Quote from: PseudoephedrineI think our disconnect on the commonality of "detective" games might come because I count all that "occult investigator" stuff as detective games. There is, to me at least, a great deal of difference between a detective game and a detective story and a police procedural, even if the former stars the cops and the latter has a detective as the hero.

Detective games to me are the sort that tend to focus on "solving mysteries", by getting lots of "clues" and then weaving a plausible story out of them. Police procedurals are all about building cases by accumulating evidence. The two activities are not identical. I think the former is done often enough in RPGs that it's old hat. I may have missed counter-examples, but I'm not aware of any RPG out there that makes PCs build cases.

BTW, this thread is pretty useful in that I'm starting to get an idea for how to design a really neat police procedural RPG. More on that some other time.

That makes sense, in my personal parlance I would call the occult games investigative games, for me detective games would involve people who were formally detectives.  Using your equally valid parlance though I agree that there is plainly a difference between detective games and police procedurals.

Police procedurals generally don't follow through to trial, Law and Order is kind of unique in that.

Fruit of the poisoned tree and so on matters, because it has consequences, but those consequences tend to be off screen until the bad guy recurs in the plot having been released due to those errors.

87th Precinct people, check it out, damn near created the police procedural genre.

There is an investigative game called Esoterrorists that I recall a lot of people saying it had innovative rules for investigation.  Has anyone here read it?

Pete