I was re-reading Night’s Black Agents by Kenneth Hite and Pelgrane Press for a review for this site, when I was stopped in my reading by what I thought was an important question (which I ask in the headline). Why aren’t more designers making games around the Gumshoe system created by Robin Laws? Robin Laws is a very smart man who thinks a lot about role-playing games. Now, I don’t always agree with where his lines of reasoning take him, as a designer, but that doesn’t take away from the man’s brilliance. I will admit that I wasn’t as impressed with the Gumshoe system at first blush, but as I have put more experience with the system under my belt, that has changed and my appreciation for what Laws did in the rules has grown.
The concept at the heart of Gumshoe is one that has bothered me in a lot of fantasy games that I have run or played over my many years of gaming. That simple phrase: “I search the room.” Forgive my French, but the one thing that I dislike most about RPGs is the tendency towards “pixelbitching.” For those who may not be familiar with this term, it basically applies to having to state that you’re searching every inch of a room and looking out for cracks, crevices and any weirdly discolored patches that you may encounter in the flickering torchlight. It also refers to those “locks” that are pointless mini-puzzle games that require you to figure out the right combination of up-down-up that will unlock a door, or activate device. I hate those things.
One of the central concepts of a Gumshoe game is to get rid of that idea, and let you get to the meat of the scenario at hand. In game design in the 90s, we saw a rise of role-playing games with highly detailed skill systems. Pages and pages and pages of skills, with specialties and sub-skills all detailed. One of the high points of this style of game design would probably be GURPS from Steve Jackson Games. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t bashing that style of design. I played the heck out of games like GURPS in the 90s. Just about everything that I wanted to play was ported into GURPS via the multitude of supplements that the system had. The problem arose with this school of design in that, while you were still assumed to be creating highly competent characters (at the higher point totals for GURPS characters, at least), the way that the skill systems worked your “highly competent” characters always had a non-trivial chance of failure when a player attempted to do anything.
As games touting their “realism” became more and more prevalent in the 80s and 90s, this trend for designing skills followed. All of those years of characters trying to do something cool, and instead doing something disappointing. You see this idea made fun of in various D&D memes around the internet, and I think that game design is finally getting around to fixing this idea. Gumshoe isn’t the only one doing this, not by far, but it is one of the only systems that is putting “fixing” investigation in RPGs in the center of the design.
But Gumshoe doesn’t catch the imagination of game designers in the same that Fate or Apocalypse World seems to be doing. I’m not saying that Gumshoe is better than either of those systems, in fact I’m supposed to by playing my first Powered By The Apocalypse game next month. There are always going to be game systems that catch on with designers, and those that get left behind. Gumshoe seems to have a devoted following, and a number of successful games, including the earlier mentioned Night’s Black Agents and Trail of Cthulhu among them. Pelgrane Press has a growing number of Gumshoe powered games, but for a system that has been released under both the OGL and a Creative Commons license it just surprises me that we don’t see more designers chewing on this system for their own worlds, like we do with D20, Fate or Apocalypse World (or any other number of free-to-use game systems out there).
Maybe Pelgrane Press is doing such a good job with their games that designers don’t need to remake the wheel. I know that there was talk of a Ars Magica/Gumshoe mashup at Atlas Games at one point, but I haven’t seen anything about that in a while.
At this point, you’re probably wondering one of two things, maybe even both. First, why does it matter what systems people use? Second, why is Gumshoe so cool?
The first question has a simple answer for me, and it lies in why I started writing for this site. Diversity in games is always a good thing. I like the idea of having a toolbox of different games, so that I can use the game, or system, that works best with what I want to do. Yes, I can just get a high level of system mastery with one game and use it for everything that I want, but that isn’t really how I roll. You get a different feel for a fantasy world when playing D&D, or when playing Stormbringer, and I like that. I want a game to reflect a world, and I want a world to be a good fit for how the mechanics of a game works. When I play a pulp game with Fate, and one with Troll Lord Games’ wonderful Amazing Adventures, the characters have different feels to them, and how they can interact with their worlds are different. Sometimes those differences are what I am looking for when I run, or play, a game.
Now, why do I like Gumshoe is a more complicated question to answer.
First off, it gets rid of the idea that a competent character has a non-zero chance of failure. That’s a HUGE idea, when you look at the stream of design that hit its height in the 90s (and still shows up at times in more contemporary game designs). If you look at role-playing games from the idea that they are supposed to simulate what you see in the stories/movies/comics that we all read, this brings what happens in a game much closer to what we see in the fictions that we are trying to emulate.
One thing, the “zero to hero” games, which cover a lot of the level-based games out there, most of which draw upon some strain of D&D as their influence, are not a counter argument to why there should be a “whiff” factor in RPG design. You can argue many things about the “heroic journey” of these games, but mostly the idea of them is that your character is on the journey to get to be that competent character. Using a first level D&D character to refute Sherlock Holmes or Tony Stark (sometimes they’re even the same person) isn’t proof that competent characters shouldn’t be doing competent things. It just means that different characters should be able to do different things.
I think that our recent Classic Traveller game would have been more interesting for the players if the game had been designed like Gumshoe. Too many times the momentum of our game was interrupted because a character who should have been able to do some sort of action couldn’t. Definitely not a slam on old school game designs. In most other aspects, the design of Classic Traveller is a hallmark of how simple and elegant older school game mechanics can be. If your idea of fun is overcoming adversity through fumbled dice rolls, then the task resolution of Classic Traveller will be your thing. I just think that, in the case of our group, this held us back in some ways.
So, again, what makes Gumshoe so great? I keep talking about where other games fall down. In a Gumshoe game, characters have what are called Investigative Abilities. But, what does this mean? At the core, the Investigative Abilities in a Gumshoe game let you get to the heart of the matter, because getting a piece of necessary information shouldn’t be dependent on a dice roll. Now, there are still contingencies for getting this information: your character has to be one the scene, they have to have a relevant ability and they have to tell the GM of the game that they are using it. In Night’s Black Agents an example of this is “I use Chemistry to test the blood for silver.” Obviously the character has an important reason to ask this question (perhaps it is a way for people to protect themselves from vampiric attacks, by dousing themselves with silver), and the next step of the characters (and the story) probably hinges on the results. In a game where there are non-zero chances of success, time can be wasted in a game session in rolling the results of this over and over to figure out if the answer given to a character is correct or not. What Gumshoe posits is that, if a character is a chemist, and demonstrates competency in their Chemistry ability, time shouldn’t be wasted in rolling until you get a high enough of a result to be able to tell if the GM is telling the truth or not.
This idea also assumes something important: a role-playing game isn’t a competition between the GM and the players. If the information is important to the story, and the characters have the relevant knowledge, don’t waste time in the reveal. While I’m sure that some gamers have fun with those hours spent in a chemistry lab testing, and retesting blood samples, others would have much more fun getting past the blood tests and getting to the point where they get to fight vampires. I know that I would.
But all of this brings me back to my initial point of this piece. Why aren’t more designers using the Gumshoe rules for their games? Maybe they just aren’t as familiar with the rules, which is entirely possible. But becoming more familiar with these rules is why I wrote over a thousand words for this piece. It does mean that I will, hopefully, have to explain less in my review for Night’s Black Agents, but that is really only secondary. What we see often in gaming writing is people writing what they know, talking about the games that they know and figuring out how to make them fit into other situations. Sometimes, instead of talking about how a screwdriver can be used in different situations, we should talk about why a pair of pliers are also useful.
