Teaching Players To Be Better Detectives

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Neurosis
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Teaching Players To Be Better Detectives

Post by Neurosis »

Through play, or otherwise!

Right now I'm running a Call of Cthulhu campaign (I'm using lightly modified HERO System, but that tells you nothing about it, whereas if I say it's "Call of Cthulhu", that's a 90% accurate statement about the tone and milieu) that is very investigation heavy. It seems to be at least 75% sleuthing to 25% fighting. Well, the action splits that way. More actual time is spent being/roleplaying being terrified/disturbed/losing sanity than fighting, but anyway I digress...it's very investigation heavy. (I'm not sure if this is relevant, but everyone is very on board with the basic vanilla CoC concept of "this shit is scary and we are open to being scared", so generally game sessions are pretty serious and intense. Also I'm taking liberties with the Mythos and the average Mythos knowledge among the players is moderately low to nonexistent, and that helps).

I've noticed that while not terrible at investigative gameplay, my players aren't exactly great detectives either. How can I teach them to be better investigators through play? I want them to actually experience the joy of developing hypotheses and occasionally being right, rather than them being stumped on what lead to follow next and me eventually taking pity on them and letting them make a deduction roll to figure something out.

Ideally, I'd put them in a clockwork orange style theater with their eyes pried open and force them to watch hundreds of hours of police procedural, but that's obviously not an option, so what is?

Oh, a caveat: all of the players are obviously ENJOYING the sleuthing gameplay, so it's not like that is the wrong jam for this group. They're just not especially good at it and I want to train them to be better detectives.

(Oh, generally, I'm not a fan of the "make a perception roll to see if you look in the right place" approach to investigating a crime scene. If I know something is under the bed, for instance, I'd rather award that clue to the PC that specifically says "I look under the bed" than the one with the best perception roll who isn't especially specific about where in the bedroom they're searching.)
Last edited by Neurosis on Fri Jul 24, 2015 6:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Occluded Sun »

Have you taken a look at 'Trail of Cthulhu'? It's basic idea is that detective stories don't transition well to old-school RPGs, since bad rolls or uninspired players can pass over vital clues.

The basic idea behind Trail is that the basic clues come nigh-automatically, and successful rolls and clever characters produce better outcomes and additional information. The mechanics are full of ways to divulge information, and are designed specifically to facilitate that.
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Re: Teaching Players To Be Better Detectives

Post by Previn »

Schwarzkopf wrote:(Oh, generally, I'm not a fan of the "make a perception roll to see if you look in the right place" approach to investigating a crime scene. If I know something is under the bed, for instance, I'd rather award that clue to the PC that specifically says "I look under the bed" than the one with the best perception roll who isn't especially specific about where in the bedroom they're searching.)
I hate this on so many levels.

You're asking the players which much less knowledge of their surroundings in game to figure out what you did/where the clue is through 20 questions. Unless you've given them a reason to specifically look under the bed, it's assaine to waste half an hour with:

PC: I search the closest.
DM: There's some clothing and an old steamer trunk.
PC: I search the steamer trunk.
DM:It's full of old photos, but none that are relevant.
PC: I search the desk.
DM:You find some tax forms and various office supplies.
PC: Ok, then I search the dresser.
DM:It's full of cloths, with some more adult items hidden in a corner, but nothing else of interest.
PC: Ok, then, I search nightstand next to the bed.
DM:There's a little light reading and an alarm clock.
PC: Ok, how about the bed?
DM:Finally! You've managed to find Clue #1. It had basically nothing to do with actual investigation, but good job!

God help everyone if you demand a search check for each of those interactions. I really don't want to play 'flail about in the dark until you guess the GM's riddle/clever idea.'

A search roll prevents crap like the above from wasting everyone's time. If the players have a reason to specifically search the bed, they should just search it and be given the clue without a roll. Ideally the clue that brought them to the room with the bed also provided some hint to search the bed.

If the players will dead end if they don't find a clue, it should not be something they have to roll for unless you want the game to come to a crashing halt when they miraculous fail that search check.

If you want an investigation, you need to have clues that logically point from one to another without requiring the players to guess at things.
Last edited by Previn on Fri Jul 24, 2015 6:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Username17 »

Basically what you're describing is the game "guess what I'm thinking of." It's a stupid game, and the only way to get good at it is to learn more about the person whose thinking you're supposed to be guessing. If you're spinning an entertaining yarn while this is going on, the players may indeed have a good time. But the game portion is the kind of thing we might as well put finger quotes on and call a "game." Like those "hunt the pixel" games of the late 80s and early 90s, asking people to guess what phrases you've arbitrarily decided need to be uttered before the next clue pops out is pretty much totally unfair.

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As described, you've given us pretty much no evidence that your players are bad detectives rather than you being something of an intransigent ass. If you want detectiving to work in an RPG format, you have to have the whole whodunnit nonsense be totally fluid. The players find clues wherever they think to go, many of which are made up on the spot. And then you listen to the players hypothesize based on those clues and adapt your fucking storyline to fit the coolest direction the players suggest.

To do it your way, the players can't ever become "good" because you are fucking cheating. You're playing the "What have I got in my pocket?" play in a riddle game, and as Bilbo demonstrated that is unfair.

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Post by vagrant »

Basically, there are really two different ways to do decent rpg investigation. One is Frank's method, which really deals with your ability to extemporize. The second, if you want that feeling of 'Elementary, my dead Watson!' for your players, then you have to draw attention to the obvious clues.

For example, if you want people to search under the bed, you need to give it something descriptive, and hide the detail in the scene desc. So like,

'The room has clearly been torn apart, with the bed totally wrecked, and the various dressers and drawers similarly demolished.'

Then ask for an average perception roll, and tell whover makes it 'You notice a clear spot on the floor near the bed that's free of dust.'

Then they search there. You really sometimes need to make it obvious.
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Post by kzt »

Essentially, if I'm role-playing a skilled detective I have skills involving finding clues, interrogating suspects etc and since it is a fucking game I want to USE the skills I have to find clues and interrogate suspects, not play 20 questions. I suppose if you wanted us to roleplay 1920s police interrogation by tying you to a chair and beating the answer out of you I'd be willing to roleplay that out, but I doubt you had that in mind.
Last edited by kzt on Fri Jul 24, 2015 10:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Shady314 »

You can't teach players to be better detectives in my experience. Some people are good at piecing stuff together into a coherent theory and some people aren't. You make the players feel better at it by making it easier on them because investigation is hard enough when interacting with the real world let alone the GM's imagination in a fantasy world in which they probably do not know all the rules.

My first investigative heavy game I ran had one player that felt she needed to interview almost every single person who had ever interacted with the victim. That was partly my fault because I thought hey the victim needs to feel like a real person for them to care right? So I came up with a lot of details and extraneous crap they could learn about him that wasn't terribly relevant to the mystery. So of course she took that and runs with it and wants to interview every teacher he had before dropping out of school 2 months ago... mea culpa.

So try to avoid not just red herrings but any extraneous information that isnt laser focused on the plot/mystery is the lesson I learned.

Like Frank said you gotta adapt to where the players go. Though I never planned on it I made sure the one player got a clue from the teachers. Because if I said you learn nothing then we wasted time and she would feel bad/useless.

Like Previn said don't make the players the investigators. That's why characters have skills the players don't. The victim's diary under the bed should be found immediately. The second secret diary will take some work and rolls.
Last edited by Shady314 on Fri Jul 24, 2015 10:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Orion »

Police procedurals are not written by having one writer think up a mystery and another writer guess things for the protagonist to try until they get the right one. Nobody involved in producing a procedural, at any point, is called on to actually work out the answer to the mystery from the clues provided. In fact, this is frequently impossible, because when the big reveal comes where the hero explains how they solved the crime, it frequently depends on a clue that was not mentioned at any point prior to that moment, either because it's a trivia fact the character already knew but has just remembered or because they investigated something off-screen.

Procedural characters spend most of their time following "hunches," and while they are almost wrong about who did it, or why, or what the central issue is, these hunches almost never turn out to be dead ends. If they decide to go talk to the deceased's high school teachers, then even if turns out that everything they were thinking when they decided to do that was completely wrong and the teachers aren't connected in any way, they will still accidentally learn some fact or spot some picture that turns out to be relevant in the end.

If you want players to solve mysteries in a reasonable time, you need to make sure that whatever leads (or imagined leads) they follow pay off. There are two ways to do this. Frank provided one: you can improvise the mystery as you go, inserting clues wherever the players decide to look. This tips your game toward being a bear world but it totally works. You can improvise everything including the guilty party, or you can think up the answer and 3-4 major clues and tuck those clues in wherever you can. The other choice is to explicitly tell your players where to look. Like, outright tell them "you have a hunch that X might be important." This tips your game toward being action-adventure because the players' challenge is more to get their characters safely from set piece to set piece, but it totally works. You can include as many branching paths as you like.
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Post by Previn »

Orion wrote:Police procedurals are not written by having one writer think up a mystery and another writer guess things for the protagonist to try until they get the right one. Nobody involved in producing a procedural, at any point, is called on to actually work out the answer to the mystery from the clues provided. In fact, this is frequently impossible, because when the big reveal comes where the hero explains how they solved the crime, it frequently depends on a clue that was not mentioned at any point prior to that moment, either because it's a trivia fact the character already knew but has just remembered or because they investigated something off-screen.
No, that's just the terrible 'appeal to our don't want to have to think audience' ones. Good detective stories/shows will give you all the clues to reach the same conclusion as the protagonist without any hidden reveals or knowledge you couldn't have as well.
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Post by silva »

What Frank said.

Also, as Occluded Sun suggested, take a look at Trail of Cthulhu.
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

Orion wrote:If you want players to solve mysteries in a reasonable time, you need to make sure that whatever leads (or imagined leads) they follow pay off. There are two ways to do this. Frank provided one: you can improvise the mystery as you go, inserting clues wherever the players decide to look. This tips your game toward being a bear world but it totally works. You can improvise everything including the guilty party, or you can think up the answer and 3-4 major clues and tuck those clues in wherever you can. The other choice is to explicitly tell your players where to look. Like, outright tell them "you have a hunch that X might be important." This tips your game toward being action-adventure because the players' challenge is more to get their characters safely from set piece to set piece, but it totally works. You can include as many branching paths as you like.
If you go with the second option in a play-by-post game, you can note important clues / interactables with a different font color.
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Post by silva »

It amuses me that still exist players that appreciate this playstyle nowadays.
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Post by rasmuswagner »

Most police shows are fucking terrible examples of investigative play, because the guy who is introduced at the 10 minute mark but not under suspicion is probably the perp, and the guy put under suspicion at the 11 minute mark clearly isn't.
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Post by rasmuswagner »

One thing I like to do when GMing investigations is couching everything in terms of the characters' paradigms. Like, this guy is a cop, he's on the lookout for crooks and troublemakers, but he can't tell an accountant from an account manager from a contract attorney. This guy is a careerist, he notices power and the relationships that flow from it. This guy is a poker player, he's always looking for tells.
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Post by Dogbert »

If there's something I've learned from over 10 years of running superpowered police procedurals, global conspiracies, and temples of doom is this:

1) My "obvious" clues are rarely obvious.
2) My name is not Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, nor did I graduate from the police academy and took the detective course. Chances are, I'm not half as good at writing mysteries as I think.
3) My players did not graduate from the police academy and took the detective course... nor are they under any obligation to do so. It is my work to make things as easy to follow for them as possible.

Are you familiar with Gumshoe? That one is basically the system for running detective stories. The system for the action skills is not exactly perfect, but their system for Investigation skills is just the right tool for the job.
Last edited by Dogbert on Sat Jul 25, 2015 8:02 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Orion »

rasmuswagner wrote:One thing I like to do when GMing investigations is couching everything in terms of the characters' paradigms. Like, this guy is a cop, he's on the lookout for crooks and troublemakers, but he can't tell an accountant from an account manager from a contract attorney. This guy is a careerist, he notices power and the relationships that flow from it. This guy is a poker player, he's always looking for tells.
Can you elaborate on this? Are you saying that you filter exposition to the players through the presumed worldviews of their PCs? And is that intended to help them, or simply to be entertaining? I ask because in a thread about helping players solve mysteries, it seems like emphasizing the idea that a PC doesn't know the difference between accounting and customer service wouldn't help.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

rasmuswagner wrote:Most police shows are fucking terrible examples of investigative play, because the guy who is introduced at the 10 minute mark but not under suspicion is probably the perp, and the guy put under suspicion at the 11 minute mark clearly isn't.
Actually that's almost a perfect example of what you should do with an RPG "mystery". Limited cast, villain must be that guy, because we're pretty much everyone else with a name, at most MAYBE one very rapidly VERY obvious red herring.

About the only thing you'd do differently is maybe not introduce the guy at 11 minutes. Well, not unless you want his house firebombed anyway.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Dogbert wrote: Are you familiar with Gumshoe? That one is basically the system for running detective stories. The system for the action skills is not exactly perfect, but their system for Investigation skills is just the right tool for the job.
I've heard of it but don't know how it works, what makes it work out? Is it something that could be ported to other games, can the mechanics be modified into a fantasy setting so it's the "avoid pitfalls and traps" exploration/dungeon crawl part of the game?
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Gumshoe's thing is that all the 'core clues' are handed to the players no matter what their characters do (as long as they don't ditch the scenario to go fishing or something). Core clues are the ones that lead you along the path from A to B to C to where the answer will be given. There are also a big pile of investigative abilities which give you extra clues so you can be better informed on the details, or better-prepared for the final showdown or whatnot, but unless carefully managed, that's just a big empty distraction.

And the core clue handout is basically functional but also completely disempowering if you look behind the curtain, because when there's no room to fail, there's no room to really succeed – just to follow the rigid railroad.

Now, the authors seem to have realized this to some extent, and more recent published scenarios have involved a lot more sandboxing and providing multiple valid interpretations for the PCs to choose between depending on which clues they've turned up, and so on; good stuff, but not really supported by the original text. And those scenarios wind up being bigger than the core rulebook, even when the core rulebook is the Trail of Cthulhu hardcover.
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Post by ishy »

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Post by Neurosis »

This is the Den, and you guys will see I have rather a lot of posts here over the years so I really have no right to be surprised when I make a fairly innocuous thread and get viciously insulted within two posts. Hell, look at my signature.

Still: fuck this toxic shit. Life is crappy enough without intentionally exposing myself to the caustic environment of this part of the interwebs. I'm going to take a sabbatical for a few years or so.

Other than that a lot of the thread was suggestions of things I already know/already do/aren't having trouble with. Like having the PCs skills matter predominantly over the players' abilities--that's already how I run things--or filtering things through the PCs' preconceptions. A really good idea, but one I'm already integrating. I probably could have done a better job of explaining: I have a feeling that not including that last parenthetical sentence or explaining it better in the OP could have avoided a lot of misunderstanding/hostility.

Thanks to those of you who actually said something I didn't already know or hadn't already considered without being a complete asshole. The discussion of the pros and cons of Gumshoe was kind of interesting (I'll stick where I am, system-wise) and the article about the three clue rule definitely seems like it's worth reading and rereading.

Peace out.
Last edited by Neurosis on Sat Jul 25, 2015 8:08 pm, edited 5 times in total.
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Post by silva »

Schwarzkopf,

Playstyle particulars aside, I think what you looking for in your friends is buy-in / investing / motivation. In my humble experience most players sufficiently invested in any game will come up with the kind of hypothecizing/speculation/brainstorming you are talking about, regardless of genre. And the best way to have them invested is to have them colaborating in the creative process of the game/setting/scenario. So my question is twofold:

1) Did you involve them in the game/scenario/theme choosing/building/construction ? Can you say the game youre playing is of your authorship as much as its theirs ? If the above is negative, can you revert it someway ?

and

2) Have you spoke this with them ? Communication is key, as always. Perhaps telling your expectations to them ("being more inquiry overall") and listen theirs would help things immensely. Maybe you come to know thats not how some of them envision the genre or something, and some calibration is in order. Or maybe one of them even comes out and makes it clear its not something they appreciate in gaming. Or something like that.

Thats my 2 cents.
Last edited by silva on Sat Jul 25, 2015 9:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by hogarth »

Orion wrote:Police procedurals are not written by having one writer think up a mystery and another writer guess things for the protagonist to try until they get the right one.
Well put. Similarly, when I hear people say "you need to have the possibility of death in your game or it isn't exciting", that makes as much sense as saying that Spielberg and Lucas need to shoot 99 versions of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" when Indy dies in the middle in order to make it exciting when Indy survives to the end.
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Post by MGuy »

hogarth wrote:
Orion wrote:Police procedurals are not written by having one writer think up a mystery and another writer guess things for the protagonist to try until they get the right one.
Well put. Similarly, when I hear people say "you need to have the possibility of death in your game or it isn't exciting", that makes as much sense as saying that Spielberg and Lucas need to shoot 99 versions of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" when Indy dies in the middle in order to make it exciting when Indy survives to the end.
Don't they put indy in a bunch of situations where he could/should die in the movies to make the prospect of his death thrill the audiences?
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Post by Foxwarrior »

When I realized that important characters almost never die in movies from that genre, I did not suddenly magically find the whole genre boring.
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