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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 7689123" data-attributes="member: 177">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, again, in that same post, I noted, "All in all, it is a system that does what it does pretty well (I'm about to use Ashen Stars for a campaign for my group), but what it does isn't necessarily what everyone wants to do. And that's okay."  So, you know, we have already recognized it isn't for everyone.  Again, on the first page.  If you're going to be a constructive part of the conversation, and you want to be critical, it would help a lot if you got up to speed on the points we've already covered, rather than making us retread stuff from just a few pages back. 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.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.Well, here we need to note a few things.  We are talking about a game of mystery fiction, not mystery real-life.  In real life, detectives and people solving problems do this as their full-time jobs.  They have days and weeks to consider and probe.  And the real world is largely parallelized, such that one person working through some ideas doesn't stop other people on their team.  Much of real-life detective work is intensely tedious and time consuming.Meanwhile, we are at a table for only a few hours a week, maybe, and all resolution of actions is serialized through one GM, who is expected to help keep up some level of dramatic tension to the whole thing.So, yes, we take some shortcuts in order to make it come out as a reasonable play experience.  We really don't have time for players (who are *not*, in the real world, typically experts on the things their characters are experts in) to go through the full thought process of real-world investigation.  What, never heard of pair programming?  It's a pretty common practice today... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />(Just in case you missed it, that's a joke.  A truth, but a joke, regardless.)No.  We are *moving* it.  And the game is pretty clear about this - the game takes as its basis that the act of interpreting information is more interesting to the players than he act of finding data.  If you're not on board with that, the game isn't for you.  Have fun playing something else, instead. 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?</blockquote>

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