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Message: <blockquote data-quote="IanArgent" data-source="post: 4678412" data-attributes="member: 21673">Mechanical niche protection is not required for this beyond making it prohibitive for every character to become good at everything, a job that 4E does at least as well as Shadowrun, IME. In fact, 4E has better niche protection in some ways than SR does, given that in SR your reach a point where it is much easier mechanically to become broader rather than deeper in the skills department.Choice of system in a primarily mystery/investigative campaign should depend on the setting in which you want to embed. This is why Eberron looks so good for it when contemplating D&D; the Eberron setting has certain design choices made to made it an attractive setting for an investigative campaign. But that's the setting, not the rules. I would much prefer to run an investigative campaign under 4E Eberron, even before the 4E source book comes out, because 4E *does* allow all classes to participate in all facets of the investigation. There's not much point in playing a fighter in a 3E investigative campaign because, no matter what, the fighter will be mechanically prevented from picking up the necessary in-game skills to generate the clues. That applies whether I'm running the game in the Realms, Eberron (though Eberron at least has some feats to let me evade the mechanical restrictions), or a homebrew. And a barbarian is worse. The *only* place these characters are effective is in combat; and that may only crop up once a session. Whereas the rest of the characters carry their load in the investigation, and can still be effective in combat.I ran SR in an investigative mode for a party of up to 12 people. In a system with no niche protection and every reason to overlap skillsets, the characters ended up all being noticeably different, and the players all had fun, with each contributing to the team's success. Perhaps because of this experience, I don't care for niche protection in mechanics.When I construct an investigative adventure, I either start with what the PCs find and let their investigation lead to whodunnit (surprisingly fun, and while I can see it's not for every GM, making the players do the prep for me on the fly made my life a lot easier); or I start with whodunnit and what they did, and walk the cat back from there.I've done a locked-room mystery in Earthdawn, "was it aliens or supernatural" in Shadowrun, and political intrigue in Eberron 3E. The only reason I haven't run anything of this kind in 4E is because I'm only halfway through running KotS; but in the game I'm playing in the DM is running classic Mystara and having no issues at all with the investigative/political stuff we've done (and had some fairly major issues regarding certain spells when we were under 3E prior). My favorite system for this is SR, and my favorite setting Eberron. But I wouldn't hesitate to run any of this under 4E, even as a side quest from a normal-assumptions campaign, because I can reasonably expect everyone to be able to participate (from a mechanical standpoint) without building their characters to the purpose.I guess what I'm trying to say is that since system doesn't matter for a primarily investigative campaign, I prefer 4E to 3.X because it allows me to run the occasional investigative session without sidelining certain characters for the session. That, in many ways, is more important to me than it being a good system for running a primarily investigative campaign (though I think that would work better as well).</blockquote>

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