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Message: <blockquote data-quote="xiombarg" data-source="post: 7689160" data-attributes="member: 18471">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...</blockquote>

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