15 responses to “First attempt at an investigation scenario”

1. This ought to have the OSR tag and I’m afraid I’m not sure why it isn’t there. Oh well.

   Also, I forgot to add my objectives for the session. In no particular order: practice a new (to me) game structure, write some passable prose, entertain myself and Adam (obviously), and see if I could portray a mystery scenario without any explicit “clues” but which could still be solved.

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2. This is a very cute little account, PigDog. I love how the player “figured it out” based on a meta-clue (which wasn’t intended as one).

   I think running investigative scenarios is one of the trickier things in RPG play (at least of the things we regularly do, as typical play activities and desired scenarios).

   There are lots of variations on how to do so, and they’re worth pondering. The one key thing is to always preserve the meaningfulness of player choice – sometimes a challenge with any kind of “here’s a mystery; your job is to figure it out, my job is to keep it from you” setup (as is hopefully very obvious from that way of describing it!).

   Thanks for sharing this. (I’m also testing out the new WordPress format – a big upgrade!)

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   • “Rather than write up discrete clues, I tried to just imagine what the town would be like and how these people might react.”

     This is key to me. There’s a lot of advice about how to run a mystery (the three-clue rule being pretty well known), and frankly I’ve never really understood any of it. Stuff like that has always felt like levers the GM uses to control pacing and control challenge and control, control, control. Maybe it’s because investigative play of any sort has never interested me and neither have mystery novels.

     That said, I think “play your characters honestly” is a to-the-bone approach in just about any scenario.

   • Yes, it was funny to me! And slightly disappointing. (By the way, I forgot to paste in the bulk of the text, including the part where I actually say the phase of the moon. I’ve contacted Ron for an edit. Ron, if you don’t want me discussing technical site details in the comments, please let me know.)

     The funny thing is, I’m not lying: I really do track the phase of the moon in that game, and I start every normal session by stating the date, weather, and moon phase. (Easier than you might think, because the Germanic calendar is based on the phases of the moon, so if you know the date, you know the phase.) This costs me no effort and it lets me know how bright the nights are and if any werewolves are active as you see here. Also, every night the players are at sea there’s a 1-in-720 chance that the moon will dip low enough on the horizon that they can sail to it, and its size depends on its current phase. And finally, it’s very flavorful; it just feels like something the medievals would keep track of.

     But in this case I forgot to start the session with the date, weather, and moon phase, because the game was so casual. And I thought it would be too obvious if I said, “Whoops, I forgot to say…” so I wove it into the narration instead. With mixed results. Maybe we are so familiar with the connection between werewolves and moon phases that anybody who hears the moon mentioned will always perk up.

     We might distinguish between “tactically relevant scenario information” and “literary detail”. Mystery writers make the same distinction, I think, and often try to confuse the reader with a cloud of literary details. They camouflage the most important clues as mere details. And so when we solve a mystery book we’re reading our most important task is not to explain the presence of this or that fact, but to decide which fact is important. Then we can easily explain things.

     I wanted to blur scenario information with literary detail, even in my own mind, when I was running this session. That is, I didn’t want to start with a list of “clues” for the player to find; I wanted to just picture the scene, as strongly as I could, and simply describe what I was picturing. Is this how people normally run investigations? I’m not sure. It doesn’t seem to jive with advice like the “three clue rule”.

     (Challenge-focused games can also distinguish between scenario information and detail. (How to properly describe this difference? I’m only gesturing at it so far. Must think more on the matter.) I think there though the players have the prerogative and ability to exploit any particular detail, to turn it into scenario information. Kind of the opposite of solving a mystery. The player doesn’t want to figure out which detail was already scenario information, but which detail can be turned into scenario information.)

   • Hans (and anyone else with knowledge of this issue),

     I’m very curious about rule-structures around investigations. I guess I don’t see GM control as necessarily a bad thing — and my knee-jerk negative reaction to it, and similar pacing methods, reminds me of my initial knee-jerk negative reaction to all the tools of narrative play. (When I first encountered these things, I thought that they de-legitimized the stories they generated, and that one could only get good stories in rpgs through blind luck, rule-less skill, and unconscious cooperation.) Do you think you could explain why explicit pacing rules and control mechanisms are OK in narrative games (if you think they are) but not in challenge-focused investigations?

   • This is a reply to pigdog’s question to me–

     The more I play across a variety of games the more I think received categories that get used on the internet as if everyone knows what they mean–like “narrative game”–are worse than meaningless. They actively obscure and damage meaningful discourse.

     I say that not to chide or correct you but just to say that I think we need to be on better footing regarding what we’re actually talking about. Rather, we can safely dump discussion of “narrative” play and mechanisms and just talk about the actual things and how they operate.

     So, for me the real question here is what am I talking about when I’m talking about mechanisms of control? I’m certainly not talking about the GM having authority over the backstory (knowing the clues and the mystery). Maybe I don’t know exactly what I’m talking about in crystal-clear terms I can point to. But when the outcome is set by the GM and play simply consists of which path the players choose to that outcome, that is the kind of control of play I’m talking about. And I don’t really know how else a mystery game can be done (that’s not a “we all come up with pieces of the mystery together”).

     I’m not saying there aren’t different ways of doing it. I’m saying I don’t know what they are. When I first entered the hobby I had a period where in rapid succession I played in a 3.5 game, a GURPS game, and went to a couple local conventions and played a number of games (4e and Call of Cthulhu and Cat stand out in memory) and they ALL involved a group of PCs trying to uncover some sort of mystery or solve an information problem. For that short period of time I really began to think that “guess what the GM’s thinking” was the extent of the activity of roleplaying and I almost quit and never came back.

3. Hello! With apologies for brevity and nothing but a pointer, my comments about role-playing investigations at Star Trek: The Pool may be useful.

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   • Ron,

     This is useful! I particularly like the question, “Why are you rolling?”. It does make me wonder, though, what if any rules structures would support a genuine investigation. Do these things have to be played as, essentially, free kreigspiels? Do the rules here only support ancillary elements of the investigation? (I know you’re not saying that anywhere, but I think it’s a reasonable view, and question, anyway.)

   • These topics need dissecting. One could ask, what is, in fact, “genuine investigation” as it relates to fiction? How is wargaming (I think you refer to outright competition) relevant?

     However, those questions are too abstract. Good for mining clicks and shares on Reddit, not worth much here.

     To dissect the topics properly, I think we need to talk about play as we’ve experienced it, to look across the relevant posts and their comments, and to post more in the knowledge of that body of work. The slow road.

   • I hope I can limit my comments and questions to things we can immediately resolve based on our own experiences.

     By “genuine investigation” I mean a mystery (whatever that is) where the players don’t know the answer, the referee does, and the “point” is for the players to solve the mystery. They win if they figure out what’s going on, and lose if they don’t. (I’m sure there’s a lot more to say about this. And I don’t think my session was a pure genuine investigation — after all, Adam didn’t solve the murder! Though he did figure out what was going on in town in a general way.)

     By “free kriegspiel” I meant “game with no explicit rules for determining outcomes”. I guess outcomes are determined by drama (as in DFK drama) or some ad-hoc fortune mechanic, at the referee’s pleasure. (I’m probably butchering some or all of the terminology here; my apologies. If something is unclear, please ask.)

     In my example, the “rules” only came into play when I was rolling a reaction check for Fionola. We didn’t have any investigation skills, DCs, whatever. I’m tempted to say that in this session every important question was resolved with drama, and the game’s rules only came into play for ancillary things.

     So I’m curious to hear how people have used traditional/obvious aspects of a game’s rules in what I’ve been calling a genuine investigation. For instance, have you rolled skill checks to see if the players notice a clue, or to see if they interpret it correctly? Did that go well, or poorly? Was it a departure from normal play, or the same as usual? That sort of thing.

     As always, please let me know if I’m still asking impossible questions.

   • Sorry Canyon, I wasn’t very clear. Those were rhetorical questions designed to illustrate that quick-and-reflexive answers wouldn’t be productive. I was trying not to get into the details here. I don’t want to disrespect your effort, so I provide the following strictly as thought material, long-term, without one-on-one back-and-forth in this spot.

     1. Your reply about the genuine investigation is very useful due to its internal contradiction: it’s well and good to say that the players win if they solve it and lose if they don’t, but you also say that if they don’t solve it, then it’s not a genuine investigation. It’s only a “GI” if they can fail to solve it, but not a “GI” if they in fact fail?

     2. Regarding “no explicit rules for outcomes,” there is no such thing. A game’s resolution rules may not be familiar, and the scale or content of the outcomes (what they’re about) may not be what one is used to, but moving from uncertainty to at least some certainty is fundamental to the act of play. I do see what you’re asking, but it’s falling into the long-standing conundrum of wanting players to deduce things but also wanting dice to constrain whether the characters deduce things. Play can’t have both at once as the determining device, and table attempts to resolve it by synchronizing them are agonizing, and have been for decades. The more usual solution, or rather, desperation device is exactly as you describe here, which is to jettison one of the components … which typically leaves the remaining one in an anemic state.

     Again: these are rhetorical. I really don’t want you to reply to them. I’m trying to illustrate that these things swiftly become nonsensical no matter how intuitive they feel, and cannot be discussed with rapid typing. This is going to be a long-term discussion best conducted with ongoing play experiences. The Detective/Mystery category has lots of useful posts to examine as well, and I especially recommend Monday Lab: Roll to know, if you want to check it out.

4. Hi Der PigDog, thanks for sharing this transcript – it’s very enjoyable to be able to read along with the session. I especially enjoyed seeing Adam’s unprompted, authoritative statements – his pointing out that Lirann would have knowledge of Ogonnelloe’s culture in #24, his setting of a new scene in #61, to name two that especially jumped out at me. I also like the idea of a game taking place both over voice and in chat…my experience of play by post is very limited, but this made it seem fun and easy.

   I’d like to make some further observations, but first, am I correct in assuming that Fionala is Caoimhe’s widow?

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   • Yes, that’s correct!

   • Great! I wanted to offer a perspective on some things I noticed around #75, where Clodagh reveals to Lirann that she is a werewolf. I bring it up because you specifically call out wanting to “just imagine what the town would be like and how these people might react.” This is a great summation of healthy play, and I think it is a helpful starting-point for thinking about making any fiction – including mystery fiction – in the medium of roleplaying.

     Back to #75. It seems to me that in that moment, where Lirann ‘cracks the case,’ you and Adam stopped attending to dynamic areas of uncertainty and fictional instability in the situation, and moved away from the immediate events of play.

     The big unresolved certainty I see: What is Fionala going to do with the news of Clodagh’s intended departure? She’s already taken violent action related to her niece. She wields considerable social power in Ogonnelloe, and Lirann and his thegn are in a highly vulnerable position if she decides to mobilize the village against him. There’s an extreme Reaction Roll result to work with as material in deciding Fionala’s, Clodagh’s, and the villagers’ actions. To read perhaps too far into it, I could see the villagers viewing a local warlord taking a young woman from their head family back to his fortress as ‘an apprentice’ appearing less like charity and more like tribute/hostage-taking.

     However, once Lirann solves the mystery, all that charged and unstable material is put aside. I am curious about what would have happened if the focus had stayed on “what the town would be like and how these people might react,” instead of stopping where the mystery was ‘solved.’

     I don’t intend to point this out like I’m some expert who knows everything about play mysteries, because I definitely don’t. However, I’ve been trying in my recent play to focus on the bleeding edge of what’s happening in the fiction (where the most impactful events happen), and part of that has been recognizing when my attention wanders from the fiction happening right now, right in front of me.

   • Wow, this is really great! I wish I had had some of these considerations in mind when I was running the scenario. I think you’re right that in my mind the scenario only went as far as “find the werewolf” and the game basically stopped after that happened, bar a little bit of (very nice) role-playing on Adam’s part.

     If I were running a dungeon delve in an extended, I would never imagine saying “Ok, you’ve found the gold, so now you’re good, we end session here!”. I would always ask the players to deal with the complexities of getting the gold out. That’s half the fun! And investigations, and their resolutions, have just as many complexities. If I’m going to do justice to the scenario, I have to play it through to the end.

     Thank you!