Over the Christmas break, I caught up on a bit of reading for 'pleasure' with CHAOS, Tom O'Neill's account of his madcap 20-year effort to get to the heart of the Manson murders. I don't think this is a spoiler - the effort was fruitless. But the book does throw up a huge amount of fascinating speculation, and thereby succeeds in casting a lot of doubt on the 'official' story as to why the Tate-LaBianca killings happened. It may be the only book of its kind - devoted to debunking a widely accepted version of events and then, Rashomon-like, giving a smorgasbord of other options to believe in without itself committing to any of them. In the end, I don't think it quite works, but it is at least a riveting read.
The experience of reading CHAOS, in any case, struck me as a good metaphor for a problem that has always made it difficult for me to conceive of running a genuine investigative 'mystery' game - namely, coming up with an Agatha Christie-level scenario that the players can solve, which doesn't feel too easy or too hard, and which doesn't rest on the tabletop RPG equivalent of pixel-bitching. That is to say, good mystery stories are like intricate faberge eggs in which every detail matters and the solution requires careful elucidation and focused awareness of all moving parts. And this isn't what tabletop RPGs excel at - RPG players are mainly good at causing, well, chaos, like a herd of bulls in a series of china shops. Coming up with a good, interconnected series of clues, NPCs, etc., in such a way that a group of players can figure out a way to the final mystery without getting sidetracked feels like a prohibitively difficult challenge.
RPG mysteries, in other words, strike me as being rather like O'Neill's frustrated attempts to uncover the truth about what really motivated Charles Manson. He starts off with a curious sequence of events - the murders themselves. And then he starts pulling at various threads which lead him to a haphazard collection of encounters with drug dealers, record producers, Beach Boys, former police officers, district attorneys, private investigators, washed up actors and has-beens, Hollywood stars and CIA spooks. He learns about elephants being dosed up with LSD, the infiltration of hippie-dom by the FBI, the corruption of the LA Sheriff's Office, possible murders incompetently disguised as suicides, free love gone wrong, torture and mayhem. It's very entertaining. But it goes nowhere.
It reads, in other words, rather like the 'Actual Play' from an RPG campaign (Unknown Armies, maybe?) in which the DM flung together an initial mysterious scenario and a big cast of NPCs, locations and events connected to it, without having a clear idea in his own mind what was really going on behind the scenes or what 'really happened' - and then just let the PCs have at it and see what they stumbled through. And whenever it seemed like they were about to exhaust a lead, he'd throw three more into the mix. It strikes me that somebody could easily run a campaign that way almost indefinitely, with the PCs going about ostensibly investigating something (a murder, a paranormal event, etc.) and from there simply uncovering yet more mysteries, going down rabbit hole after rabbit hole, having weird encounter after weird encounter, and never actually coming to an end. This would be a sort of open-ended investigation in which the journey was everything and the destination nonexistent.
This, I think, would at least be achievable and is, I suppose, what is really implied behind the classic idea of a Call of Cthulhu campaign - a sort of sandbox of plot hooks that the PCs pursue until death or insanity claims them. But would it be satisfactory to actually play?
Disclaimer: I've never run a "mystery"-type game. I did play in a brief (somewhat-railroady) one 9-10 years ago.
ReplyDeleteMy gut reaction to the idea of such a campaign, one with no actual truth or ultimate conclusion, is that it sounds pretty unsatisfying. Kinda disingenuous too, if the players are invested in getting some real answers. Even if the DM doesn't have a clear idea of the truth at the outset, it's not too hard to put together a broad-strokes outline of "what's really going on" after a few sessions, and maybe set more things in stone as the game goes on.
Yes, it would have to have buy-in from the players. This game will be about unsolved mystery along the lines of a Lovecraft or Ligotti story.
DeleteI'm intrigued by InSpectres, a Ghostbusters-like game where the players suggest the explanation for the events. No idea how it works (You have to play several scenes till you have several clues, then you propose an explanation and what to do about it?). Also, no idea if it would work; with the right people, maybe, with the Friday night get-together-and-cause-imaginary-havoc crowd, maybe not.
ReplyDeleteAndy Slack's blog (hws3.wordpress.com) had play reports from The Dracula Dossier, which does seem to be an intricate mystery.
Anzon
Yes, I know what you mean - that could work, though better as a story game.
DeleteWould that be sort of like Twin Peaks? :-)
ReplyDeleteIndeed!
Delete"Coming up with ...without getting sidetracked..."
ReplyDeleteThat "without getting sidetracked" really jumped out at me. I think you are describing a railroad. You could easily rewrite the sentence as "How do I get a party of PCs to go through an adventure without getting sidetracked?"
Maybe you just need to let that go and accept that some mysteries will never be solved, others will be solved very quickly and some will be talked about for ever, and you will never know which will be which?
Yes, but I think if you were doing a mystery story game 'properly' it would have to be a kind of quasi-railroad in that there is one crime and one solution that has to be found. There has to be that structure to things. The reason I say 'quasi-railroad' is that the way of getting from A to Z might involve lots of different clues and potential avenues of investigation. But A and Z still have to be in the position they are in, if you follow.
DeleteThere is a wonderful game called "Technoir" by Jeremy Keller that is exactly what.you describe. It is an endless noir-esque investigation powered by a clever connection map mechanic that you build up during play.
DeleteThe way I've run mysteries that make them more fun for me to keep things in motion:
ReplyDelete-Whatever did the crime is going to keep on doing crimes during the investigation. That provides more clues for the PCs to pick up on if they missed important initial clues but the longer the PCs fail to figure out what's going on the more damage the criminal (or supernatural force or whatever) can do. Continually raise the stakes.
-Once the criminal (or supernatural force or whatever) figures out that the PCs are investigating them they'll try to shut down the investigation. This will start small (sending corrupt cops after the PCs, having low-level thugs hassle them, etc.) and slowly escalate to the point where the criminal calls in all of the favors they can to set up a big ambush on the PCs. Again, continually raise the stakes.
So eventually the PCs are going to figure out what's going on basically inevitably. So the point of doing well at investigation and understanding the clues isn't to find what happened, but rather to find out what happens quickly (and quietly) enough that the PCs can get the drop on the criminal instead of the criminal getting the drop on the PCs.
That's a really concise summary, thanks. Something to ponder if I'm gonna do a mystery game.
DeleteCHAOS was such an amazing book! I ended up caring little about any sort of conclusion and so enjoyed the journey itself. I very much look forward to rereading it in 10 years when it's a faint memory
ReplyDelete> That is to say, good mystery stories are like intricate faberge eggs in which every detail matters and the solution requires careful elucidation and focused awareness of all moving parts. And this isn't what tabletop RPGs excel at...
ReplyDeleteMy eyes are opened! Add this to the list of often-attempted, seldom-succeeded genres in TTRPG, but also pointing the way out (a more chaotic approach to mysteries and info-exploration).
Are you familiar with the game Brindlewood Bay (and its many spin-offs)? It bills itself as Murder She Wrote meets Call of Cthulhu, and one of the thing that appeals to me about it (although I've not yet had a chance to play it) is that it is a murder mystery, but there is no set solution - the players must themselves propose a solution and, depending on how many clues they manage to work into their explanation (and, of course, the roll of the dice) it may turn out to the the "correct" one.
ReplyDeleteAn random tought: perhaps police procedurals are better suited to RPG's than proper mysteries of the whodunnit type? Policework requires a lot of specialized skills for properly documenting things - such as those a group of pcs, instead of the brilliant, but kinda immaterial, hunches of a singular Belgian gentleman - in order to not only figure out what is happening, but to actually convict the guilty party. This needs not to be dour: to invoke the oldest example in the book, Columbo episodes can be quite fun ("In falling for this trap and braking in the car repair shop to steal the victim's contact lenses from the trunk right in front of the hiding comissioner you have proved your guilt, Mr. Such-and-So!"). Sure, maybe you dont want to follow that recipe to the letter (with the guilty party very clear from the start and the whole effort being a 'hunt') but incorporating the 'meta-problem' of "alright, it was him, but how we prove it beyond reasonable doubt?" could game-ify things further.
ReplyDeleteI feel like a version of this already exists the hex crawl, just use most of the tools associated with the hex crawl on a clue map and have the player characters be motivated to find something that they never actually produce. Probably also create some kind of mapping based xp based on recording their evidence and trying out alternatives.
ReplyDeleteThen people's goal is to discover what is going on in a given situation while not making enemies, though with that being a clear possibility as you roll reaction rolls for them all the time.
I think I would find playing in a scenario like that really unsatisfying. I would also find running unsatisfying. I did once run a mystery game where I shifted gears after realising my original premise was too grim to work with my group of players, and I re-structured everything, but I only changed the answer, I didn't have no answer at all.
ReplyDeleteIt is very hard to run a good mystery though. I find system really matters. Games like Dungeons and Dragons, especially later editions, need really careful planning to take into account all the magical ways people can get information for example. A modern game needs to acknowledge that players will want to use the internet. Perhaps that is why the most popular settings for mysteries are 1920s and earlier, because it allows for more control over information access on the GM side and less ability to flip the table with some ability or technology on the player side.
I think mystery adventures like this are among the hardest to prep, and I'm a bit too lazy to do it these days, but done well it's up there among the absolute best experiences in roleplaying. Very different to your classic high agency OSR game but equally valuable I think, and harder to pull off for sure.
I remember L2 as a pretty good mystery adventure. Anybody run or play through that one?
ReplyDelete