Today’s theme is “Mystery.”
Mysteries are very hard to do in RPGs. At least part of this
is because RPG characters have skills and adventure writers think that hiding
information behind a skill roll is therefore the thing to do. But there’s
always the chance that someone’s dice will fail, and the entire evening will be
spent with every player knowing exactly where a crucial piece of information
is, but unable to get it because nobody can successfully roll against their
skill.
There are a couple of games that are intended to work around
that. The most popular is the GUMSHOE engine, in which investigative skills
require no roll to use. This allows adventure writers to focus on the actual
mystery rather than hiding information. I have a couple of the games that use
this system but haven’t had the chance to give it a proper run.
Another game that I have tried is InSpectres. Instead of
trying to solve the GM’s carefully crafted puzzle and risk not finding a piece
or putting them together incorrectly, the players ultimate success is
inevitable. They need only accrue the right amount of successful die rolls (of
any type) over the session in order to win and thus “solve the mystery.” It is
a comedy game, naturally.
My own solution to this problem, which I came up with before
I knew about either of these games, was to make sure that whatever “mystery” I
constructed could be solved with information that was there for the asking. The
reason that the party could solve the mystery rather than anyone else who could
simply ask for this information is that I typically gave the party some extra
piece of information that they just happened to be in the right place at the
right time to uncover. They heard the victim’s last words as she died in front
of them. That sort of thing.
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