So I was running a one shot that was going to be essentially a murder mystery after an in-game wedding. It was a typical "you're trapped during a storm" scenario that would play out after the wedding, with some PCs being the bride and the groom.

I decided to start the game before the murder, during the wedding, to have the players get a chance to mingle. Then the wedding started and that's when it went off the rails.

One of the players decided they wanted to cancel the wedding because they talked to the bride, another PC, who had gotten cold feet over it. He secretly killed the father in law, which stopped the wedding and caused a panic.

There was just one teensy weensy little problem: the father in law was going to be the villain! When this happened I paused and considered what to do: just tell the player "no"? Fudge some way for the father in law to survive and continue as planned?

I had many alternatives planned for the investigation of the mystery, but not for the culprit himself randomly dying before it started.

What I ended up doing was follow the player's lead: they were essentially going to become the new villain, in my eyes — I could see the potential for a player driven mystery.

However what ended up happening is they basically did nothing after that and the session flopped with nothing left to do except the party figuring out how to get back to civilization.

The session went great for the PCs who were involved in the derail but it flopped for a good many others.

Thinking back on it I wonder if I should have just bit the bullet and denied the entire attempt — my normal approach is to let player agency go where they take it, to let them dictate the game direction, but here it ended up basically ending the game.

Was there something else that should have been done? Or is this just the cost of doing business.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic on December 26, 2020, 05:03:59 AM
So I was running a one shot that was going to be essentially a murder mystery after an in-game wedding. It was a typical "you're trapped during a storm" scenario that would play out after the wedding, with some PCs being the bride and the groom.
...shenanigans follow...

If a PC was playing the groom why did he not try and figure out who just killed his father? Especially since they were all locked up in one place.

Then you have a situation where one group of PC's is trying to unmask the crimes of another. Perfectly fine for a one shot.

If the groom was an NPC, why weren't they trying to catch the players?

Could one of the guests have been police and taken up catching the guilty PC?

Did the other players really show no interest in catching the killer? They knew this was a murder mystery one shot right?

Was this a published scenario, or one you wrote up?

There's a couple of approaches I might have tried

1)  Your approach - the PC becomes the villain and the other PCs hunt him
2)  The PC becomes the villain and NPCs hunt him
3)  Pick someone else to be the main villain

I would not have told the player "No, you can't do that."  That would go against my entire DMing philosophy.  I probably would have gone with #3, then the PCs hunt the villain and NPCs hunt the villain _and_ the PC murderer.  I probably would not have thought of your approach, but it seems the best one without foreknowledge of how it turned out.  Sometimes you do your best and things just don't work out.

Are those players usually this disruptive?  Some folks enjoy that, but if the game is set up to have the players act heroically, I'd prefer to have them stick to that approach.  If these guys regularly murder NPCs randomly, I'd consider replacing them at the table, assuming that your group is primarily for gaming, rather then a bunch of friends who sometimes game and sometimes do other stuff.

Quote from: Jaeger on December 26, 2020, 05:34:39 AM

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic on December 26, 2020, 05:03:59 AM
So I was running a one shot that was going to be essentially a murder mystery after an in-game wedding. It was a typical "you're trapped during a storm" scenario that would play out after the wedding, with some PCs being the bride and the groom.
...shenanigans follow...

If a PC was playing the groom why did he not try and figure out who just killed his father? Especially since they were all locked up in one place.

Seriously, this^

If one of the PCs (or anyone for that matter) killed one of the wedding guests--specially one as visible as the groom's father--why didn't the ENTIRE wedding party flip out? Why did NO ONE try to do an investigation? The guy didn't even get to kill anybody, so as far as the guests were concerned an innocent man was just killed right at an event they were attending, and one of the PCs was related to him. For all they knew they could have been next. But the PCs just packed up and went their merry way?

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic on December 26, 2020, 05:03:59 AM
One of the players decided they wanted to cancel the wedding because they talked to the bride, another PC, who had gotten cold feet over it. He secretly killed the father in law, which stopped the wedding and caused a panic.

The PC's motive to kill the father-in-law was just to stop the wedding? Was there any other reason that provoked this, or was this some kind of "logical" conclusion that came from the player? "I know how to stop this wedding! MURDER!!"

If there was some actual, reasonable motive for the murder, the situation would at least make some kind of sense.

QuoteWhat I ended up doing was follow the player's lead: they were essentially going to become the new villain, in my eyes — I could see the potential for a player driven mystery.

I think that's the best approach. Because although the mystery has changed, it's still salvageable.

It's at that point that you should take a break from the session and start documenting this replacement murder. Write down the location of the murder, the murder weapon used, clues left behind, the time of the murder, who might else have a motive for killing the father-in-law, and have the investigation start. Perhaps you can coordinate with the murderer on whether they want to do anything to obscure the clues, plant false evidence, or do anything to muddy the investigation - don't plant the seed in their mind, but ask them if there's anything they want to do while the investigation is taking place.

QuoteHowever what ended up happening is they basically did nothing after that and the session flopped with nothing left to do except the party figuring out how to get back to civilization.

Why? Weren't the NPCs and PCs fearing for their own lives after finding the dead body? Didn't they have any connections with the father-in-law that would make them care about his fate? Why didn't they show any initiative after the shocking discovery?

QuoteThinking back on it I wonder if I should have just bit the bullet and denied the entire attempt

I think that's the worst course of action you could take. I think that you should continue and let this new mystery play out. There should be ramifications and consequences for the mystery playing out like it did. But, the mystery must involve an investigation after the murder has taken place.

I don't think you're at much fault in this situation - it's mostly the fault of the players for not engaging in the mystery. Perhaps your failing was not having an NPC pick up the ball, start the investigation and pull the PCs into it. Especially if they didn't seize the initiative and do it themselves.

This is your regular campaign, right?

Because if this was a pick-up with a new group of players, talk to the player, and if need byehem out. Part of the social contract is not fucking everything up for everybody else, and that's exactly what the player was doing, if everyone else bought into a murder mystery.

Though if you just mean this was a tangent in your normal campaign, then it's fairly similar, it just requires some additional assessment. How did you sell it to them? Did they buy in? Are they okay with some player just fucking everything up? How well can you improvise? It's perfectly fine to jump the tracks, if the players are all cool with it and you can handle the ad libbing required. It's also fine to run the occasional themed sessions where the expectations are everyone plays along. Work it out. This is a social issue, so you solve it with people skills not some arbitrary rule. Read the room and make a judgment, talk it out, or whatever. Throwing out a player who is incompatible with the group is the nuclear option, but it's better to do that than to constantly ruin everyone's fun.

Your group needs to pick a playstyle and reconsider it's composition.

Many sorts of games, including high-prep scripted stuff like "Whodunnit's?", require buy-in from the whole group.  If the table knew what they were getting into, and a player chooses to murder someone randomly, that isn't "Player Agency", that is intentional derailment. Same situation if your playing a traditional superhero game and one of the hero players decides instead of stopping a crime, to join in. 

RPG's are the only games I know where people purposeful spoil the entertainment of everyone around them and are tolerated.  If we were playing a board game, and someone was intentionally taking 30 minute turns just to make sure the game was ruined/no fun for everyone else, I'd tell to f#$k-off and never invite them to game night again.  Stupid excuses like "The game doesn't have a time limit!" wouldn't change a thing.

Quote from: Two Crows on December 26, 2020, 11:02:08 AM
RPG's are the only games I know where people purposeful spoil the entertainment of everyone around them and are tolerated.

I some multiplayer online video games, this seems to be the main way of playing the game. I sometimes wondered if the players were all a mix of sadists and masochists.

Are they "invite" or Public games?


(Note: My comment reads "and are tolerated".)

Usually the latter have Report/Block/Ban options for just this sort of thing.  If the other players are having fun, you aren't spoiling anything.

Glad it was a one-shot.

You have to ask yourself: if the players decide to do gonzo-crap like this are you enjoying the challenge of coming up with alternative scenarios to match their actions or are you just wasting your time trying to introduce alternative scenarios that they aren't going to have their characters adhere to anyway?

Get some real players who are more serious about what their characters are doing, or would do in this situation, or keep placating this idiotic style of role-playing.  As a DM, the choice is of course yours to make.

At least you got to weed out players not worth playing with so that's something.

Assuming the player that did the murder of the NPC was not doing it just to fuck thing up. Then you made the right option to just roll with it and change gears some.

Personally if the PCs wouldnt go for looking for the murderer then I'd have had the NPCs doing so.

All this assumes no one was just screwing with the session.

One thing to ever keep in mind is...

Not all sessions will be great. Or even ok. Some may fail. But more often you will get a mix. Some part failed, some part was ok or better. You shrug and move on.

As others have mentioned, buy-in is important. What did the players think the game was supposed to be? Was part of the buy-in that they knew this was supposed to be a murder-mystery?

Given a wedding between PCs including one with cold feet, it sounds more like an open-ended drama to me -- whereas mAcular Chaotic was picturing the wedding would go off without a hitch, and the murder mystery would follow. Were the PCs pregenerated? It sounds to me like the PCs were not a team and were working at cross-purposes, which is always a challenge particularly with tabletop RPGs.

There's two issues here:

1) How to better plan a scenario like this?

2) What to do in the moment when things go off the rails?

Addressing these separately:

1) I'd say in tabletop for a murder mystery, it's better if the PCs are a team working together. In a live-action (larp) game - especially with two or more GMs - you can have players working independently of each other, and have other PCs be suspects. But sitting at a table together with one GM, it doesn't work so well to have secret note passing and having the GM constantly pull players aside. That frequently leaves most players sitting around the table with nothing to do.

For a murder mystery, it's easiest to have the PCs be a team and have the murder already happen. Even if they don't kill the suspect, the players can easily disrupt whatever clues you plan and/or stop the murder from happening.

2) For adjusting in mid-play, it sounds like you needed to improvise a hook to bring in the other PCs who hadn't killed the father-in-law. I don't know what the other PCs are or how they would be involved, but some thoughts: (a) other PCs are roped into investigating the father-in-law's murder, and the authorities demand results; (b) the murder motivates some other faction to revenge, so the other PCs have to offset it; (c) others go through the victim's effects and find *his* plans for murder, and that he has an unnamed accomplice.

Ah! The OP missed an opportunity! I would still have the villain be the Father-In-Law, simple act of  feigning his death to ensure he could MURDER EVERYONE and no one would be the wiser. He just needed a patsy, that's why the BRIDE was in on it. To convince the PC to stop the wedding! And to make matters worse, He's a Grand Lich, only using that mortal shell to convince everyone he was truly dead! And the bride is his thrall, greedy and manipulative. She was in it to learn the secrets of immortality, since she has been dabbling in NECROMANCY!
Muh-hahahahahah!

(As a GM, I relished when crap went off the rails! Flexing my creative problem solving skills was a joy! Of course, this presents a problem for the Bride's player, but that's why I always fully stat NPCs who have a large part. Take the character away, give them the NPC to play. In this case... the Skullerymaid or a bridesmaid would do! Shocks the player a bit, when their nice, sweet character turns out to be a monsterous villain! But then, I would never set something up like this anyway. If there's an NPC, I expect the murder-hobos to rear their ugly heads...)

All right, some details.

It was an Amber-esque setup, where the PCs are all members of the two families having the wedding, and everyone was linked to others in some way. Everyone went into it knowing it would have some PvP element because it was going to be our yearly Halloween game with our regular group, a one shot, where we do stuff like this. Some people made more, murder happy characters, as a result, I think.

The game was going to have the father-in-law kick off a Saw-type scenario where the PCs are all trapped and have to figure out how to deal with the situation and each other, balancing paranoia and cooperation.

So pretty much everything was fine, except that the father-in-law got killed before any of that could happen.

The players involved didn't do it just to troll or anything, it's just how they set up their characters -- with various family drama involved. Granted, I didn't think they'd jump straight to murder, or the premise would get bucked, but at the time I also thought it was neat: before I even introduced the murder scenario, the players took it upon themselves to make a murder scenario of their own!

It just ended up not going anywhere afterwards, which only was apparent in hindsight. The rest of the family did indeed prioritize finding out what happened, but it turned into more of a typical "everyone works together to figure out the puzzle" type game, which was okay, rather than the tense and thrilling one that was set up.

At that moment I considered throwing out my old plans and improvising an entirely new situation, but I didn't want to "negate" the consequences of the player's actions and just ran it through with the parameters that had already been established. I'm sure if I just rearranged everything behind the scenes it would have been fine, but that's against my normal DMing style -- maybe I should have there anyway though.

What probably happened is an old one that crops up now and then in gaming.

One or more players pull some stunt thinking it will be fun. But because they did not think it out, or because not everyone in the group is on board, or in some cases even aware... Things can end up puttering out.

In those cases it is usually not done maliciously. Its just a spur of the moment idea acted on without any planning as it were.

Other times the player/s may be just expecting the DM to "do stuff with that".

Lots of possible angles it can occur from.