#RPGaDAY2020 20: INVESTIGATE

#RPGaDAY2020

20: INVESTIGATE

Investigative games are my default setting.

I can come up with clue chains and conspiracies more readily than interesting fights or dramatic developments, and players tend to jump on them.

So much so that I sometimes set out to do drama or something else but a mystery will probably take over if the intended dramatic plot doesn’t build up steam.

I can generally rein it in after a while, if the players are up for it.

The tricky part of an investigative game is keeping a partially improvised clue chain straight. Some red herrings are acceptable, but there really does need to be an answer that makes some kind of sense.

A really planned-out investigation with handouts and the like can be a lot if fun too, but obviously much more work.

Right now I’m running a Vampire game that turned from drama to mystery after I realised most of the players wouldn’t know what the original hook was about and a Buffy game that I’m actively avoiding turning to a serialised investigation.

This goes almost all the way back to formative GMing experiences, my first long game being The Enemy Within for Warhammer Fantasy Role Play, which is very much an investigation with some monster fighting interludes, more Call Of Cthulhu than D&D. Call Of Cthulhu also inspired GUMSHOE, a whole system built to address the clue finding bottleneck.