I am trapped, unable to escape the looming spectre of crime fiction that hangs over my psyche like a guillotine. Maybe, just maybe, this will be my undoing, it will destroy my ability to run games and I will go mad in the pursuit of making investigation compatible with genuine player agency. All I know is that for whatever reason, the genre has been held hostage by some absolutely terrible advice and core ideas of game design. I have rambled extemporaneously about my initial thoughts on this subject over on Youtube, and it is here that I will structure more cogent and specific arguments for the core problem with the genre as it has been thus far handled.
These first few posts will contend directly with the most common advice given to new referees running the game by the most visible and accessible platform: Youtube. It is here that gamemasters running games such as D&D will go to get advice for their first foray into having their players sleuth about. I watched the top 10 or so videos of "How to Run a Mystery Game". I took some bullet notes on them, but for the sake of brevity we are going to cover just 5 of them, especially considering that there is massive overlap across these channels (Almost like everyone in RPGs is just regurgitating the same ideas over and over and over again or something). Without further ado:
Professor Dungeon Master
Professor DM makes his video fairly explicitly about running a mystery in D&D or other similar fantasy games, so the advice is coloured accordingly. There is an bit about how, because he likes running mysteries, he barres certain spells from being taken by player characters that could make the investigation less exciting (Speak to Dead, Read Thoughts, etc.). The idea being that if he wishes to include a mystery in the campaign, the offending character abilities are already dealt with. This is extremely common advice and frankly I get it. It's very easy to say "Just design your crime around a killer who knows to work around these spells", but this gets tiresome and arbitrary quickly, and if you are going to stonewall the use of a player ability anyway, may as well not include it.
He then brings up Chekhov's Gun as a way to illustrate that extraneous details should not be given to the players. If there is something in a room, it needs to be pertinent to The Plot (get ready to hear about The Plot a lot). So if there is a fireplace there needs to be a clue in it, if there is a painting on the wall there needs to be a clue in it, and so forth. This is, frankly, awful advice. If everything that gets described to you as a player is relevant to the plot, you create the weird artificial feeling to the world where not only everything that happens, but everything that exists only does so to serve the needs of the players and the story they are in. This breaks immersion and limits player options, and ironically ensures that the players are denied the ability to pull their own "Chekhov's Gun" maneuvers. One of the great joys of being a player is catching some throwaway detail that the GM includes to add flavour to a scene and utilizing it to your own advantage. When entering the dungeon the GM describes a tattered standard hanging on the wall, its just dressing, it doesn't have any important significance. But a player later using it as a cloth for an impromptu bandage, or to extend their rope a little further, or setting it on fire to smoke out the room, these sorts of spontaneous player actions are a big part of what makes the game fun. Insisting that all details are relevant to The Plot commits the sin of a foregone intended outcome (We call this a Railroad).
Something that did confuse me is that he uses an example from The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh to illustrate an example of "irrelevant details". There is a room on the first floor of the house that has plaster on the floor and the ceiling seems weak. Professor DM suggests that this sort of information will simply stall the game as the players poke around at non-essential data. But this example is a baffling choice, as the plaster on the floor and the weak ceiling is itself a clue, letting the players know that the floor in the rooms above are weak and potentially hazardous. This room is a telegraph for crafty players to be more prepared when they enter Rooms 14 and 15, where the floor can give out on them when they first encounter Ned, a key player in the mystery of the house. Saltmarsh was one of the first modules I played as a young lad, and this detail popped into mind immediately, I remember us carefully testing the floor on the second story of the house because of the data we received from this very room!
He doubles down on this philosophy for NPCs, suggesting things like handouts to remind PCs who is important or avoiding talking in-character as non-relevant NPCs. Not only does this continue to reinforce the artificial feel of the scenario, casting the spotlight only on the things which will drive The Plot forward. This is not a living campaign world, this is a video game with select Essential NPCs.
He then brings up the Gumshoe method of simply giving players the clues they need. This method has long been touted as the Killer App of mystery design, because it keeps the game from grinding to a halt when an important clue is not found. I have a lot of strong opinions about this, and I won't be expounding on them too much. I have intentions of addressing Gumshoe directly in another post, and also because this philosophy will come up again in the other entries on this list. Suffice to say, this is more railroading. This is no different than a DM in a fantasy game telling the adventurers exactly where they need to go and what they need to do to get the McGuffin and Kill the BBEG. It's a theme-park ride, where the players are simply being led through a series of rooms where they are told more details about the mystery until the reveal of The Climax. I said this in my video, but it really seems like investigation games are still trapped in the mindset of "Playing through a story" while fantasy games have figured out that trying to recreate the events of a Dragonlance Novel is not good game design.
He does, when talking about giving them the clues, produce a premise that is strikingly similar to something Brian Renninger posted the other day. He suggests that if the players fail a roll on finding a key clue, instead of having them fail to find the clue, have it take longer to do so. The Call of Cthulhu example is Library Use. If the information is there in the library and a competent academic can find it, and the real question becomes "How Long Will It Take?". Brian makes a similar proposal in his article, where certain skills have a duration cost correlated to the dice roll rather than a simple pass/fail gate. There's a lot of potential here, but I would note that this only matters if the passage of time is consistent and non-arbitrary, otherwise Time is just a magic button the GM can use to punish and reward players, rather than a meaningful resource to be used or preserved according to player intention.
Finally, he recommends some modules that are in the genre, but frankly this is irrelevant to the task at hand. The issue with almost all the advice in this video is apparent: The best way to run a mystery adventure is to carefully keep the players on the rails and whenever possible trick them into not noticing this. In the next post we will deal with the advice given by Baron de Ropp on his channel Dungeon Masterpiece.
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