14 - Mystery
How to host a mystery?
Which is a less deadly spinoff from How To Host A Murder which didn’t catch on as much because the original title is so much more morbidly fun.
And that’s an example that interactive mystery stories are popular beyond genre gaming circles.
Murder mystery parties can and do become LARPs if the guests start playing characters instead of just investigating as themselves.
Call Of Cthulhu, one of the big RPGs for forty years now, is built around solving mysteries. (And then wishing you hadn’t.) So it’s a baked-in playstyle going back decades, earlier than that as some D&D modules tried it early on.
The GUMSHOE system is dedicated to making sure the PCs got all the core clues and then deciding what else to select.
I will tend to start a game with a mystery to solve if I don’t have a reason to do something else. The kind of mystery can help set the tone - murder establishes stakes.
And there are other ways to run mysteries, closed or open. This goes for secrets between players and the like as well.
There are even mystery genre games with no actual answer so you propose a solution and roll to see how right you are.
How complicated do you get, and how much do you nudge, remind, throw in surprise reveals and the like? My high school group got stuck in Power Behind The Throne for Warhammer and I couldn’t figure out where to redirect them.
Having at least some of a solution in mind generally helps with making the clues make sense even when improvising, otherwise you have a mystery box, not a mystery.
Red herrings are tricky because the GM is the narrator of the world as well as making up what the possibly lying suspects say, and players have to know what to trust in and out of character.
And there are only so many games where you can solve the mystery like I often do with crime shows by identifying the most familiar actor with too few scenes early on.
14a - 2, 10, 4
What, Excited, Rule
The PCs get roped into a murder mystery party or play. And it doesn’t end up featuring a real murder!
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