Tag Archives: gming

How I Run Mysteries

Posted on by dconstructions
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Somebody on RPGNet was doing a survey on “general mystery running advice”. Since it’s been a while since I posted here, I thought I’d post my thoughts on that.

If there’s a mystery, I think of a whole bunch of ways players could find out the answer. Let’s call them Clues. eg let’s say a redhaired guy did it. Then a clue is: strands of red hair.

Then I put the clue wherever the PCs look. So it’s never “there’s red hair at the crime scene” but “there’s redhair wherever the PCs look”.

Sometimes you can even step back and be even more general about the clues, so “wheever the PCs look” there is “an appropriate clue that points to Teh Solutions”. eg if they go totally for motive then I will, on the fly, make sure there are heaps of motive clues that point to redhaired guy.

The other important thing is to use the idea of focus. If a scene is leading to a strong lead, I put lots of screen time into that scene. Like say there’s redhair at the crime scene, I describe it slowly. I call for lots of rolls. I play the NPCs up as dramatically as I can. I take the time to explain how fricking awesome the PCs are for finding the clues they do. Whereas if there is no lead, I just summarise and cut. You see this on cop shows all the time. If there’s no leads but the police think to do something, we don’t show them doing it, we just cut to the next scene and the cops go “we canvassed two hundred bars and nobody had seen our guy”.

Which is the final tip: watch TV. Crime shows are everywhere and despite the caveats that players aren’t Lennie Brisco, crime shows are written, for the most part, to allow ratiocination (ie letting the viewer solve the mystery). Hence they are good at skipping useless avenues and focussing on strong avenues, to name but one technique mentioned. And they’re good at Making The PC’s Skills Important – if one character is an expert in Ancient Japanese History then holy shit there will be a lot of crimes that can be solved through that. And learning that kind of mental judo, the art of going “no matter what the problem is, Ancient Japanese History can solve it” makes for good GMing, because you learn to go “whatever the PCs do solves the problem”.

This is what it always comes back to: WATCH TELEVISION. No medium ever created has had more in common with, nor more to teach the roleplayer. Sometimes I think I should do a Hamlet’s Hitpoints except focusing entirely on watching Law and Order.

Portal 2, Puzzles and Roleplaying

Posted on by dconstructions
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So I’m playing Portal 2, up to chapter six I think and not unlike Portal 1, I’ve been thrown out of the simple fun of solving totally self-contained puzzles into a world of exploration of haunting environments, first-character roleplay and well-written plot. And while the environments are pretty and the writing good, I am cranky because all I goddamn want is my puzzles.

Why? Because puzzles are, ultimately, relaxing. Everything is known, except the solution. You have to move from point A to point B using only the tools provided.

But when you’re in Adventure Land, it’s hard to know where you have to go. It’s a big, beautiful world and there are no clearly marked goals or exits. Everything could potentially be a tool provided. Mark it too clearly and the story falls apart, it looks false. It has to be a seamless, realistic feeling world to explore and poke until you see the puzzle.

In other words, I just got shunted from a gamist experience into a sim one, much to my eternal annoyance.

And this is of course, why riddles and puzzles tend to suck in most RPGs – because they suddenly thrust players out of a nar/dram/sim environment violently into a gamist one. Now, in theory there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as everyone enjoys each style equally and enjoys shifting between them. Generally, I go to rpgs to get away from puzzles and too much thinking, I want to explore and poke things and blow them up, and pose awesomely afterwards (which is also why I play City of Heroes).

What’s more, puzzles are very hard to do in RPGs because unless you really force your story into the kind of artificial environments seen in the Portal series, the whole point of these games in imagined realities is that you can imagine beyond the frame. You’re not forced to follow the rules of narrative or game. Portal tells me the only way out of the room is by opening the door, but you and I both know that if I pick up the bot and break off a shiv, I can hone it into a blade, pry open the lock mechanism and short-circuit the doors. And as tradition goes – and rightly so – any GM who says “no you can’t do that” deserves a good punch in the hooter.

This applies widely as well. Don’t design adventures like puzzles, with only one solution. By all means have the goal being to get the door open (figuratively speaking) but let them figure out how. Unless your players would rather be doing mind puzzles, of course. But I don’t think rpgs support them very well, because they are either massively forced to come into existence, or full of railroading to stop people imagining their own solution, or both. And thus most players find them unwelcome.

That’s not to say you can’t have a few tiny drops of gamism to add spice to a story, or indeed, have a fun plot ticking on behind your puzzles, like the start of Portal is. It’s the total genre shifts that suck.