Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Piratecat" data-source="post: 5795681" data-attributes="member: 2">A combination of things.- Flawed premise. I had a great hook, a reasonable set of clues for development, and I never crafted a really compelling climax. - Flawed characters. They were mechanically fine, but I think their interactions were sort of boring. (The players liked them, I was underwhelmed.)- A distracted player. One of the players was being goofy. Eh, it happens.- Not enough advice in how to run it. Those few pages in the original Esoterrorists just weren't enough.- I didn't trust my clue chain. I was really intimidated by the concept of building a mystery. Part of that was feeling like I had to have everything written down ahead of time (which is nonsense), part of it was not remembering which investigative abilities would find what clues, part of it was the aforementioned half-assed climax.- I didn't have a feel for how General Ability dice pools worked, or how to refresh them. As a result, I didn't understand how far the PCs could be pushed to their limits. I went soft on them as a result... I didn't challenge them enough.I'm being overly hard on myself. The players had fun, and I had fun, but I left the game feeling that it needed some improvements before it could really sing. I then converted the scenario over to Dread and ran it three more times, and it didn't really work there, either. That suggests to me that my scenario/character design wasn't great. I can't blame that on the game rules.I'm much more comfortable now with the clue chain, because I stopped worrying. I know who did what, and how. Then it's up to the PCs to ask questions. If they think of checking for a clue that would obviously be there but which I didn't consider, I just extemporize. It works perfectly.Example: in the first game of my Ashen Stars mystery "Dangerous Bedfellows," the PCs are trying to track the path of the murder victim through the space station before he got killed. Are there cameras? There are! The PCs use a skill to pull up the data feed, and I explain that the victim has a Personal Bluffer which fuzzes out surveillance devices. One of the players says "So if he has a zone of interference around him, we can follow his path by watching the video feeds and seeing which one blurs out when." Completely brilliant, completely logical, and I gave them the information they were looking for.</blockquote>

Verification