Obviously, I agree; players in a mystery-RPG do not have to successfully solve the mystery.  This is not a story, or a novel, its a game, and you can fail at it.

My own mystery adventure in Gnomemurdered, "Murder, She Gnomed" presents the very real possibility of the player characters never solving the mystery; in no small part because the gnomes start to murder everyone else.  Even so, the first murder is explicitly NOT a Gnome-murder, and when I've run this scenario the players were genuinely interested in trying to figure out who did it.

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Quote from: RPGPundit;420398Obviously, I agree; players in a mystery-RPG do not have to successfully solve the mystery.  This is not a story, or a novel, its a game, and you can fail at it.
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Once people open themselves up to the possibility of failure in the game, I think it gets a whole lot more interesting. Same with character death.

Quote from: danbuter;420160I like the idea of solving the mystery gives a bonus, but isn't necessary to complete the adventure (unless the mystery is the adventure). This derives from several puzzles I had in dungeons that I thought were relatively easy, which ground the game to a halt while the players wasted a lot of time trying to figure them out.

Even if solving the mystery is the point of the adventure, failing to solve it can be satisfying if the consequences of failure are interesting. As a principle for adventure design, I think of it as "Either you get the mystery, or the mystery comes and gets you."

So, for example, in Castle Bravo, an adventure for Trail of Cthulhu, if you can't figure out how to stave off the Lovecraftian weirdness, the results are literally cataclysmic--how specifically depends on how the PCs fail.

Another way of thinking about it is I guess to plan for failure. That way PC success comes across as a real achievement.

One of the problems with a mystery game is that you aren't really there to see the clues. To work, the gm pretty much needs to spell the fuck out what is going on. That means you need clues that players can do something with, instead of directly infer the answer, which can be hard.

I try to plan for the consequences of failure for most PC quests/mysteries... and don't set up situations (the fate of the world hangs in the balance!!!) where failure is not an option. Usually failures to stop the villain/ritual/train lead to increasingly dangerous paths... more likelihood of someone snuffing it.
As for setting up clues... this article has a nice talk about avoiding bottlenecks in mystery games.

Quote from: RPGPundit;420129What's more, what if instead of D&D, you're playing an Agatha Christie style murder mystery? How do you handle that, with the real possibility existing that unlike in the genre that is being emulated, the PCs might utterly fail at finding the culprit?

You start by understanding that emulating a genre is different than emulating a style of fiction. RPGs are not novels, and you shouldn't try to make them be.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;420173What I do try to do though, is make sure that failure is just as exciting. In most instances this means there is a consequence for failing to solve the mystery.

That's pretty much my Golden Rule for any kind of situation a GM presents: any action, including inaction, on the part of the PCs should have consequences. The game doesn't stop because of a failure, it just shifts in a new direction.

Failures should create complications more than roadblocks. They can be far-reaching, long term complications, but failure doesn't mean the end.

I'm going be running a mystery game starting in 6 hours. It's the third and final part of the mystery.

If all goes well, the detective PCs will arrest the murderer, intercept the arms shipment in the Port of Rotterdam, and establish their newly formed EU police unit as a force to be reckoned with. They will also find a thread of new clues leading to the illegal arms supplier (and so the start of a new case).

If they fuck up, none of the above will happen, and their unit will be disbanded as a bunch of losers (and lots of 'allied' established police forces would love to see this happen). And of course, they may even get killed.

Without the chance of failure, there is no game.

And I agree, failure should be interesting - a less total screw up than that described above would see them struggling for survival with a crippled budget, and a rep for being useless - and probably with most of the important criminals getting away.

The whole question of a chance of failure means focusing on definite investigations to be cracked.

What about the generation of a sense of mystery among the players simply for the sake of doing so and not as a necessarily critical step in their immediate task? Has anyone else thought about or employed that?

Cos I've seen it all the time but nobody seems to articulate it very much in those terms.

Quote from: Omnifray;420535The whole question of a chance of failure means focusing on definite investigations to be cracked.

What about the generation of a sense of mystery among the players simply for the sake of doing so and not as a necessarily critical step in their immediate task? Has anyone else thought about or employed that?

Cos I've seen it all the time but nobody seems to articulate it very much in those terms.

That will often arise naturally in play, as you say. I don't generally attempt to generate it as a goal, however. It's a natural consequence of NPCs doing things that the PCs aren't entirely privy to.