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Why Aren't Designers Using The GUMSHOE System?


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.
 

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First, any game where an orc can pound on you with an axe for a full minute and get as lucky as it's possible to get in no way has physical hit points. You can not have hit points work at all other than as abstract results. Second, although people may have ignored the rules as written according to Gygax' DMG (p61), hit points are abstractions of endurance, luck, and magical protection.
Weasel words. He tried saying that it was about luck and magic and whatnot, but the actual rules of the game never supported the ability to cause HP loss without inflicting physical damage to do so. You couldn't curse or dispel your way through HP, or anything. The only things that dealt HP damage were things that caused actual physical injury.

Also, you're taking things out of context. If you just stand there and let the orc wail on you with an axe, then you're just dead outright, as though you'd been Held and someone slit your throat. HP assume that you're trying to avoid attacks, which is why you can get hit ten times without dying - because none of those hits is anywhere vital.

If you want, you can feel free to say that your luck and magic and whatnot are why none of those attacks is anywhere vital - they are why you can take ten hits to the meat without dying - but things get silly very quickly if you try to suggest that those "hits" didn't actually "hit" anything.
 

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Weasel words. He tried saying that it was about luck and magic and whatnot, but the actual rules of the game never supported the ability to cause HP loss without inflicting physical damage to do so. You couldn't curse or dispel your way through HP, or anything. The only things that dealt HP damage were things that caused actual physical injury.

The weasling is coming from your side. Hit points have never reflected physical damage in any meaningful way. When you are 1hp above 0 then guess what? You are fully functional. You aren't hurt, bruised, scorched, and in too much pain to move. You've taken at most cosmetic damage. Hit points therefore do not and can not do actual physical damage.

And then there's the recovery time. Even 1E AD&D recovery times max out at about the time to recover from running a marathon. Hit point recovery is not in any meaningful way like recovering from actually being badly hurt.

Also, you're taking things out of context. If you just stand there and let the orc wail on you with an axe,

Which is not what you are doing. My case is that the orc gets as lucky as it is orcishly posisble to get and the PC gets as unlucky as it's possible to get. It is physically impossible for an orc to kill an fighter in his underwear that is fighting back in a minute after about first level. The orc can never be that lucky - meaning that supernatural levels of luck must be protecting the fighter.

HP assume that you're trying to avoid attacks, which is why you can get hit ten times without dying - because none of those hits is anywhere vital.

And to assume that the orc is as lucky as mathematically possible either means you're made of something tough as steel or that you have supernatural levels of luck protecting you.

Hit points do not in any meaningful way behave like damage. They behave like plot armour.

If you want, you can feel free to say that your luck and magic and whatnot are why none of those attacks is anywhere vital - they are why you can take ten hits to the meat without dying - but things get silly very quickly if you try to suggest that those "hits" didn't actually "hit" anything.

They get even sillier if you try to claim anything other than luck, plot armour, and miraculous flesh wounds. The orc with the axe can be as lucky as possible and still get nowhere.
 

In this thread, post #6, I said, "To answer the question, we should note that GUMSHOE is really designed to handle mystery/investigation/procedural style games." So, I'm pretty sure the issue here isn't a bait-and-switch, since all this has been present in the thread since the first page.

And not in the OP or the normal sales pitch for GUMSHOE which makes it about clues and investigations. Yes, I'm saying your answer is more accurate than the way it is pitched.

GUMSHOE games aren't typically about exploration or gathering loot, either. It seems like a poor fit for you.

Oh, and most "procedure" is logistics, summed up and standardized for maximum effectiveness and efficiency. "Police procedure" is a real thing for good reasons.

I work in a hospital. Logistics are good. Stories are normally written about when systems fail not when they succeed.

How difficult that is to get is less about the game, and more about the players. Getting you to buy looks like it'd be like pulling teeth without anesthetic. Meanwhile, I'm doing character generation with a table of players tonight who, when offered five different games to choose from (including D&D) dove right at Ashen Stars.

I might buy in for a one-shot. Or I might buy in for a good GM (I personally think that Feng Shui 1 is an awfully designed game and would rather play Wushu any day of the week - except with one of the players I play with who's great at running Feng Shui).

Who is the "we"? Maybe that's what is going on when you work with the system (you have worked with it, right, and aren't criticizing it on theory alone), but that's not what's going on at my table. Maybe you ought to stop passing judgments on things you're not experiencing, hm?

I have worked with it - I was even one of the Ashen Stars playtesters.

And I'm not experiencing what's going on at your table. But that Feng Shui GM I mentioned earlier? Part of the way he makes the system sing is that he ignores about half the rules (most of which were left out for FS2 to be fair). What's going on at your table may or may not be what the book says (most games are like that).
 

And then there's the recovery time. Even 1E AD&D recovery times max out at about the time to recover from running a marathon. Hit point recovery is not in any meaningful way like recovering from actually being badly hurt.
I've never claimed that you're badly hurt. I'm just saying that every hurt is physical. The system doesn't really do "badly hurt, but still alive"; it's an inherent limitation in the model. It's a concession so that we end up with a playable system.

I'll also note that the fighter probably isn't standing there in his underwear. The default assumption of the system, just like how the fighter is actually fighting back, says that the fighter is probably wearing armor during combat. Just about anyone that the system could care to model is either wearing armor (like a fighter) or supernaturally tough (like a dragon) or is some flavor of magic (like a wizard or monk).

They get even sillier if you try to claim anything other than luck, plot armour, and miraculous flesh wounds. The orc with the axe can be as lucky as possible and still get nowhere.
That just places an upper bounds on the contribution from luck, relative to skill and toughness. No matter how lucky that orc is, it's not possible to be lucky enough to overcome the supernatural durability of a level 3 paladin wearing armor.

Plot armor is right out, though. Maybe plot armor is why that 8-point axe hit didn't kill you, but if you couldn't look down and see some physical injury that corresponded to the impact of a weapon, then you wouldn't know that you needed a poultice or a healing potion or whatever to recover from it. You'd have fighters walking around with 3/50 hit points, thinking that they're just fine.
 

What, never heard of pair programming? It's a pretty common practice today... :p

(Just in case you missed it, that's a joke. A truth, but a joke, regardless.)
Wildly off topic, but reminds me of the classic software development / project management joke: "You want a baby in a month? Ok, bring me 9 women."
 

GURPS has a lot of problems. A focus on too much simulation, at the expense of playability, is one of them. A focus on too much verisimilitude, at the expense of fun, is another one. I'm not sure that either is the biggest problem with GURPS.

In GURPS' defense some would argue (i.e. GURPS fans) that what you're labeling a problem is a feature in their eyes. I'm in the middle, because these days I prefer speed and efficiency so lean toward BRP or Savage Worlds for my generic universal gaming (trying to absorb Cypher, too) which means that even though I ran GURPS continuously back in the nineties and early 00's I just have no time/stomach for it anymore....and it's precisely because those features I used to love now look like bugs to me.
 

Wildly off topic, but reminds me of the classic software development / project management joke: "You want a baby in a month? Ok, bring me 9 women."

Yeah, I know.

Though, actually, Pair Programming done well has some interesting effects - it doesn't actually speed development itself, but done properly it generally leads to decreased bug counts - you';re essentially getting very detailed code review and editing by another person as you write it. The result being that if you are constrained on QE, pair programming can actually get you to delivery more quickly.

But, as you said, this is wildly off topic.
 

So, I'm late to the party here, so if in reading the eight pages of comments I missed something, please let me know. I tried to make sure my perspective wasn't mirrored here already.

The first question the OP asks its why it's not as popular as he thinks it should be, and then goes into the virtues. Amusingly, and proving my tastes are not that of the majority, for the worse or for the better, my issue with Gumshoe was in a lot of ways it didn't go far enough in terms of the virtues the OP mentioned, plus some other factors that I don't think anyone has mentioned...

I was very excited when I first heard about Gumshoe. I've seen pixelbitching and I hate it, and I've seen games stall over a lot of stupid stuff. I got a copy of Night's Black Agents, and was even more excited. Super spies vs. vampires! What could be more cool?

Then I read it, and grew a bit concerned. And then I ran it, and it utterly flopped, and I became very concerned indeed. Now, this is all based on one experience, admittedly a bad one, so serious grain of salt, but this is the issue we had was one of resource management and a very binary view of skills.

I've run and played a lot of Nobilis, and so had my players, so the sort of resource management in the game didn't pose a problem in the abstract. It's just that burning a lot of your resources seemed to do so very little, and it was very easy to f*ck yourself by burning resources at the wrong time or in the wrong way.

Auto-success is great! Except, it's not clear if just the core clues are supposed to be enough, or if the players are expected to spend the points to get more/better clues at the "right"moments, and how the players are supposed to know where those points are and/or how I'm supposed to communicate when those moments are to the players as the GM, and whether I'm actually supposed to do this in the first place. This was the case even with the sample scenario in the book and the Zalozhniy Quartet, where in theory this stuff should have been spelled out better.

In Nobilis, spending even a single miracle point can be amazing, and if your stat is high enough, you can do some pretty amazing stuff with no spend at all. Now, no one was expecting to be like gods, but they were expecting to be competent investigators and spies.

The binary nature of the investigation skills did not make the players feel like competent investigators. It seemed that any chemistry expert was as good as any other. This was especially true because higher levels in the skill didn't really mean higher levels of competence, it just meant more book-keeping: It gave you more of a resource you could manage to get better results, but that didn't mean you generally got better results if you didn't spend the resource at all. It didn't feel like you were a better chemist. If felt like you were a *luckier* chemist, except that unlike rolling for luck or getting the very clearly spelled out (in its own way) results of a Nobilis miracle, you had to risk a very, very limited resource to have even a *chance* at a reward. So, from our perspective, the investigation system combined the worst aspects of auto-success and rolling: All the risk of rolling with none of the potential of reward, all the worry coming from not knowing what was going on or if one was using one's resources correctly, and all the feeling of sameness where all experts were equal.

This weird system design methodology was even more pronounced in the non-investigation skills, which were somehow still weirdly binary, AND you didn't even have auto-success! If you had a high rating in a skill, that didn't mean you were more likely to succeed. It meant you could *sometimes* be more likely to succeed by spending points. So, all the worry and risk and uncertainty of the investigation system, without even the guarantee of minimum competence. WTF?

Yes, yes, in both these cases you're way better off than someone with a 0 in the skill, but then all super-spies are going to be able to shoot a gun, right? Shouldn't a super-spy who is especially good at guns be able to *consistently* out-perform one who is simply competent, rather than just do something cool once in a while?

I understand this is supposed to be about spotlight sharing. But characters have so little points, and the scale is so delicate, that it seemed more about everyone failing all the time. The attempt to make it so the competent character can't hog the spotlight made it so they couldn't even *have* the spotlight but once in a blue moon... And once everyone had blown their points, until refresh, NO ONE can have the spotlight, as everyone is a bumbling incompetent.

At least in Fate, which the players (and I) were also familiar with, if you are out of Fate points, you're still Superb at the skill you put most of your points into, rather than suddenly being merely "not completely terrible".

All the additional options, the cherries and the different additional things you could spend on, plus the different weird ways you could use investigative abilities to improve your chances on a general ability, only make this WORSE. It became less and less clear what actions a competent character could reasonably expected to succeed at and how you could make the system allow them to succeed more than once at any given thing.

I mean, looking at the publicly-available files linked in the article to remind myself I'm not insane here, you're not supposed to tell the players the difficulty of an action, "to force players to decide how much they want to commit to the situation, with the gnawing emotional dissonance that comes from the possibility of making the wrong move."

Except, why is this emotional dissonance supposed to be fun? I can see it being fun if it's about the fictional situation and what the right thing to do is on a moral level, or even in terms of a calculated risk, but it's not uncertainty about the situation... It's being uncertain how to use the system optimally!

To use Night's Black Agents as an example, finding out a bunch of weird things about vampires, and then being not sure how to proceed or what the best method of defeating them based on the data you've gathered, that's fun. Not being sure how to ensure you can successfully shoot a thug or even if it's worth doing so is not fun, especially if your character is supposed to be a super-spy who is good at shooting people.

System mastery in D&D 3.5, while not easy, at least has an obvious path. Gumshoe, on the other hand, uses two completely different systems with similar, but not identical, philosophies, and then provides several different ways they interact where it is extremely unclear what is a good choice in any given situation, even after you've sat down and done the math.

In short, we found it very difficult to enjoy a system where it seemed like being competent for five minutes meant being incompetent or mediocre for the rest of the adventure. Being awesome isn't just being awesome once. I feel like if something is your character's thing, maybe you should at least be able to be awesome at it twice in a given adventure. I'm not sure why that's asking so much, or why the design seems hell-bent on making sure the players are exhausted all the time.

Returning to Fate again, when the players are f*cked, the GM can Compel their Aspects to cause even more trouble but gain them needed Fate points, and/or the players can act in accordance with their Aspects to get said points. In Gumshoe, you only get points back over time, or if you were really clever, you bought a cherry refresh that only kicks in when you geek out about something, which is extremely limiting in the extreme.

And before anyone pixelbitches our understanding of the system or makes all sorts of suggestions, consider if those suggestions are actually in the rules, make intuitive sense, or are encouraged in any way by the rules text, because if we have to modify the game to make it work like it sounds like it's supposed to, then there's no reason not to take the approach that several people have advocated in these comments and import certain types of auto-success into another system where characters actually have a baseline level of competence without burning extremely limited resources.

I mean, at first blush, I feel like we would have done much better using Fate with a longer list of investigative skills and an auto-success rule a bit more robust than the fail forward / succeed at cost methodology that's already in Fate...
 
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And before anyone pixelbitches our understanding of the system or makes all sorts of suggestions, consider if those suggestions are actually in the rules, make intuitive sense, or are encouraged in any way by the rules text, because if we have to modify the game to make it work like it sounds like it's supposed to, then there's no reason not to take the approach that several people have advocated in these comments and import certain types of auto-success into another system where characters actually have a baseline level of competence without burning extremely limited resources.
First, I'm not really familiar with Fate, so I can't really comment too much on differences or similarities between the two.

But I do think, from reading your post, that perhaps you're not quite playing the system as intended. To start with there are no wasted investigative spends. Either the GM will offer them when available, or if the player asks and there isn't an available clue for that skill (and the GM can't make one of the other available clues fit), then no points are spent.

The investigative spotlight sharing is all about the differences in skill rating. If two players have Chemistry 1, then they will seem the same (as they should, right?). But a player with Chemistry 2 will have either the opportunity for better clues (they can get 2 point spend clues that a PC with Chemistry 1 simply can't get) or more frequent non-core clues (they can find two separate 1 point clues whereas the player with Chemistry 1 can only find one clue). The rules also encourage giving more of the core clues to the player with the higher rating. In games I've played they have certainly felt "more expert".

I'm not sure why you think that it's not possible to auto-succeed on general skill checks... there is no "1 automatically fails" rule, so perhaps that is where you are confused? Normal target number is a 4, so a 3 point spend will automatically succeed. A 2 point spend will only fail on a one. For an expert (generally considered to start at 8+ in a general skill), they will be able to have 2-3 automatic successes, or 4+ "almost a sure thing" successes. Also remember that general pools typically refresh much faster than investigative skills, and most experts (8+) will have cherries which allow them to partially refresh general skills within a scene. Certainly the difference between someone with skill 8+ and someone with no skill (or even someone with a mediocre skill like 4) - has been noticeable in games I've played. The no skill guy really is relying on luck to succeed (approx 50% of the time against standard difficulty), the mediorce guy generally has one or two good checks in him, and the expert generally has enough auto successes (or near enough) to seem like an expert through the whole scene.

Finally, you state that players shouldn't be told the difficulty... which is only part right. The rules advocate not giving the exact target number to players, but it also strongly advocates giving them narrative cues as to whether the task is easy (3 or less), average (4) or difficult (5+), to give them an idea of whether they want to spend points, given the stakes involved in the roll.
 

After 35+ years of gaming, I have found that I can run any sort of campaign/adventure under almost any ruleset. I can run an investigative game using Pathfinder, D&D, Savage Worlds, BRP, Toon, WoD, Wild Talents, or any other rule system because I don't make finding the clues and solving the mysteries dependent on die rolls. The cleverness and persistence of the players is what leads to success in investigative/mystery games when I run them.

I prefer to use the ruleset the players like the best and adapt the details of the campaign to take advantage of that system, when necessary. Since most players these days seem to be averse to learning more than one or two systems, I have found that many of them are more open to non-combat (or low-combat) campaigns if they don't also have to learn a new set of rules.
 

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