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The clue piñata is my name for a problem that sometimes happens with emergent mystery games like Brindlewood Bay. Essentially, the rules say wherever the players look for a Clue, they find one. That’s great! It’s a deliberate decision to avoid the classic problem in mystery games of the players struggling to find clues. But it can create a negative effect too: namely, that finding Clues feels too easy and not entirely realistic.
You walk into a room. You whack the Clue piñata. A clue falls out.
Walk into the next room. Whack the Clue piñata. Another clue falls out.
Look out the window. Whack the Clue piñata. Another clue falls out.
I’m exaggerating, but not by all that much.
The solution is rather simple: don’t let the players look for a Clue just anywhere. Ask them why they’re looking there, and how they’re going about it. They only get to roll if the answer makes sense.
In addition, feel free to set limits on how many Clues can be found in a given place. Ok, you searched the office and found a Clue. That means this place is now tapped out. If you want more, you’ll need to search somewhere else – or give an excellent justification for why they think there’s more information here that their first action didn’t turn up.
The effect of this is to increase the feeling that, even though we all know the mystery is improvised, it’s real. Because you have to describe how you’re going about looking for a Clue, and because that description needs to be good, it feels more like real investigation. Because you need to describe why you’re looking for a Clue there, and because that description needs to be good, the Clues feel more logical and more real.
Ex Tenebris, my gothic space investigation game (launching on Kickstarter in September), codifies this into the rules. The GM will only provide a clue if it makes logical sense to be able to find one – both based on the methods used, but also the context of the mystery: in other words is there any information here to find? It’s emergent mystery, so that question isn’t entirely based on GM fiat – if the players have a clear theory that there could be clues to be found, then there may be clues to be found. But they do have to have that theory – because if they don’t, the GM will look to their own ideas, and might well say “sorry, nothing to see here”.
Just because there’s no Clue in a place doesn’t mean there isn’t any useful information – Ex Tenebris distinguishes Clues from other types of information, so if the players go looking with a decent method but the GM doesn’t think there could be a Clue, they can still find something. What that something looks like will be covered in a later article.
In playtesting this has all worked really well. The process stops feeling like hitting a piñata, and starts to feel like, well, investigation. I think it would work just as well as an adaptation to existing emergent mystery games.