saying "The pcs always get the clue no matter the outcome of the skill checks" openly admits that the PCs are supposed to win. Hearing this stated out loud drives some people nuts. When they hear someone say this sort of thing, they write lengthy posts decrying it. Sometimes they're polite, like you've been, and sometimes they're completely jerks about it and start ranting about how REAL roleplayers are hardcore enough to risk failure, and how kids these days are all soft, and need to walk uphill to school both ways in the snow, etc, etc, etc. And if you talk to them for a while, eventually it becomes clear that they really do game exactly the way that everyone else games.

No. The players are supposed to have a fun time.

Sometimes that means that the PCs win and sometimes it means that they get to enjoy a triumphant comeback from failure. Heck, I just saw one player have enormous fun at getting an epic death protecting our retreat after we lost, badly, in an important encounter. So, no, the PCs are not guaranteed a win.

I don't get something: if you can die in battle (read: lose), get captured (read: lose), go through a TPK (read: lose), make dumb tactical decisions and fail to achieve your strategic objectives (read: lose), nobody objects to that. But as soon as it's a skill or RP, people object to failing at the objective. Combat is not the only place with risk in the game. Or is it that skill failures feel like the player's fault?

Of course, you can fail to get a clue. Many of the clues in my adventure can be missed if you miss the checks or do the wrong things. Missing on an attack roll doesn't derail a combat either. But if you miss a ton of clues or make a ton of mistakes with the clues that you get or only have spells that blow stuff up or put all of your ranks in combat-centric skills, guess what, the killer keeps on killing. Or gets away with it. Or kills someone you like.

Making sure that there are multiple paths to solving the mystery DOES NOT mean that the PC can't lose. It means that one failed check or bad decision by the player doesn't end the adventure with a loss. But several failed checks and bad decisions can. Just like it would in combat.