Hmm. I think I can bridge a few topics.

Quote from: AtomicPope on March 06, 2022, 03:55:49 AM
That's the danger of improvising with mystery games: information gets left out and it can quickly become inconsistent or incoherent.

I'm trimming that down an interesting post to a short snippet, but I think this is the key thing to emphasize. I have spent a significant amount of time specifically making a system which does nothing but fair play detective fiction, and it's forced me to concede that there are hard limits to the RPG game genre. I think I've come up with some interesting work-arounds, but I don't actually think that a traditional criminology Agatha Christie style whodunit is possible in RPGs. I think that the real trick is to understand that playing a game of espionage and counter-espionage with a villain plays better into player tastes and tends to run in the RPG format better than running a hardboiled detective fiction story with only one preset answer, and it's pretty easy to color these to look and feel like a traditional criminology murder mystery.

This is increasingly why I don't try to GM as either a Storyteller or as a Referee. I roleplay my villains.

The way this plays out is the party enters an area, and the villain already has 3-4 schemes in play as they arrive. As the players interact with NPCs and the environment, they naturally find things which are out of place (no dice necessary; I run an extension of Gumshoe, where the act of giving the PCs clues receive clues is what gives the villain's scheme permission to continue.) The multiple schemes means that the story doesn't break if the PCs fail to figure out a particular scheme, and the villain can still make plot progress despite the players defusing a scheme. You can also softly predestine events by having multiple schemes which can end in the same way. Need a town mayor to die? Assassinate with a crossbow? Poison? Creating a building collapse? Why choose? You can have all three in play at once.

There are problems with this approach. It reduces player agency because the villains are the ones being proactive, for instance. I really like AtomicPope's story about the players setting a trap; good parties deal with smart and proactive antagonists by being smart and proactive themselves.

I suppose another problem is that you need to aim the villain's schemes past the PCs, but close enough that they will feel uncomfortable and react. That requires players with a pretty strong "bite the plot hook" mentality, because the only way this really works is if there's some bad blood between the party and the villain.

All I know for sure after reading this is that I want to introduce Quantum Monsters into my setting... undead (i.e. neither alive nor dead) who are able to teleport between two points at will. 

Goes well with the teleporting encounter.

Even better is if the teleporting encounter and teleporting undead both jump to the PCs location at the same time the resulting sub-atomic explosion should kill everything on the planet and save the DM any more hassle with thinking. 

Quote from: AtomicPope on March 06, 2022, 03:55:49 AM
Since someone brought up mysteries I have to comment.  I've run several mystery campaigns that lasted many years (Mage the Awakening was a long one, nearly 4 years of playing 5 to 6 hours every week).  Mystery games have a very different pacing, and much of the game's enjoyment comes from reveals.  As a DM, you need to have a clear event in your mind: something happened.  That's different from the traditional dungeon where the event is often a part of history (tombs, abandoned castles, this one time in bandit camp, etc).  The mystery game involves an unfolding of history.  When I'm crafting an adventure I try to "layer" my clues and witnesses, and obviously I employ Chekhov's Gun.  What I mean by "layering" is there are clues that are immediately found and others that are discovered along the way.  To maintain a thematic structure I try to have one or more clues that gain meaning as the game progresses.  This new information leads to another location, clue, witness etc.  Think of it like a Theater of the Mind Dungeon, where the PCs are moving down paths, getting keys to doors, getting ambushed, etc.  Just like in a dungeon you don't get to teleport directly to "The End" because no one knows where that is just yet.  You might know there's a dragon at the end, just like the PCs might know there's a murderer or a thief.  In order to avoid skipping ahead it's good to have a series of events in mind (an outline works great here) that take place over several different locations.  That doesn't lend itself to just making shit up as the game moves along.

So, I'm currently running a detective game and I just ran into a snag I explicitly planned on avoiding.  Not kidding.  When I typed up the outline I specifically had these two different witnesses and three different clues revealing locations, events, history, and information to build on the story, but then I screwed up.  Last week I was under immense stress during the game because just before the game, as I was sitting in traffic, I learned my father died.  When I arrived wasn't focused at all but decided not to say anything and just run the game anyway.  I accidentally mixed up a vital clue with a witness testimony and it rearranged the order of what took place.  When it came to the overall narrative things the PCs jumped way ahead, skipped a vital witness and location, both of which added context to the story and revealed the shady past of the dead man they were investigating.  This meant that the PCs met with a dangerous witness way too soon (they didn't know he was dangerous because the original clues were mixed up) which immediately caused a fight they weren't expecting, like a really, REALLY dangerous fight that almost ended in a TPK.  I had to improvise the entire situation and introduce new clues because they skipped ahead do to my screw up.  In the end it worked out but for a while there the players were like "WTF is happening?!"

That's the danger of improvising with mystery games: information gets left out and it can quickly become inconsistent or incoherent.

In this same detective game there were times when the players accurately read the clues, listened to the witnesses, and guessed what happened way ahead of time.  There was an adventure where the PCs were looking for two things: a missing person and his missing box he had with him.  That was actually a fun game because as a DM I knew they were overlooking one key detail.  When the PCs laid a trap for their suspect he avoided it, not because he knew it was a trap but because they forgot one very important detail and that "trap" wasn't a trap at all.  That was a lot of fun for everyone.  Here's what happened:

The PCs were looking for two things:
1) A missing box containing a McGuffin.
2) A missing person  was an old disabled vet who was carrying the box, got robbed and shot several times in the chest.  Then he jumped from the train and disappeared.

Because it's D&D and takes place in Eberron I was playing within the bounds of known mechanics, lore, and established places.  The missing person was a disabled veteran of the Last War.  He had a Dragonmark (a magical birthmark) on his left hand.  His left hand was blown off and now he has a mechanical replacement, a magical prosthetic.  The PCs figured out that he was seen in two places at the same time based on witness testimony they pieced together, which is impossible for a low-level Artificer who specializes in prosthetics (no Simulacrum or Clones).  One of the places he frequented was a run by Changlings, basically dopplegangers.  They figured out that there's a Changling impersonating him.  Then all of a sudden the missing person appears on their doorstep looking for his box.  Very suspicious.  What the players didn't piece together was the place the missing person would frequent was a "living theater of memories" called Velvet's in Sharn.  The Changlings used a telepathic link to gain memories of the clients, change into the person or people they desired, wear the appropriate clothes using Garbs of Many Fashions, and then using those memories reenact the events the clients paid for.  That was the detail they overlooked (they knew what Velvet's did).  They didn't realize the Changling discovered something while digging around in the old vet's memories, something that could make him rich (he owed money which is why they cut off his hand to identify him because a Changling can't simply grow a new hand), and that's why the ambush was successful.

The trap the players laid out was a simple memory trap they called "where's the spoons?"  If he was the real person he would know where the spoons were in his own house.  Of course the Changling did know because he had access to the client's basic memories, and people never rearrange their kitchen.  What they overlooked was the fact that the Changling had two right hands.  The missing person was wearing the only prosthetic right hand he had left in the house, which was a tinkered model the old vet built for a friend but didn't give it to him.  The other left hand, his spare, was inside his suitcase that was part of the clues (this was a red herring to get the idea in the player's heads that the missing person would show up without a left hand and it worked).  There was another prosthetic but it wasn't a left hand.  The Changling wouldn't know what happened after the last time he plundered the old vet's mind for secrets, that both hands were taken.  So the Changling, who was double-crossing the gang that stole the box, led the PCs into a trap where he stole the box while the PCs were fighting with the gang and ran off in the middle of combat.  Then when they were returning to tell their client they found the box but a Changling stole it, the real missing person appeared and he had a hunch where the Changling was going to sell the box and why.  So now the PC detectives must venture into the seedy underbelly of the city looking for a person with two right hands.  Clues and layers.


The Mysterious Box adventure seems convoluted because I designed like that.  Lots of little clues that reveal more and more along the way.   Compare this to the previous adventure where the PCs skip ahead and it's very different.  I can say first hand that mysteries are best DMed with an outline in hand and a clear idea of the events that took place in mind.  That doesn't mean there is a railroad (ironically the Mystery Box started on a rail car because one of the PCs was a railway engineer who was down-sized out of a job so I wove that into the story) or an illusion of choice.  Just like a dungeon there are only so many rooms and hallways, traps and monsters, and we have a particular boss fight in mind.

That's really impressive.  I'd love to play in a game like that