5 Thoughts on Mystery Planning

In one of the bigger RPG forums in Israel, there's a discussion about investigative games: Possible, or not? And if possible, how can it be achieved? As a person who GMs quite a lot of investigative games, I started to think about how one should plan a game like that and how it should be GMed. My thoughts about the subject follow:

1. The most important thing to consider is what place clues should take in your mystery. In some investigative books, the investigators like Sherlock or Poirot, finding the clues is not the challenge, and both Sherlock and Poirot find them quite easily. In other stories, we can go for quite a lot of time before a single clue is found. For me, I think that the real challenge shouldn't be to find the clues, but to use them together to find the real criminal.
2. Red herrings. This is another important thing to consider, as this concept is used in almost the entire investigative canon of books. For me, I always thought that red herrings are one of the more unique qualities of the genre, and one of the hardest to pass to RPGs. While in other mediums, you can decide when the investigator will throw the red herring, in RPGs you cannot. If I want to use it (and boy, I sure want), I tend to use it as a comeback in a later investigation, or more likely as a small level. You solved the mystery, but there's still a hidden layer that you might need to find, someone who activated the criminal that you caught.
3. Types of crimes. We have to face it, solving mysteries can become as tedious as dungeon crawling (and far more frustrating, of course). Because of that, we have to rewind the mysteries. One crime will be a murder mystery; another will be a kidnapping mystery... But we can go to even farer places: One mystery will contain a moral dilemma; another will confront one of the characters with his/her deepest fears...
4. Complexity levels. I've written about it once, but it worth repeating: Not all mysteries were born the same, some are harder than the others, some are more complex than the others, and some have a bigger scope than the others.
5. Team work. In the canon, the investigator never was alone. Sure, s/he did almost all of the work, but there was another one. In RPGs, we can't have one player who will be the mastermind and the others to be the sidekicks. One way to solve it is with having one person to play the computer genius of the group, another to play the interrogator of the group and so on... A little better approach (to my belief) is to have this allocation of experts, but to have skills that are known to more than one expert. The computer expert might be better at using the Internet, but she will also be good with sneaking past cops. The sneaky might be better at sneaking past cops, but he'll also be good with using the computer. This way, there's a greater feeling of teamwork, as the characters can help each other...

So, these are my thoughts on the subject. How about you? How do you plan/GM investigative games?

Curiosity Killed the Cat, but Made It Famous...

And today is the time to the next installment in our series. Today we're gonna talk about curiosity. Curiosity is the need to know, to answer the questions, and it is one of those things that make us want to continue reading a story, watching a movie, or in our subject, participate in a game.

Like in our previous emotion, this one also contains relevant emotions, which are wonder and intrigue.

If used correctly, curiosity will make the players talk about the game after the games is finished, trying to understand, to predict, what will come next. If not used correctly, the players will probably be bored, or uncaring, but by all means they won't put energy to the game beyond the game time (if at all).

So, how can we raise the level of curiosity in the game? For that there are, again, a few techniques. They also raise the level of interest, but are used more to this emotion.

The main way to do that, and also the basic way from which we're building up, is by arousing questions. They can be simple questions like "will the thief run away" or as complicated like "will she shot her son, when she'll discover that he's the murderer of her husband?" What is important, though, is that there will be questions.

We can think about the questions in a few different levels:

The opening sequence questions are the first ones we'll have to consider. It is mandatory to catch the player's curiosity from the first moment, and raising interesting questions at this early stage will sure catch their attention and curiosity. Think about the pictures from the start of the movie Chinatown, or better yet, the questions that arouse in the first few segments of The Godfather: To whom is he talking? Why is he so important? What happened to the girl, and why? From that moment, we're hooked with curiosity, and by the time these questions are answered, we have new ones.

Always have a few questions running in the players' minds. It's not that difficult to arrange, but it is rewarding nonetheless. By the time an answer is given, 2 new questions should pop up.

Another level to think about is the one of scale. A question can arouse in the whole plot, or in a single beat. If most of the beats will raise questions, it's surely on the way to advance even farther. When the lunatic enters the room screaming, apart from the surprise and fear, the beat also contains questions such as who is he? Why is he here? Why he hasn't been stopped and so on.

But questions can also be in the scene level. Will Rick be persuaded into helping Ilsa? Will the investigator get the permission to read about Kane in the book?

Or even in sequence level. Will the criminal on the train succeed in running away from the investigator? Will Annie discover what event in the past made Alvy be this loony?

And of course it can also be in the act and story levels. What is important, though, is that there will be questions, many of them, most of them small (so there won't be an overflow of questions or info gained) and constantly bombarded at the players and their characters.

"There are trails from the dead body of the horse, the cape is full of blood, but there's nobody wearing it. They are leading to a certain point, near the bushes and trees, and then it stops, disappearing..." Not too complicated, but look what questions do we have: What happened to the rider of the horse? What happened to the trails? Has he gone through the bushes? Trees? Is he alive? Is he a she? Who is the rider, actually? And of course many many more.

There are 2 more techniques that I'll discuss today. The first one is withholding the information. If the players discover the answers too soon, there's no real excitement or drama, and the curiosity has died before it had even begun to flourish. The idea is to hold the info as much as we can before the game draws into a halt or frustration starts to fill the players. One possible way to solve it is to wait about 2-3 minutes of real time, or until 2-3 new questions have aroused before answering the earlier ones. Another way is that the answers themselves create new questions: "What happened to Lisa? -She left her house with a boy, and then disappeared. -Who was the boy? -I don't know, but he had 6 fingers on his right hand..."

The last technique for today is of emphasising secrets and schemes. It fills us with curiosity when a scheme is being made, or if someone is holding a secret. "How will it turn out? Will the scheme succeed? Will the secret be revealed? How?" I'll discuss secrets more thoroughly when I'll discuss surprise, but let's just say that holding the secrets creates a sense of intrigue and wonder, which bump up our curiosity level.

So that's it for today. What about you? How do you try to catch player's curiosity?

The Dirty Secret of Mystery Planning

Most GMs wanna run a mystery game, at least once. Some of them, at least from those that I came to know, wanna GM a mystery campaign and not just a little game session. There is one problem that prevents them, "how can I come up with a new complex plot for each mystery?". For that, there is a simple answer: "You don't.

The longer version is more down to earth: After you've ran a complex mystery story, the players won't expect an easy and shallow one. More than that, they'll look for the rest of it. "No, it's just another red herring". After you've made a complex plot, with many stages and many more red herrings, coming with a simple one, a murder mystery at the level of an Action movie's mystery, they won't believe it's that simple and they'll create the complex stages for you.

Take into account, though, that after a very easy one, running another easy one will destroy what you built. It's preferred, at least from my experience, to go for one complex, one shallow, but don't make it too obvious. Sometimes, change of complex levels might be the refreshment the game needs.

On a side note, this can be used in conspiracy games also. When the players and their characters start to unravel the conspiracy, they'll look for more than what is on the surface. Doing all the work of the conspiracy in question seen to all will make them seem much more sinister...

When Truth Kills the Justice, Go the Other Way Around

We aim to shoot the head each and every time that we try to shoot something, we try to find the truth behind every mystery, to uncover the secret that was not supposed to be solved, but sometimes, justice is a lot more important than the truth.

There's a game I want to run, an investigative game, a murder mystery, but the clues contradict one another, and the PCs should use what clues they see fit to get the result that they want.

The thing that is identical in both of these situations is that the truth is not the most important thing. Sometimes, truth is not relevant at all, like in the second situation, and all of this thinking came from a movie I watched called To Kill a Mockingbird. It's a courtroom drama, with some elements that can be considered as horror, and it's a really good one. In the end of it, the Sherriff says that the truth is not this important; it will harm more than it will help, and he invents a lie to bring justice back to its place.

And that's the whole point: Justice is more important than truth. Truth should be twisted to complement the just things, but never should we do the second thing around. In games, it's really important, at least from my standpoint, that when the characters are faced with an investigation that is gonna end with a good person being harmed in one way or the other, the characters should be rewarded if they choose the right and just thing. More interestingly, though, can be a more difficult situation, where they should have to choose between truth and justice, each one with its own benefits and drawbacks.

I don't know if I actually succeeded with explaining what I mean, but to make it much more simple, and to get to the point of what I'm trying to say, I think that this is a point, an aspect, that should be explored: What is more important, truth or justice? To what extent is it true?

This is a Conspiracy

I've just found this, read all through it, and I'm looking for a chance to use it in a game. Thought it might be a good idea to share it...

Using Clues in Games

Like all GMs, I like to run mystery games. Actually, my horror games often do start as mystery one, as well as most of my fantasy ones. Like all GMs, I do have a problem with the clues: How many clues are enough?
There is no clear and definite answer to that, at least not that I'm aware of. One great solution came from the blog "The Alexandrian", which stated that for every bit of information that the players should find, there should be three clues: 1 that they'll miss, another that they'll understand poorly, and the third for them to understand and to add to their tally.
Another solution came from the "Gumshoe" system, in which finding the clues is not the challenge, but a commodity. The clues that they must have are given to them (if they have the right skill, that is) automatically, with using skills for extra info, that may help, but won't be necessary.
I'm somewhere else, a little bit closer to the one Gumshoe uses, although I used a lot the three clues model. For me, finding the info is not a problem, whether they succeed with the roll or not, the clue will be there, in one way or the other, but there is no one solution to the mystery. In my games, the players, using the clues they have, give me the next clues to give them (based on their assumptions and theories), or in other words, giving me the solution for the mystery.