Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 7688740" data-attributes="member: 177">I have no idea how you get this.  The DM is not any more God in GUMSHOE than in any other system.Moreover, there's not need for it to be a "locked room" mystery.  For any mystery, most of the universe holds little to no useful information for the detective.  The useful clues are only found in particular places, or from particular people.  To design the adventure, the GM has to figure out what those places and who those people are.  This is not terribly different than making up the rooms in a dungeon you have to go through to find the BBEG.  But, instead of having physical 10'x10' corridors marking the path between rooms, there are lines of reasoning leading from one to the other.  And no, the path between the clues does not need to be linear.I've seen some rather nice maps of GUMSHOE adventures based on this premise - instead of dungeon rooms, you have locations with clues, lined less by physical paths as where the clues point.  Mind you, GUMSHOE isn't just about mysteries.  While we tend to think of "procedural" in terms of "police procedural", and connect that with a crime with an unknown criminal to be identified, that's actually a very narrow idea of "procedural".  More generically, a procedural is a fiction in which a problem is discovered, investigated, and dealt with in one chunk.  This can be a typical police crime procedural, of course.  But, There are medical procedurals.  And many episodes of Star Trek can be considered science procedurals.   We can look at Firefly as a space-western procedural.  Anything that can be likened to "problem of the week" can be a procedural.  You don't need to create a closed-door mystery every week - you just need to create something the PCs don't understand and don't know how to deal with.Ashen Stars, for example, is set up to do Space Opera procedurals.  You have a spaceship and its crew, and they face a different problem each adventure.  Sometimes it is about crimes, but other times it is about weird sciencey stuff, or about complicated diplomatic situations the PCs don't understand fully to start with.  And, like Trek, or Firefly, or Babylon 5, there's an A-plot and a B-plot going on, which may not be related.  In fact, it may be that the nominal mystery of the week is the B-plot, really there as a frame in which some character development plotline is going on.And, no, the combat system is not terribly deep in its tactical design.  But, that leaves it open to a bit more pulpy improvisational action scenes, with the PCs doing more to gain advantage by thinking up things to do with stuff in the scene than referring to their sheet for what bonuses they get.</blockquote>

Verification