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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Herpes Cineplex" data-source="post: 1722943" data-attributes="member: 16936">Oh man, I was just about to make this same suggestion.  Except I was going to recommend Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and any cheap detective novel you can find at your local used bookstore.  <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=";)" />I'll go ahead and refine the suggestion a little bit, using something from a foreword to Raymond Chandler's The Simple Art of Murder:  make your mystery about the PEOPLE, not the props.There's a reason why Hammett's The Maltese Falcon is hailed as one of the best detective novels of all time, and one of the few detective novels to have genuine literary merit, and that reason is because the actual mystery (who shot Miles Archer?) is the least important part of the story.  The amount of time Hammett spends describing the scene of the crime and evidence and how Sam Spade is investigating it can be fit into something like two or three pages; the actual story, on the other hand, is all about Spade ferretting out the relationships between the other characters, making tough decisions, and playing every conceivable angle to get things to work out to his benefit.  Instead of the old-fashioned puzzle mystery stories where the point is to keep the reader trying to crack the case before the main character does, this was a story about people and the things that really motivate them.  (It's also a fantastically stylish novel and one of my all-time favorites, obviously.)So anyway, when you're designing a game where the PCs will be doing some investigating, don't get too wrapped up in trying to make the actual crime something that's hard to solve, or trying to build a bunch of physical evidence that will consistently point to the bad guys.  Instead, work on making really interesting bad guys, and on finding ways to get the PCs to interact with a wide range of great NPCs in really cool places.  Work on mapping out relationships between NPCs and how you can get the PCs stuck in the middle of them.And play fair.  There's a great temptation for many GMs to have all-knowing NPCs who for some reason can never be bullied, coerced, or argued into sharing their info with the player characters.  Screw that: every good story needs a weaselly little snitch who'd rat out his own mother for a quick buck.  Every story needs a helpful idiot who shares useless theories that lead absolutely nowhere.  Even the evil mastermind shouldn't know everything about what just happened.And like Gothmog says, you need to keep the pacing up.  When the PCs get stymied, a fresh lead is just one "a bunch of guys burst through the door with guns" away.  When they start bogging down, that's when you can shift your attention to figuring out what the bad guys are doing, and how their actions are going to be noticed by the PCs so they can get things moving again.  And you should never, ever have only one piece of evidence that could lead the characters in a particular direction (nor allow only one PC to have exclusive access to that evidence), because when they fail to share that information with anyone else it'll put a bullet right through your game's heart.  The only other suggestion I have is to either require or strongly encourage players to make skill-heavy characters rather than power-heavy ones.  Either that, or change the rules to let the power-heavy character types actually be able to have some proficiency with social tasks and spotting clues.  If you're using a D&D setting, for example, rogue and bard players will have an awesome time playing an investigation-heavy game, but anyone with a fighter or a barbarian is just going to feel useless most of the time, and magic-users who don't have appropriate spells for what's going on will be bored.(For example, one adjustment we tried was to let each character have a "spotlight" skill, some class skill they always had maximum ranks in without having to spend skill points on, and to also let them buy cross-class skills at a cost of only one skill point per rank, with the normal cross-class maximum still applying.  It let non-rogue-types have a little gather information or bluff or whatever, plus a skill they could really shine at, without making them overly powerful or stepping all over the niche of really social characters like bards.  It worked out pretty well.)--actually, our group tends to do more investigative games than any other kindryan</blockquote>

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