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Five Decembers Q9: Gaming and investigations
Structurally, most of the book is taken up with McGrady's investigations of the murders in the barn and tracking down Smith. It's also a common pattern in many RPGs. How would you translate this book into a game form? How should you handle the boring legwork? After all, McGrady comments that "more often than not, cases were solved in rooms like [the motor records archive]" as he's faced with manually scanning thousands of paper slips.
A controversial topic-starter. My thinking is that investigations are a bad model for RPGs, as they're normally more about the players solving a puzzle than the characters acting. However, the "mystery" frame is a convenient vehicle for keeping players' attention during extended exposition dumps by the GM. The interesting part of play, for me, comes when the players (and PCs) understand the situation, and then decide what they do about it. It's that decision and action that I'm interested in.
Comments
A question loosely connected to that. You say "It's that decision and action that I'm interested in" which I totally get. Now in a book narrative it is very common for a character to think they understand the situation and pursue a particular course of action, only to discover later on that they have misread it (or maybe been deceived) and then have to backtrack, undo whatever mistakes have been made, and then reinterpret the evidence to arrive at a different conclusion. Does that pattern hold true in gaming as well?
I tend not to enjoy investigative games, so my response is coloured by that. But even general advice about running investigation games is to avoid red herrings and false leads, because the players have so much less awareness of everything, as they're improvising actions in a relatively short gaming session, unlike real investigators who typically have greater skills in the area and more time to think about what's going on, do the legwork of organising and cross-referencing evidence, and so on.
I think there are a couple of other factors that militate against the trope of misunderstanding the situation. One is the general gamer dislike of failure in any form; if RPGs are a power fantasy, we want to be represented as someone who succeeds. The other is the lack of intense time pressure in many investigation scenarios; often, players can wait and gather more evidence rather than being forced to take action immediately. Yes, there are ways of imposing a ongoing progression in the scenario, but it's not (I think) often used to force PCs into action before they're ready.
What's your experience with investigation games? Do you enjoy them?
It's a long time since I did any gaming, but I remember one long-running game (two regular players, sometimes three, plus the GM) where we had to try to solve a problem not of crime but of insurrection - a vague and rather intangible group who would every so often carry out raids and pillaging. A rough analogy would be the border reivers along the England - Scotland border, where we were supposed to be the law-enforcement agents trying to enforce peace and justice. The GM quietly dropped it after a while as we players all found it profoundly frustrating and fruitless. Which I guess bears out your point, though we were all very young and impatient at the time
I’ve also found that mysteries can be very compelling drives both in fiction and in RPGs. By mystery, I both mean ‘a puzzle to be solved’ and also the more existential mysteries explored in SF which are meant to pique curiosity, but are not necessarily solvable.
So yes, I like mysteries, but much more if they can be solved by interiewing people (as McGrady mostly does) than by examining a crime scene, which I agree is boring.
And to Richard: yes, misreading and backtracking are definitely possible, and not necessarily a bad thing. If playing an open campaign without a time limit, this can lead to some interesting side stories. It’s less desirable when the timeframe is tighter, or if there’s a defined goal to play (ie. a plot to be followed).
There's two ways of running investigations in RPGs.
One is the traditional way, where GM prepares a mystery and a set of clues for it, then reveals the clues as the players do things until the players are also able to understand (recreate?) the explanation of the mystery.
The other way, as exemplified recently in Brindlewood Bay, is for the GM to have a situation and some interesting clues, but no idea as to the mystery behind it. Eventually, the players have discovered enough to produce a theory as to who dunnit, and that becomes the solution.
Are either of those more or less satisfying for you in play?
My best successes with mysteries have frankly been published scenarios where the author thought things through well.