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rpgs

Mystery game, part 1
Ok, so as mentioned on the mud, I ran a one-session mystery RPG, based on the principles discussed in this Forge thread.

So, uh, wow. It turns out to be really hard to think of a mystery. I guess this is why mystery authors get paid the big bucks. It's also, as a separate skillset, hard to clue a mystery. This certainly overlaps with general GMing skills to some extent -- knowing when and how much to push or hint to the players.

So, hmm, in terms of plot development, I started off pretty early with wanting to do a locked-room mystery. This is a classic mystery plot and provides plenty of opportunities for deduction. The problem is, it's almost all deduction. This is probably just me being insecure about my GMing skills, but I wasn't sure that a locked-room mystery would provide enough opportunities for me to put the brakes on player deductions if they were going too fast. I realize that's a lame attitude, but my big worry for the game was that it'd be over in an hour and people would feel cheated. Anyway, so after rejecting a pure locked-room mystery, I came onto the idea of a snow-surrounded cabin with some footprints. This limits how many people can come but doesn't require that nobody at all can come, and it leaves a lot of stuff about the exact timing open. I also had this idea about a brother that gets arrested when it was actually the other brother, and that, plus a desire to make it Even More Complicated turned into the murder-disguised-as-suicide-disguised-as-murder which the plot ended up as.

The related good idea to this was to have snow fall partway through the day, erasing the tracks of the guy's arrival, but then someone else fakes his arrival later, confusing the time of death and when alibis are good for and stuff. It's too bad I had to invent the snowshoes thing (which I think is pretty weak -- it seems like something the police might think of) as a way for the guy to get out of the cabin without leaving tracks, but I guess that's life.

Then I just needed someone to have seen him earlier in the day to be able to fix the time of death as earlier than the tracks show, with a reason for that guy not to speak up, and we're in business.

Once the plot was solid, I wrote up a timeline and a personality chart. Normally I am a totally seat-of-the-pants GM, but the essence of mystery solving is to find contradictions and have them be significant, so I wanted to make sure I didn't have too many unintentional ones. I talked katre50 into helping out as an NPC, so having those written up was theoretically helpful there too (in practice, my webserver was broken for much of the game so I'm not sure he got to look at all).

I ran emshort through the plot (with no roleplaying, just her telling me what she does to investigate) and it clocked at 2.5 hours. I figured it was fine. So why did it take 6 hours in actual play? Not that this is necessarily bad -- I mean, it seemed like people were having fun and stuff most of the time. But there were definitely some stretches when people were impatient or bored or not getting to play much, and those are no good. What went wrong?

One major problem, I think, is insufficient hinting. Naturally Holmes notices the most subtle clues since he's got the author on his side:

For the Doctor Watsons of this world, as opposed to the Sherlock Holmeses, success in the province of detective work must be, to a very large extent, the result of luck. Sherlock Holmes can extract a clue from a wisp of straw or a flake of cigar-ash. But Doctor Watson has got to have it taken out for him, and dusted, and exhibited clearly, with a label attached.

The average man is a Doctor Watson. We are wont to scoff in a patronizing manner at that humbler follower of the great investigator, but, as a matter of fact, we should have been just as dull ourselves. We should not have even risen to the modest level of a Scotland Yard bungler. We should simply have hungy around, saying: "My dear Holmes, how—?" and all the rest of it, just as the down-trodden medico did.

For players you really do have to give the clues pretty explicitly and multiple times, and it'll still feel like they're doing hard deduction because it is hard -- look at all the text that doesn't give a clue and compare to the small amount that does. So yeah, I need to get better about that and more willing to give hints, and do it earlier in the session.

The other thing where I clamped down too hard was the theories. I explicitly said "hey, I want theorizing" but in practice people didn't do it, and when they did it often wasn't useful. I think partly this is not knowing how to do it from a player perspective, and partly the usual GM-death-grip where I can't bear to risk the pacing of the game. With the result that I clamp too hard and nobody can figure stuff out and it takes too long.

huskyscotsman pointed out that it's hard for large groups to commit to the decisions -- they'd often mention something, discuss it, talk about pros and cons, and not actually do it. Or they'd do it, but an hour after the subject was raised. This seems sub-optimal, but I'm not quite sure how to fix it. I think the right thing is for the GM to do more to cut off debate and say "ok, right now, what do you do?" but it's hard to know when to do that without, as above, clamping down on things too much.

Also, not as a bad thing but just as an observation, a large part of the enjoyment people in this group (talking about the larger ifMUD roleplaying community here) get from RPGs is acting in-character and doing funny stuff. This, obviously, takes time. More subtly, I think it distracts from the mystery -- people get distracted and go off on tangents instead of doing what you really "should" be doing in a mystery, which is methodically interrogating the NPC and then going on to the next informant. Anyway, since this is something people enjoy, it's not bad. But the moral is that adding an NPC to a mystery can increase the playthrough time of the mystery just as much as adding a plot complication to the mystery itself can.

Another problem with large groups is that it can be hard to keep track of clues. I was giving some clues privately to some people, which probably made it hard for them to enter the group consciousness, but also doing things like two interrogations at once or just engaging in random chit-chat seemed to make it difficult to remember what was going on. This doesn't matter much in my usual games, but in a mystery it actually is important to remember a guy has no alibi for immediately after lunch, but in the morning he was around people the whole time or whatever. I don't know what to do about that. I could keep notes for people, but it seems like this then crosses the line where I am identifying clues for the players, which takes away the fun. Maybe we should try a clue object that people can record things on.

So yeah, overall I thought it went pretty well, but there are a bunch of habits I need to work on -- places where it wouldn't kill me to let the players know something without hassle. Even though working out the mystery is the point here, there'll always be another complication down the line.


And here is the transcript of The Mystery of the Misplaced Boot.

Stanley says, "Now then, hold on a moment, everyone."
Stanley says, "These footprints may be jolly important."
Stanley says, "They indicate the prints of feet."