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<blockquote data-quote="niklinna" data-source="post: 8965901" data-attributes="member: 71235">On the other hand, if every house they could break into has an alarm system, or a guard dog, or a nosy neighbor who'll call the cops, even if they strike oil on the first house, they can have a satisfying challenge. But then you have the opposite problem, when they have to slog through all eight houses before finding the evidence. Lotteries. Feh. In longer games, of course, there might be interesting things to find in most of the houses...but then you get the players doing the equivalent of pixel scrubbing.And of course, things are never so simple as an example scenario. Three suspects would be well within the tolerances of most players, I'd guess, in the last-house situation. The players might have other options than to blindly pull at straws (although that is certainly something investigators face in reality...wanna roleplay a stakeout in real time? <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&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> ). But you could add a phase where the players tail the suspects first, glossing over the moment-by-moment and just inform them whether they are doing anything warranting more...personal investigation, and then the players know which houses are the most likely to yield results.Finding that sweet spot between exhaustive detail and glossing over is one of the big challenges in roleplaying games. Certainly not insurmountable. I've been mostly happy with how Blades in the Dark handles such things. Not always, but mostly.Edit: Minor clarification.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="niklinna, post: 8965901, member: 71235"] On the other hand, if every house they could break into has an alarm system, or a guard dog, or a nosy neighbor who'll call the cops, even if they strike oil on the first house, they can have a satisfying challenge. But then you have the opposite problem, when they have to slog through all eight houses before finding the evidence. Lotteries. Feh. In longer games, of course, there might be interesting things to find in most of the houses...but then you get the players doing the equivalent of pixel scrubbing. And of course, things are never so simple as an example scenario. Three suspects would be well within the tolerances of most players, I'd guess, in the last-house situation. The players might have other options than to blindly pull at straws (although that is certainly something investigators face in reality...wanna roleplay a stakeout in real time? :) ). But you could add a phase where the players tail the suspects first, glossing over the moment-by-moment and just inform them whether they are doing anything warranting more...personal investigation, and then the players know which houses are the most likely to yield results. Finding that sweet spot between exhaustive detail and glossing over is one of the big challenges in roleplaying games. Certainly not insurmountable. I've been mostly happy with how Blades in the Dark handles such things. Not always, but mostly. Edit: Minor clarification. [/QUOTE]

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