Gumshoe seems like it blows

[Dean]

Having been working on a mystery minigame of my own I read through Gumshoe tonight. I assumed since it was the first thing people would namecheck when talking about RPG mystery systems it must have something going for it. Having read it I'm really struggling to express how insulted I am, not unimpressed, insulted. Like...what the fuck? People have a bunch of random skills like Notice or Medicine and some fungible points that can use on them. That's pretty much everything player side. So the DM brings them to a crime scene, tells them the clues they are guaranteed to find at the crime scene, then sometimes asks players if they want to use one of their 3 Notice points to notice another clue. In the course of that exposition they learn about another crime scene or suspect and do that again until it's done. How the fuck is that a system? How is it anything? Am I missing something cause it doesn't seem like I am. It seems like someone spent about 20 pages on a system that, minus expository dialogue, goes like this:

DM: You get a call about a crime, you go to the crime
Player: Yes.
DM: At the crime scene you discover a grisly crime. Here are all the clues you found at the crime. They tell about a spot you can go to to learn more about the crime!
Player: Yes
DM: Player, you see something, would you like to spend 1 of your points to Notice it?
Player: Yes
DM: You notice an extra clue, it's about a person that's going to be at the spot I told you to go to keep learning about the crime. Great stuff everyone, you guys nailed it. Now who wants to go to the second location of this wildly interactive mystery where you listen while I talk at you. Oh no Bears appeared!

Gumshoe seems like it's nothing and it seems like it's nothing to a degree that bums me the fuck out. How are so many top name RPG products such insulting garbage? Gumshoe does not appear to meet the level of quality I would consider acceptable for posting in an ideas thread nevermind a published product. It appears obviously uninteractive, only uses abstract "points" that have no in universe justification and don't replicate anything in-genre. Am I missing something? I would love to know that I've missed some fundamental element of this game as, as it stands, it appears to be 20 pages telling you to sit silently while your DM exposits everything happening around you and also what you are doing in response to those things. I mean why show up?

[obexpe]

It is explicitly intended, by word of the rulebook itself, to skip directly to the challenge of putting clues together. It couldn't care less about anything outside of this insanely myopic focus, so yes, it's a bad mystery game.

Really, you will find that almost every RPG product that outsells most of it's genre kind of blatantly sucks.

[Foxwarrior]

Do those 20 pages at least go into extensive detail explaining to the DM how to come up with a set of clues that make an interesting puzzle for the players to put together to figure out what the next crime scene to go to is? Mystery point and click adventures can be fun after all.

[phlapjackage]

I was also looking at other systems that might have good mystery or downtime-heist-preparation kind of minigames. Thanks for saving me the time and effort of looking through Gumshoe, it was on my list...
- I looked at Karma in the Dark, and it took me a few minutes to realize it was based on A*World shit. Didn't read any further...
- I've heard maybe Interface Zero 2.0 has some interesting takes on it? Need to get the book...

[Username17]

To the extent that Gumshoe is a game at all it is rationing when you would like to press the 'Would You Like to Know More?' button. The MC gives additional exposition of varying utility depending on where you are in the story and you get a limited number of times you can ask for additional exposition. It's not really a game so much as a content rationing system.

Like, Gumshoe adventures have replayability to the extent that they are playable in the first place. You could go through the same story and request additional exposition at different points and see if it shed any new or different light on the case.

But yes, Gumshoe is a pen and paper rendition of a walking simulator. Like, literally exactly that.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

There was a thread on hear years ago on how "the investigation minigame should feel"... anyone remember what it was about? I think poker or monopoly was brought up along with other minigames like politics and rockin' out

[Whiysper]

I didn't bookmark the thread, but IIRC it's one of the Asymmetric Threat threads - the relevant list of bullet points (which I did totally crib off with) is:

• Infiltration -The infiltration minigame is about bypassing security systems. Sneaking, hacking, lockpicking, and so on. Ideally this should feel like you're playing Blackjack: pushing your luck as far as you can without "going over" and getting the heat down.

• Disasters - The Disasters minigame is about using your abilities to fix problems that are escalating. Fire fighting, stopping runaway trucks, portal closing, medicine, and so on. Ideally this should feel like you're playing Arkham Horror - switching back and forth between dealing with different escalating problems while working on solutions.

• Chases - The Chases minigame is about catching things in a hurry. Not just getting away from the cops or catching fleeing suspects, but also getting to or from bombs before they explode and crossing dangerous roads or factories to get to the action. Ideally, this should play out kind of like Liar's Dice - with players pushing and bluffing their way to outdo the opposition while accepting greater risks for doing so.

• Investigation - The Investigation minigame is about finding stuff: clues, suspects, answers, gear, whatever. Stuff needs to be found. Ideally, the subsystem should play out like Memory or Clue, with players guessing and matching to get breakthroughs.

• Politics - The PR minigame is about pushing public agendas. Spin, reputation management, news management, collecting and spending political capital and so on. Ideally it should feel like Bazaar or Monopoly - accepting trades while trying to build and leverage synergies to accomplish distinct goals by spending out.

• Debate - The Debate minigame is about convincing people to do or believe things. Haggling, Seduction, Interrogation, and so on. Selecting an appropriate avenue of "attack"by exploiting weaknesses in the target. Should feel like

• Combat - Most RPGs have a combat minigame. It should feel like a tactical exercise. Pretty selfexplanatory.

[angelfromanotherpin]

The big problem with Gumshoe is that the system barely does anything at all. Leaving aside the non-investigation stuff, all the investigation stuff does is point you at various tiers of info written into the adventure. Basically any other system could do that, as long as your table has a result for like [Search <10: Core clues] to prevent dead-ending.

Literally the entire burden for whether you have any meaningful choices or just a walking simulator comes down to the adventure writer, who decides what info goes into what tiers, and who also writes the CYOA flowcharts that determine if your choices based on that info mean anything. A good Gumshoe adventure would look like a decent mystery CYOA, where following only the core clues still solves the mystery, but also gives you a bad ending where more people die and/or the killer gets away and such; and you have to use the bonus clues and deductive reasoning to prevent those things, avoid hostile encounters, and otherwise get the good CYOA stuff.

But that adventure doesn't benefit from anything Gumshoe brings to the table except for the one conceit that your minimum investigation result will still get you some forward progress. And that conceit is written into the adventure content in the core clues! It would be trivial to convert any good Gumshoe adventure into D20 or Shadowrun, and it would play the same or better, if only because those systems give a fuck about the outcomes of action scenes.

[Mord]

I see Gumshoe less as a playable system and more an essay on how to negotiate stories that depend on hidden information at a game table.

In one of my most frustrating early RPG experiences, I had an MC attempt a mystery story. First, his implementation of looking for clues was "everyone rolls Search at the crime scene until someone hits a nat 20." That was a boring hellscape for what felt like an hour. Several scenes later the plot completely petered out and the MC just kept grinning silently at us like an idiot until the party collectively declared surrender. It turned out that at a key moment some while back, no one rolled high enough to pick up a vital clue, so we did not have enough information to progress the story, and MC determined he would not tell us or provide any backup plan.

Maybe this is overly colored by my own bad early experience, but I'm glad Gumshoe exists, if only as a thesis on the bare minimum requirements for executing a hidden information story in a collaborative storytelling environment.

[jt]

Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective is an excellent investigation game that makes no claims to being an RPG. You're given a giant list of locations, and after you've received your initial clues you spend your turns visiting any of them to try to get information. Most of them are completely irrelevant, some are red herrings, and the ones that do give more clues vary in quality. When you decide you've solved the case, the game judges you on how accurate your explanation was and how many locations you needed to visit.

The game is mostly propped up on its excellent scenario design. But I think the big fixed list of locations is crucial and should be ported to any RPG-based attempts at an investigation game. RPGs often run into a problem where you can technically go anywhere, but in practice you'll only ever go somewhere the GM has described. That means that in a mystery the GM has to manually keep mentioning irrelevant places before the players are even capable of getting themselves on the wrong track. Providing a numbered town map at the start gives the players more agency in getting themselves confused.

[Iduno]

Having been working on a mystery minigame of my own I read through Gumshoe tonight. I assumed since it was the first thing people would namecheck when talking about RPG mystery systems it must have something going for it. Having read it I'm really struggling to express how insulted I am, not unimpressed, insulted. Like...what the fuck? People have a bunch of random skills like Notice or Medicine and some fungible points that can use on them. That's pretty much everything player side. So the DM brings them to a crime scene, tells them the clues they are guaranteed to find at the crime scene, then sometimes asks players if they want to use one of their 3 Notice points to notice another clue. In the course of that exposition they learn about another crime scene or suspect and do that again until it's done. How the fuck is that a system? How is it anything? Am I missing something cause it doesn't seem like I am. It seems like someone spent about 20 pages on a system that, minus expository dialogue, goes like this:

DM: You get a call about a crime, you go to the crime
Player: Yes.
DM: At the crime scene you discover a grisly crime. Here are all the clues you found at the crime. They tell about a spot you can go to to learn more about the crime!
Player: Yes
DM: Player, you see something, would you like to spend 1 of your points to Notice it?
Player: Yes
DM: You notice an extra clue, it's about a person that's going to be at the spot I told you to go to keep learning about the crime. Great stuff everyone, you guys nailed it. Now who wants to go to the second location of this wildly interactive mystery where you listen while I talk at you. Oh no Bears appeared!

Gumshoe seems like it's nothing and it seems like it's nothing to a degree that bums me the fuck out. How are so many top name RPG products such insulting garbage? Gumshoe does not appear to meet the level of quality I would consider acceptable for posting in an ideas thread nevermind a published product. It appears obviously uninteractive, only uses abstract "points" that have no in universe justification and don't replicate anything in-genre. Am I missing something? I would love to know that I've missed some fundamental element of this game as, as it stands, it appears to be 20 pages telling you to sit silently while your DM exposits everything happening around you and also what you are doing in response to those things. I mean why show up?

This sounds like the result of someone trying to win a bet that they couldn't design an RPG in under an hour while heavily intoxicated. Except someone edited it into coherency and took out all of the weird stupid ideas.

RPGs often run into a problem where you can technically go anywhere, but in practice you'll only ever go somewhere the GM has described. That means that in a mystery the GM has to manually keep mentioning irrelevant places before the players are even capable of getting themselves on the wrong track. Providing a numbered town map at the start gives the players more agency in getting themselves confused.

One of the most disappointing parts of Shadowrun is this. There are so many named places that they never get used. Making a list of just what is nearby and having the players figure out which places are useful would be a good idea.

[Chamomile]

I like Whiysper's post not just because it's a good enough summary that I'm gonna bookmark it, but also because the "debate" bullet point gets Candle Jack'd right before describing any mechanics, which seems like the perfect summary of the state of social interaction mechanics in RPGs.

[Whiysper]

IKR . That's actually a direct quote - the original post with the thought experiment was missing the 'feels like' too, and agreed, it's too on-point to amend.

One day I want to figure out what goes there, but for now I'm working on the other bits and using MTP with rolls to give prompts, and hoping that someone here will come up with something better for me to st... er, be inspired by!

[Trill]

considering the sentence before it I believe it's directly followed by the next bullet point.
So basically:
"It should feel like combat. By the way: [NEXT BULLET POINT] Combat ..."

[Dean]

Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective is an excellent investigation game that makes no claims to being an RPG.

Yo thanks for directing me to this game, it's very good and has been incredibly useful to me.

My belief is that the hardest part about having mysteries is the writing of the mysteries. It's actually very difficult for a human being to think through and causally link dozens of events in a way that makes logical sense start to finish without having moon logic bits that no one would be able to solve. As such I'm currently working on a sort of mystery generator where you plug in elements into templates to make mysteries without hours of work. I used it for the first time tonight and the mystery it made ran great but it did take me a full hour to put it together with my generator which isn't an acceptable amount of time. I have an idea of how to make it faster though

What if we have a Monster Manual but for mystery scenarios, with a ton of mysteries that each have small elements you can switch out or plug in. My current model has tons and tons of plugs and elements to fill in and takes too much time but I think if you had a bunch of mysteries you could require much less from each DM to make it their own. So one entry in the Mystery Manual would be "A Matter of Class" where a man who married an upper class woman narrowly escapes an attempted murder. At first it seems like his business rivals set it up but is revealed to be the wife's noble family who wanted to kill their daughters husband to remarry her to another powerful noble to has recently become widowed and would bring great power to the family. That mystery would be very easy to change out some of the nouns and details to make it about a rich husband married to a lower class wife who narrowly escapes an attempted murder. At first it seems like his business rivals set it up but is revealed to be the poor wife's shady family who wanted to kill their daughters husband so that she inherits his money and bring great power to their family.

If we create a formula for the games mysteries then it would be very easy to make a good system about giving people the leads, hunches, and clues they need to solve them excitingly.

[Username17]

Certainly a big issue with social interaction is that there are lots of different kinds of social interaction and it's entirely possible to be wrong about what kind of social interaction you are in. In many cases you're just trying to get people to agree to things that you genuinely think are in their interest anyway. Convincing the Elf Queen that they need to chip in to fight the rising demon army should be easier if the Elf Queen is wise and harder if the Elf Queen is foolish.

Sometimes you're trying to pull the wool over their eyes. You might be trying to get someone to buy something for more than it's worth or let you get away with something that's dangerous or against the rules. Convincing the Elf Queen that you didn't steal the ruby should be harder if the Elf Queen is wise and easier if the Elf Queen is foolish. For these types of things, stats and skill ranks basically fail us. A wisdom of 13 instead of 12 or 7 ranks of diplomacy instead of 6 just can't give us an adequate representation of these things. We want to assign some characters into the role of Homer Simpson, where telling the truth just doesn't get you very far so you just punt and tell him something stupid that will make him happy.

Then you got negotiations where you are haggling over the price of a rug and can thus model it as being a question of who wins and by how much, and then you have negotiations that aren't like that at all such as most political discussions and trade agreements and such. So you have the UK trying to pound their fist on the table and get 'concessions' with their Brexit negotiation but they can't get any because the negotiation they are having is one about harmonization of commerce regulations and there are no concessions to be made - the UK already has most favored trade status and no generically 'better' trade agreement exists to be demanded or given.

Then you get interactions where people are being pumped for information. Sometimes this is adversarial in the case of spies or lawyers trying to get people to talk about things they know they should not, but sometimes the information is neutral or positive and it's just a question of maintaining someone's interest long enough to get the information in question.

It's made all the more difficult because sometimes simply telling the players what kind of social interaction they were having would give a lot of information away. But it's clearly importantly true that people can fundamentally misunderstand the form of social interactions they are having for years at a time - and sometimes not even because of the deliberate actions of infiltrators and spies. The fact that there are still people to this day who are trying to 'play chicken' in the EU/UK negotiations as if the EU would somehow be able to 'fold' if they thought the UK were serious about shooting themselves in the foot is mind boggling, but it's importantly true that this kind of thing can and does happen.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective is an excellent investigation game that makes no claims to being an RPG.

Yo thanks for directing me to this game, it's very good and has been incredibly useful to me.

My belief is that the hardest part about having mysteries is the writing of the mysteries. It's actually very difficult for a human being to think through and causally link dozens of events in a way that makes logical sense start to finish without having moon logic bits that no one would be able to solve. As such I'm currently working on a sort of mystery generator where you plug in elements into templates to make mysteries without hours of work. I used it for the first time tonight and the mystery it made ran great but it did take me a full hour to put it together with my generator which isn't an acceptable amount of time. I have an idea of how to make it faster though

What if we have a Monster Manual but for mystery scenarios, with a ton of mysteries that each have small elements you can switch out or plug in. My current model has tons and tons of plugs and elements to fill in and takes too much time but I think if you had a bunch of mysteries you could require much less from each DM to make it their own. So one entry in the Mystery Manual would be "A Matter of Class" where a man who married an upper class woman narrowly escapes an attempted murder. At first it seems like his business rivals set it up but is revealed to be the wife's noble family who wanted to kill their daughters husband to remarry her to another powerful noble to has recently become widowed and would bring great power to the family. That mystery would be very easy to change out some of the nouns and details to make it about a rich husband married to a lower class wife who narrowly escapes an attempted murder. At first it seems like his business rivals set it up but is revealed to be the poor wife's shady family who wanted to kill their daughters husband so that she inherits his money and bring great power to their family.

If we create a formula for the games mysteries then it would be very easy to make a good system about giving people the leads, hunches, and clues they need to solve them excitingly.

Sounds a bit like the Black Closet video game. You have (amongst many others) the "Lost Lamb" case, where a student goes missing and investigations could reveal she's hanging out with someone else in another part of school, she's tied up in her closest and you need to get the person who did that to not do that sort of thing anymore or she's run off and reading her diary tells you where she's run off to. You'll have a few "Lost Lamb" cases come up in a campaign, those are randomly created.

Actually Black Closet has fairly RPG style mechanics (to the extent that virtual dice are rolled), you take your relevant skill/s +d20, compare to their relevant skill/s and you either get a win, lose, or too close to call result.

[Chamomile]

I would throw money at a Mystery Manual.

[Username17]

If we create a formula for the games mysteries then it would be very easy to make a good system about giving people the leads, hunches, and clues they need to solve them excitingly.

So I think I should probably talk about the mechanic I made for the Threats in Shadowrun Horror 2: Chicago Horror before I gave up on it for Shadowrun and myself having gone different directions.

So the idea is that the game had four chapters and each Threat had three colored symbols on it. When you got a 'major clue' it would have a colored symbol on it and you'd move to the next chapter. Also, if the symbol did not match the Threat, you'd discard that Threat and draw new ones until you found a threat that matched the latest clue (and all the previous clues).

What this meant was that there were twenty potential threats, and each new chapter there was about a 50% chance that the current 'prime suspect' would carry on. I was working with a 24 card clue deck, which means that the prime suspect from Chapter 1 would end up being the boss in the end game 11.9% of the time, the prime suspect from chapter 2 would cling on to the end 21.7% of the time, and the prime suspect from Chapter 3 would end up being the big bad of the final chapter 45.5% of the time. But if you made it dice based (or reshuffled the clue deck), then it would be a straight 12.5%, 25%, 50%. In any case, the main effect is that the current 'prime suspect' is more likely than any of the others, but still always more likely than not to not be the culprit and that with each chapter the number of possible end villains goes down (that is, in chapter 1 there are twenty possible villains, in chapter 2 there are only 10 possible villains, and in chapter three there are either still 10 possibilities or the list has shrunk to 4).

It seems like if you had a game that was more intently focused on the mystery portion that you could do the clues and associations simultaneously. Like, you could do things to discover if suspect #3 was consistent with a Yellow Hexagon clue. And thus you could create your list of suspects by who was consistent with the first clues and narrow it down after.

If you really wanted to have the list of suspects expand and then contract, you could have something where there were five clues and the guilty one would be whoever fit the most. So having characters have alibis for the first clue would make them less likely but not write them off entirely.

-Username17

[Whatever]

Worth looking at Outfoxed to see if that's the kind of minigame you actually want your players to experience.

It's aimed at little kids, so it should be perfect for the average tabletop group's puzzle solving abilities.

[jt]

If you're playing a dungeon crawler like D&D, the book is going to have dungeon creation guidelines somewhere. Those might not even be very good, but they're going to at least communicate that a dungeon is a bunch of rooms with stuff in them. And then the monster manual gives you stuff to fill rooms with.

So for a "mystery manual" I think you need to first make some mystery creation guidelines that get everyone thinking about the structure the same way, so we know what kind of slot the contents of the manual is supposed to fill. This doesn't need to be a super formal minigame, it just needs to define the shape of the bucket.

And structurally, I think you have some finite list of people/places/objects (I'll call all three locations) that you can investigate, where investigating the relevant locations gives you pointers to other locations to investigate, repeat until you find the location that solves the mystery. This is all about pointers, so I think you have to work backwards - the entry in the Mystery Manual gives you a location, but also the clues you'd find at other locations to lead you to it. Then the adventure planner goes to that location and pulls out a sub-mystery out of the Mystery Manual, gets the clues that'd lead you there, and repeats 3-4 layers deep.

Since you don't want the mystery to stall out without any leads, but you do want players to be able to fail at whatever actions they use to investigate, I think you do something like this:
[*] The players identify how they're going to investigate the location. They describe actions, make a roll, have a combat, whatever is appropriate.
[*] The GM determines degree of success based on how appropriate that action was and any rolls made.
[*] The lowest degree of success yields three very tenuous clues, one of which leads in the right place.
[*] The medium degree of success yields an additional two clues with better quality, one of the right place and one for one of the red herrings.
[*] A high degree of success yields one additional clue that's pointing right at the next place to go.
This way a series of botched rolls and bad decisions can lead to the players having to check a bunch of irrelevant places, but the correct next place to go is always on their list somewhere.

[Whatever]

from best to worst:

1) functional mystery system
2) magical tea party
3) having the DM tell you what happens for an hour with no player input
4) anything that involves red herrings

[hyzmarca]

The thing about mysteries is that there isn't one mystery genre. There are many sub-genres that overlap.

You've got the classical mystery genre like Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes. The thing about these mysteries is that their protagonists are, from an objective standpoint, terrible investigators who get along on plot fiat. In many cases, the solution runs on some alternate logic that does not resemble our human logic, but it gets handwaved by the fact that the protagonist is very smart. That's okay. But it is probably not one you want to emulate in an RPG, because that requires the players to understand your insane anti-logic.

Then you've got the cop show. In the cop show the mystery is more straightforward and your investigative tools are more direct. You have forensics, you can interrogate suspects. And you can maybe even pull out the rubber hose if your boss turns off the cameras for you.
The cop show doesn't rely on clues, except as a minor thing. Other people look for clues and then give the protagonists reports. The cop show relies on interpreting those reports and people's statements, and then pressing the suspect. But the cop show also has false confessions to worry about.

Then there is the lawyer show. On the lawyer show, the goal isn't to find out who did it. The goal is to make the jury think that maybe your client didn't do it. It's not about following the clues to a conclusion, but about presenting the evidence in such a way that the jury draws the conclusion you want them to believe. The lawyer show protagonist has Examination as a tool, which is like Interrogation but it has more rules.

[Username17]

from best to worst:

1) functional mystery system
2) magical tea party
3) having the DM tell you what happens for an hour with no player input
4) anything that involves red herrings

I don't think that's fair. I would say that if you don't have empty leads to pursue it doesn't feel like a mystery is being solved at all.

Let's say you had a simple "match the symbols" mystery minigame. Each suspect has an open symbol and like two hidden symbols, and you start with a free symbol and the rest you have to find by researching. In this mystery minigame, you'll end up prioritizing the investigation of suspects that have a symbol matching one of the ones you've found.

But of course most of the suspects are red herrings. That's fine. Red Herrings are only a problem if there isn't a firm way to rule them out and get back on track.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

Aren't red herrings likely to develop organically, as players miss the important clues and focus on some worldbuilding or padding? Sticking deliberate red herrings in as well might be unnecessary.

OTOH, you could run them as sidequests (side mysteries?), not a waste of time, but something worthwhile to do that doesn't help your main effort too much. Not sure how aggravating players would find that.