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A necessary preamble

For anyone who writes articles that they intend to last (called ‘evergreen’), one of the most annoying and frustrating phenomena occurs when you have a really great idea for an article – but by the time you can get the essentials down in some permanent form, it’s vanished from thought like a puff of smoke.

Last week, I had just such an idea – and by the time I got to make a note of it, the idea was gone. One day, it might come back to me, or it might be gone forever.

When these things happen, there’s not much that you can do other than get up, metaphorically knock the dust from your shoulders, and go with a Plan B.

I always try to have a Plan B for any critical event, whether it’s going to an appointment, putting together a plot thread for an adventure, or writing an article. Often, the trick is knowing at what point you have to abandon Plan A if Plan B is to be completed in time.

This article is a Plan B, but one that was always intended to get presented at some point in the near future.

One of the early Ask-The-GMs was a question about creating mystery plots – Ask The GMs: Penetrating The Veil Of Mystery – in which I described a near-catastrophic failure in adapting a mystery to an RPG setting, and looked at why the problems that almost scuppered it had arisen.

I revisited that incident with additional details in tip 2a, “Ripoff Blues”, in Eight Little Tips: A Confection Of Miniature Posts.

In between those two, I wrote a more extensive article on the subject, The Butler Did It: Mystery Plotlines in RPGs, which has since become one of the most popular on the entire website. I followed that up, at a reader’s request, with a couple of examples in The Jar Of Jam and The Wounded Monarch: Two Mystery Examples a week later. (The first of those has since come in for high praise from a number of sources and been linked to by WOTC themselves in a blog article on the subject!)

Aside from the occasional mention, that’s more or less where I’ve left the subject because I literally had nothing further to say. But, in the past week or so, it’s been on my mind as a subject because I had a mystery without a satisfactory solution on my hands in a broader plotline.

This article isn’t about that particular mystery per se; that was just the catalyst. But, as a result of my ruminations, a few deep thoughts came to me; this article is all about sharing them with you, the readers.

On the agenda today are – 1. getting the players involved, 2. a couple of thoughts about clues; 3. a technique for seeing the Big Picture in the small details (and vice versa), 4. roleplaying in a mystery, 5. the structure of a mystery plotline, and finally, 6. finding and assessing solutions to the mystery.

Let’s get started….

0. Working Definitions

A mystery plotline is one in which a question is posed either by or to the PCs for which there is no clear and obvious answer. Almost any question can be the foundation for a mystery – “Who” is the most common, but “Why” and “How” are also common. “Where” and “When” are more unusual. Most of the time, one will be dominant, but they will all need to be answered in the course of the investigation. I remind myself of this by remembering the well-known phrase from “Clue” (or “Cluedo” as it was here in Australia) – “Professor Plum, in the Library, with the Candlestick.”

The plotline details the investigation that resolves this problem to some identifiable standard. That could be “justice is served” or “know the identity of the enemy” or “discover what’s really going on before it’s too late” or “capture the bad guy and hand them over for prosecution and punishment”, or any number of other alternatives – but this is always identifiable from the outset to the investigators, and shapes the available pathways to a solution..

The investigation may be hamstrung by the need to adhere to certain restrictions, such as evidence being legally admissible, but more frequently, the players will not adhere to such restrictions unless forced to do so.

Mysteries can be the focal point of an adventure, or may be a smaller sub-plot in some other storyline. They can also form a plot arc weaving through multiple adventures as a subplot.

“Means, Motive, and Opportunity” are the generally-accepted requirement for proving someone guilty of the commission of a crime – which are often at the heart of a mystery plotline (this, of course, immediately provokes most writers into contemplating situations in which someone can have all three, yet not be guilty).

So, if we’re all clear on the ground rules, let’s get to the real meat of today’s offering.

1. Matters of Presentation

Like most t forms of RPG, writing for a Mystery means engaging in a dance with two partners. At one level, the content has to attract the interest of the characters, but (even more importantly) it also has to compel the players to take an active interest.

There’s not much that’s worse than hitting the first of those two targets and not the second; that, effectively, compels the players to engage in something they are not interested in – which is as good a definition of a ‘chore’ as I’ve ever come across. RPGs are supposed to be fun…

Engaging the characters

It’s actually relatively easy to engage the characters, because they are in writing to a large extent, and where they aren’t in writing, they have been exposed to past events that reveal their natures and personalities. If a mystery connects to some subject that’s of interest to the character, that’s all you need.

You can even infer such interest even if that itch has never been scratched in-game before – if the character has a skill in it, or in some related field, you can largely assume that a connection can be forged.

If, for example, you are presenting the players with a Loch Ness style monster mystery, and the character is a fisherman, the hook has been baited with an irresistible lure; you just have to dangle it in the water for a bit.

The better you know the characters, the more success you will have at this with less effort, and the longer the campaign has been running with these characters, the better you will know them.

Enticing the players

Enticing the players to engage is often the more difficult part of the process. They are more complex and nuanced as personalities, frequently have only a limited and visceral understanding of themselves, and are not codified at all. “I know what I don’t like and this ain’t it” is often the best that you can hope for, to misquote the redneck trope.

To some extent, side-conversations and general chatter can be illuminating, because these display a person’s interests outside of the focus of play. As a GM, you don’t care if the player and PC have different reasons to be engaged in the plot; what you care about is that they are both so engaged.

In particular, listen to what TV shows and movies they like (or don’t) and what plotlines and plot structures they like and dislike. Similarly, note any likes and dislikes in novels and other stories. Note the subjects of any anecdotes – but be prepared for the player to be more of an expert on the subject than you are!

The Texture Of Mystery

Mysteries hold a greater propensity for frustration than any other sub-genre of adventure. So long as the characters have a clear course to follow, this is mitigated, but leaves you vulnerable to finding yourself in a situation where you are railroading the plot.

It’s very easy for mysteries to become clue-driven, and since you are the dispenser of clues, and of the logic that connects them, railroading is ever-present as a danger, in any event.

Clue-driven mysteries are like color-by-numbers books – the end result may be appealing, even satisfying, but the process is superficial, and leads to performances that can be ‘phoned in’. I have found that watching B-movies and trying to discern why a given movie falls into that category can be enlightening in terms of a cautionary tale, i.e. what not to do. This is especially true if the movie or TV show clearly aspired to something better – an a-list cast, proven scriptwriters, solid direction and producer – the more a production tries to be an A-list product and fails, the more that there is to learn from it.

Often, the flaws will be subjective, and that’s where there is the most gold to be panned. For example, the movie “Se7en” was a moderately-big hit, world-wide – but I didn’t enjoy the ending. You want your heroes to get there in time to save the day; real life may not be that way, but too much realism gets in the way of entertainment. There is a difference between realism and plausibility; you want to stretch the realism as thinly as you can in favor of entertainment. The ending of “Se7en” falls on the wrong side of that equation for me, and for most of my players.

Equally-educational can be those productions that are more than the sum of their parts, that come together despite being handicapped in many and various ways. These are productions that clearly aspired to be nothing better than a Good B-movie but which rise above the pack to be solid entertainments despite their handicaps. As an example of this category, I commend to your attention a movie called “Ricochet” starring Denzel Washington and John Lithgow, made before the former became a star of the magnitude that he came to enjoy after the Pelican Brief made it big. Comparing the differences in resolution between the original novel of “The Firm” and the movie version is also educational – because they both work, in terms of the medium in which they are presented, while the solution of the other medium would not be as effective.

While the lessons so discerned are always important, mysteries are often the sharpest point on such matters. They have a textural component that makes them especially susceptible to problems that might otherwise be glossed over. It’s my opinion that this is because there are fewer distractions to cover up those flaws in such adventures, which is not the case when it comes to movies and TV – in a Mystery RPG Adventure, there is nowhere to hide.

That mandates closer attention to the ‘feel’ or ‘texture’ of the Adventure than you need to pay in non-mysteries.

I once ran a game session in which a thirty-second character interaction grew and expanded to fill almost the entire session, simply because the players were having so much fun interacting with this fictional individual. In terms of roleplaying, of bringing this NPC to life, I was “in the zone” that day, to the point where even the experienced players congratulated me. That doesn’t happen often. The next game session, the magic had gone, and everyone got on with playing out the adventure. What I was most aware of, after the fact, was the difference in the ‘look and feel’ between those two sessions – same players, same characters, same plotline, same adventure, same situation, same GM – but nevertheless, different. Fortunately, I didn’t fall into the trap of trying to recapture that past glory, which is very easy to do; the feeling when you are “In The Zone” can be intoxicating. I knew that the stars would not have aligned so perfectly a second time around, and the results would have been a pale shadow of the past success. That’s what makes it such a feather in your cap when it happens.

The point is this: when it works well, the results are greater than the sum of their parts, and the texture is the stylistic framework that brings those parts together and binds them. You can have the best ingredients in the world; they will be hamstrung if they aren’t combined properly, and that means getting the texture right.

Another way of looking at what I mean by texture is to describe it as the “Metagame style” of the adventure – how the game mechanics and the in-game world are melded together in terms of the in-game events that comprise the adventure. Making a skill check at the right time can be a crescendo, the denouement of the entire experience leading up to it, or it can be deflating, and it’s all in how that particular skill check is handled and the lead-up to it.

Pay closer attention to the texture, the feel, and the pacing of mystery plots. It won’t guarantee success, but it will alleviate the avenues of failure.

2. Clues

Mysteries are frequently, if not perpetually, clue-driven, as I stated above. That means that the treatment of clues is critical to the success of a mystery plotline. This treatment has to balance on a knife-edge, because there are too points of failure that are polar opposites: clues can be too obvious, or they can be too obscure.

Too obvious

This frequently arises in reaction to a sense that the clues are too obscure, or were too obscure in a previous adventure – correct or otherwise. In other words, you underestimate the capabilities of the players, often because you overestimated them in the past. But one session is not the same as another; on any given day, the players can outperform themselves, and you can’t predict when that will happen.

What’s worse is that there isn’t a lot you can do about it when you make this mistake, not without overreacting. Trying to complicate your mystery at the last minute is the usual response, and it never works. The best response is to cut out entire scenes that are now redundant and short-cut the adventure – and to have something prepped and on standby to fill any excess playing time that results. But that requires knowing your mystery, and its moving parts, like the back of your hand.

That, in turn, exposes a risk that comes from a canned mystery adventure. These have to be written to suit the vast majority of game-tables, the lowest common denominator – and that’s never your game-table. And, since you have rarely read and understood the structure of the mystery as well as comes from having written it in the first place, you are totally reliant on the match between the expectations of the writer and the reality of your players, as they are on that particular day, marrying up perfectly – which happens so rarely that its not worth writing about.

Worse still, your players will rarely follow the straight line laid out by the authors; they will want to talk to someone that the author never expected them to, leaving you scrambling to fill plot holes that should not exist.

There are no easy answers to this problem – you need an understanding of the source material that you simply can’t get on the spot. The only answer is to be prepared to throw the source material away completely, in terms of plot and solutions to the mystery (keep it for characterization and locations) and let the players discover their own solutions to the story.

One final word of advice before I move on – the night before you are to run, read your adventure from start to finish. Pay special attention to any need to skip forward or back within the content and where you have to go to find what you needed to in order to understand the adventure. Even if you are the author, the added expertise in understanding the content and its structure WILL reward the effort.

Too obscure

The opposite problem comes around when the dichotomy between the players and their characters gets exposed. No matter how skilled they might be at impersonating the characters, players are not their characters. The characters know things, by virtue of living in the game world their entire life, that the players can’t even conceive of, and they will have subtly different thought processes.

The consequence of this is that the players struggle to connect dots that the GM expected their characters to link together effortlessly.

If you’re lucky, this will only happen once or twice in the journey from puzzle to solution, and you will be able to cover it with an appropriate skill check or even stat check. This is a solution that becomes wearing, even grating, with overuse, though.

But you can’t rely on players making a successful roll at the critical moment without making the roll insultingly easy, which is a thinly-veiled rebuke of the player – whether it’s meant that way or not. And that means that you need a get-out-jail plan “B” that you can implement. Ideally, that Plan B will have been devised by the players themselves (in other words, by the PCs) – but players grow confident in their ability to improv just as GMs do, and this is one circumstance on which the two can fail to link up. The results are unsatisfactory for all concerned.

There are also occasions when, in an attempt to stimulate a player with a challenge, the GM makes things too hard and the player just goes limp, their every fall-back stymied. This can happen no matter how experienced the player is – and, while it can happen in any session, it’s more likely to arise in a mystery plotline.

It follows that it’s more important in mystery plotlines for the GM to have a Plan B of his own that he has prepped in advance, and that one of the objectives of that Plan B has to be getting the player to re-engage.

3. The Big Picture

One of my skills has always been the ability to see the impact on the big picture of the small stuff – to Zoom In and Zoom out of the mental picture. This has made it easier in the past to explain technical details to non-technical people back when I was in I.T. – one of the managers that I dealt with regularly back then called it the ability to translate “Geek” into “Human”.

It’s an ability that comes naturally to me, something that I find it hard to impart to others because I don’t know how I do it, it happens naturally.

There have been a few occasions where it has let me down, and I’ve made careful efforts to consciously learn from those (I wrote of one such occasion in My Biggest Mistakes: The Woes Of Piety & Magic). Recently, though, I perceived something that may be at least part of the answer to the unanswerable question of “how”. This was a large part of the genesis of this article, and everything else included is a bonus!

The Little Picture

The first trick is to keep track of a “little picture” of the Big Picture. You could think of this as a “thumbnail” of the Big Picture. At each scale of perception of that Big Picture, I simplify each of the small-picture elements enough that this overview can be comprehended in its totality.

Let’s look at how this works:

In an encounter, I can keep track of the personality of the character being encountered and the plot-objective of the encounter, with enough capacity left over to deal with players and their questions and level of engagement.

That encounter is thus one part of a plot thread; I can focus on that plot thread and see it as a standalone entity. It has a purpose and a narrative structure all its own. This is achieved by simplifying the component elements to their key fundamentals – encounters and their purposes within this broader plot. This permits me to revise and break down the broader plotline into smaller chunks that will form parts of actual adventures. That means that I can define encounter sequences in terms of their contribution to the larger plot, their purpose in other words.

By mentally simplifying those plot threads or plot arcs, I can construct a larger narrative from the interaction of several plot arcs and they way they push PC circumstances this way and that. This is either a campaign, or a single phase of a campaign that’s being designed to be long-running. That permits me to break the plot arc into adventures and subplots to be incorporated into adventures.

If the latter, then I can simplify the campaign phase to see how several of them will fit together to tell an even more sweeping narrative.

When most people try to view the relationship between a specific plot element and the big picture, they try to keep it all at the most granular level, I think, and struggle as a result.

A single line of code in a computer program takes milliseconds to execute. That same line of code executed 200,000 times a day takes up a significant portion of the day – so much so that it breaks the functionality of the computer program and the process that it is supposed to support. Nor are all lines of code or steps in a process created equally – some take longer than others. Minimizing those may make for less elegant code – but it makes for far greater efficiency. The same skill, or technique, that I use as a GM permits that big-picture overview (which others can understand even if they don’t understand or appreciate computer code), is what enabled me to perform those ‘translations’. So this is a skill that definitely has a real-world benefit, if mastered.

How to learn or practice it for yourself? I can only speculate on whether or not this will work, but here’s my suggestion.

1. Pick a past campaign that ran for at least ten game sessions, and preferably for a year or more, that you can still remember fairly clearly. This could even be a current campaign if that fits the description better.
2. Summarize one memorable encounter from that campaign into a single paragraph of text, 2-3 lines long, four at the most. Include the personalities of the characters being encountered, any interpersonal dynamics that feature, and the function that the encounter had in leading to either the resolution of the adventure or laying the groundwork for another adventure. While not easy, this shouldn’t be too hard.
3. Think about the resulting adventure. In a single line, summarize the previous summary, focusing on the purpose.
4. Synopsize that adventure in a single paragraph, no more than 6 lines long. Include its relationship to any adventures before or after it, and how they combined to tell a bigger story.
5. Take that synopsis and summarize it into a single line.
6. In a paragraph of no more than eight lines, synopsize that entire campaign. What was its overall story?
7. Now boil that synopsis down to a single line.

That’s all practice, to start developing methods and techniques. To fit everything in, you will need to simplify and leave things out; the trick is to isolate what is significant and identify what can be left out.

Use the same technique with a favorite movie or TV show, which has the benefit of being watchable over and over. Go from scene to act to episode to season to whole-of-show..

Once you have a bit of practice under your belt, it’s time to start to learn to do it for real.

1. When you start planning an adventure or game session, take the time to think about it in terms of what you did in the previous adventure or game session, and how it derives from that.
2. Take another moment to think about what the next game session will contain as a result of the game session you are now planning, and how you can shape the content of the game session you are working on to enhance the next one.
3. Try to summarize the game session or adventure in a single sentence.
4. When you are preparing a character or an encounter, take a moment to think about how it will be influenced by events prior to it in the current adventure…
5. …and then take another moment to think about how it will integrate into and drive the overall plotline of the adventure or game session.
6. Every time your adventure will call for a skill roll, or an attack roll, take a moment to think about how success or failure will impact the course of the adventure overall.

It’s important that these exercises be carried out mentally, not in writing, just as it was important that the initial exercises relieve you of some of the mental burden by putting your thoughts down on paper. Those exercises set a standard, teaching you how much you need to compress, and how to go about it. The exercises described subsequently teach you to create ‘thumbnail’ pictures on the fly, in your head. You may need to reset your targets from time to time with a refresher practice of the initial exercises, though. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, this should get you to success, eventually – I think.

Zooming Out

Having mastered the technique itself, you then need to learn to apply it in real-life, in real-time, when you distracted by a dozen other things. This is just a matter of practice – every time a player makes a decision, examine it in terms of the overall adventure or day’s play; every time you interpret a die roll or answer a player’s question, think about the implications for the big picture. You have only a second or two to do this; if it doesn’t happen in time, move on. It’s important to try for speed, even if you don’t achieve it at first; not doing so can cement bad habits in place, and actually taking the time to complete the task can lead to you losing contact with the moment, the ‘now’. Although you might not be aware of it, each time you make the attempt, your mental speed and ‘muscle’.will develop, and you’ll get a little closer to success.

Zooming in

Zooming in largely happens in prep and planning. Some people think that means that speed is less important; I disagree with the premise of any such statement. I want it to happen fast so that I can use the big picture to guide my smaller-picture content without taking me out of the creative ‘zone’. I don’t want to have to stop and reorient my thinking. So take a second or two to attempt it, without trying for too big a ‘zoom’ movement, and then keep doing things the way you always do. As you start seeing the details that are necessary to support the bigger picture, the awareness and sense of direction that result will naturally integrate themselves into your creative (prep) process.

The Relational Model

That’s all very well and good, but not meaty enough to become the core of an article of Campaign Mastery depth. It was perception of another piece of the puzzle that achieved that.

I recently became aware that whenever I think of an object or event and its properties, I always frame those in relation to the bigger picture of which it is part.

I have several real-world examples to illustrate the process.

Let’s start with the unexpected bill – it happens to all of us. Making the assumption that it has to be paid, either immediately and in full, or after a short delay or in parts (depending on what can be arranged), one of the properties of that invoice is the impact that it has on my personal financial plans, and hence, on my life in general. By looking at it in terms of the bigger picture, I can see how other things might have to be rearranged to accommodate the payments, and what terms I might have to pursue.

In winter, I have (on occasion) been presented with an electric bill for more than A$1000 for the quarter. My heater used to cost $1 an hour to run – that has been replaced with a more efficient unit, and electricity prices have come down a little, so it’s now less than that, but it’s an easy number to work with. Ten hours a day, thirty days a month, for three months? That’s $900 right there. If you can afford to pay bills of that size at the drop of a hat, good luck to you – I can’t. I budget in advance, making all sorts of assumptions, like an annual 5% increase in prices, and an extra $200 on the estimated bill that results in case of heavier than usual usage. I have, in other words, built a budgetary process around preparing for the worst. And if a bill comes in that is worse than my worst estimates? I know instantly how to adapt to cope with it. Before I started doing this, electricity bills were a source of quarterly stress and angst; now, they are a source of mild apprehension at worst, and something that I can ignore most of the time.

Second example: I don’t think of the flavor of a food that I have purchased, I think about that flavor in the context of how it will taste when used in particular ways. I buy mince and pineapple to add to my sweet-and-sour. I add ginger, black pepper, onion, and garlic to tinned ‘chunky’ soups, plus additional minced meat, vegetables, and carbs. I buy preserved peaches or fresh bananas to add to certain breakfast foods for additional flavor. And so on. These products don’t exist in isolation; they are part of a meal, and that meal is part of a menu, and that menu is part of an overall food plan. This permits me to buy five or six weeks’ worth of groceries at a time, minimizing delivery fees – from $12 a week down to $3 over 5-6 weeks, a saving of (conservatively) $600 a year.

Under this way of thinking, an NPC has certain attributes, but these are less important than the relationships between the NPC and other in-game elements (including the PCs). I don’t think of the NPC in terms of their skills, or abilities, or stats, or even personality traits; their defining properties lie in their relationship to the plot and to the other ‘moving parts’ of the game experience.

A piece of treasure will have certain attributes like value and effects, but I am more interested in, and think about it more in terms of, what it will permit the characters possessing it to do that they couldn’t do before. My players have learned to expect this (nothing happens by accident), which means that I can manipulate their expectations with treasure placement – ‘A cloak that gives a bonus toward invisibility from Undead? What’s he (meaning me) got in store for us, this time?’ – Answer: not what you’re expecting, but I want you looking out for moving shadows and graveyards!

The Big Picture in Mysteries

Changing – however inadvertently – a single word or line of dialogue in a mystery can completely transform the whole experience, the internal logic that holds the whole thing together. Everything has to be nuanced to generate the correct ambiance and interpretation that leads to entertaining gameplay while preserving fidelity to the eventual solution. You never want the answer to be the most obvious guilty party, nor the least-obvious – you need to build towards a plot twist. In no other form of adventure is awareness of The Big Picture so important.

It was to evade that need that I offered the solution that I devised, a decade-and-a-half ago, and described in the Ask-The-GMs article referenced earlier. In a genuine faux-Agatha-Christie manner, everyone is potentially guilty, and the actual guilty party is identified in the course of game-play; if the players rule someone out that they shouldn’t, that NPC immediately becomes the guilty party.

But not all mysteries work in that particular mode; big-picture awareness and using it to guide every GMing decision along the way lets me give the players more independence from scripted situations, and a better in-game experience, no matter what the plotline.

Always maintain as much big-picture awareness as you can, especially when running mystery-oriented adventures or plotlines.

4. Behavior

Putting a mystery into an RPG setting has some of the same requirements as doing so in a literary setting, and permits adaption of some of the techniques developed over the years for the satisfaction of those requirements.

Characterization

Having characters act out-of-character happens regularly in real life, but it never works out very well in either a literary or RPG context. Real people are, in other words, a lot more complicated than any that can be expressed in a creative mode; the credibility of plot and setting are too fragile to withstand such breaches.

That said, premeditation permits a character to deliberately conceal their true characterization and identity. This is as true in Mystery adventures as it is when dealing with a hidden double-agent in a super-spy adventure. Success in this approach requires the GM to successfully lie to the players while preserving fidelity to the truth, while providing hints and clues that will lead to the unmasking of the culprit. This is generally fairly easy if the right questions are asked – so the goal has to be to make those ‘right questions’ improbable at the outset.

I once wrote up a mystery adventure in which one part of a split personality tried to murder the other, in a situation in which multiple external individuals had any two of means, motive, or opportunity to commit the crime, and (in some cases) had actually tried to do the deed – unsuccessfully. No-one even suspected that the victim had this mental aberration, the legacy of an encounter with a doppelganger in the service of a Mind Flayer while in a fragile mental state. I never got the opportunity to run the adventure, and it is now long-lost, with only vague recollections remaining. The notion was that the PCs would be able to piece together the fragments of clues to the condition from the statements of the other potential killers until they were prompted to ask the right question – one that would never have occurred to them at the outset. The consistency of characterization would be the key to solving the mystery. If possible, to provide motivation, I would prefer to have one of the PCs be an obvious suspect, if I could possibly arrange it!

Characterization is critical in mysteries, especially if one or more characters are not who they seem to be.

Displays of Characterization

Any time a character is not who they seem to be, you need to provide some display of their true personality that can be ferreted out. Even if that’s not the case, you still need set-pieces designed to put the potential guilty parties on display – and you need to remain true to the personalities that are so revealed, so those set-pieces need to be very carefully planned and executed – while seeming completely natural.

What’s more, if they aren’t to blend together into a hopeless melange, each of these will need to be sufficiently different and distinct that the players can readily separate them. Each has to be a different occasion, in a different setting, with a different tone and different structure; in most cases, the display should seem incidental to the in-game events. A dinner party, for example, might have no other purpose than putting one guest’s behavior on display.

This all connects back to what I wrote about earlier – big picture awareness and designing the small scenes to contribute to the big-picture tapestry.

Ideally, to ensure differentiation, most (if not all) of these display sequences should predate the commission of the crime at the heart of the mystery. Introduce the characters and then tell the PCs why they have all been gathered at this time and place.

Extraordinary Situations producing Out-Of-Character Responses

The one time in an RPG or literary work that out-of-character behavior is acceptable, credible, and even necessary to the point where its absence would be the less credible alternative, is when an ordinary person is put into an extraordinary situation.

The problem with such as the basis of a mystery is that knowledge of the extraordinary situation immediately puts investigators on the path to a solution, which can then become an anticlimax. Discovery of the situation should thus be a revelation, and one that is not easy to achieve. You can get a lot of mileage from a relatively simple mystery whose solution is obscured by the motivation provided by a hidden situation of this type.

There is a maxim that anyone can become a killer if pushed hard enough and in the right way. This scenario explores that maxim, proposing – for example – that a loving mother could commit murder to protect a child, and then conceal their guilt for the same motive. This sort of situation can also explore the difference between Justice and the Law in thought-provoking way by putting the players on the spot – punish the guilty party and the re-victimize the child, let her go free and she may be pushed into a repetition of the act. Some people can plausibly even become serial killers “on the side”, ‘protecting’ other children from the same potential harm. Some of the best episodes of Law & Order have this sort of thought-provoking quality to them.

Persona Thumbnails

I generally find it very helpful in such situations to have produced ‘persona thumbnails’ in advance – in writing. A one sentence, and preferably one-line, summary of each NPCs personality, motives, and the objectives that they will pursue in the course of events. This gives me a foundation when, inevitably, I have to improvise some action or reaction to PC-instigated situations.

I try never to have someone describe the personality of an NPC without providing the opportunity for the PCs to make up their own minds (or be misled by an attempt to subvert whatever truth there might be in the description).

It can also be very helpful to know who an NPC will (rightly or wrongly) hold to be responsible for some action. It can be great fun to have someone identify correctly the guilty party for all the wrong (and easily dismissed) reasons. “He may be a masochistically obnoxious piece of ruthless pond scum, but that doesn’t mean that he’s wrong”….

This is yet another example of the sort of big-picture “Zoom out” awareness that I described earlier, and the seed of the technique I described earlier for developing this facility in yourself (if you don’t have it already).

5. The Road to Solution

By now, you are probably gaining an appreciation (if you didn’t have one already) for how difficult a Mystery adventure can be to run successfully. I’ve tried hard not to state this now-obvious fact until I felt that it had been demonstrated through analysis, but the time has now come. Mysteries are hard – which only makes nailing the running of one that much more satisfying. To use one of my favorite analogies, nine-tenths of the behind-the-scenes work needed for such success will (or at least, should) never show, like an iceberg.

Having established how difficult they can be, and given some specific advice on achieving satisfactory outcomes in the face of the difficulties, it’s time to take a look at the usual general structure of a Mystery, and how that fits into the telling of a satisfactory story with the players involvement.

Multiple Moving Parts

Another of those obvious truths is that Mysteries can have many more moving parts than most adventure types, and these all have to mesh perfectly for the mystery to be successful. Unfortunately, each mystery is different in terms of what these are and the challenges that this poses to the GM, so general solutions are also going to be less than satisfactory. Awareness of the problem is part of the solution, and some of it can be simply jotting down reminders when something is not going to be front and center of your attention for a while but still needs to be kept track of – but, the main solution is to have developed your ability to monitor the big-picture while handling the detail-scale.

a. Teaser/Hook

Most adventures start with a teaser or hook to get the players engaged. Sometimes, you will want to employ a hook that is unrelated to the eventual mystery that will unfold – essentially, a pretext for introducing the participants before the fun sweeps everyone up in a difficult situation.

b. Investigation

Eventually, a puzzle of some sort will be presented to the PCs for them to solve. They will start by planning some sort of investigation to gather the information they need to reach a solution. This will often present them with an early or obvious theory, or one may have been handed to them as part of the puzzle. It’s critical that there be some sort of pathway for the PCs to follow, if they can’t or won’t devise their own. The latter is a significant warning sign to the GM that the players have not engaged with the adventure, and immediate action to correct this problem is needed.

c. Complications

The investigation will then strike problems, such as disproving and initial or obvious theory. Complications may also take the form of someone actively trying to interfere in the ongoing investigation. The term ‘setback’ is often used in script-writing classes and studies of the theoretical structure of fiction, but I have deliberately chosen this term because it can include a simple raising of the stakes.

d. Progression

For every door that closes, a window should open (and vice-versa). The investigation should never be permitted to stall in-game, though it may get put on hold. A fun way to do things is for the investigation to hit rocky ground, but to distract the players by uncovering something else that may or may not be unrelated that they can get their teeth into in the meantime – an action piece, for example, to give those players that aren’t predominantly intellectual something to get their teeth into. In general, though, progression will take the form of progress in overcoming or bypassing the complications so that the investigation can continue.

[c.-d. repeats]

The Complication-Progression cycle can repeat many times. Watch carefully for any signs that the players are finding it repetitive. The square brackets are a shorthand that I use to indicate optional content when planning adventures and campaigns.

[e. deeper mysteries]

Sometimes, the solution to one mystery only brings to light a bigger one. For example, the PCs might be the target of someone seeking revenge while they are at an unpredictable location – they don’t know who, how, or specifics as to the why. The obvious possibility is that this is a target of opportunity, and the players will probably proceed on that basis, with the full support of the GM. They will identify and capture their enemy, bringing an end to the original mystery, only to learn while questioning him that some anonymous benefactor told him exactly where and when to find the PCs. Suddenly, the original mystery is just the tip of the iceberg…

[f. babushka-doll mysteries]

Sometimes, investigating one mystery can lead to another, without the first being solved. This muddies the waters – you can’t convincingly solve one without solving the other, first, so that you can exclude evidence pointing at mystery #2 from the first one. There are two ways a third mystery can then impact what is already a complicated plotline – either the resumed original investigation leads to another mystery in the same way that it led to mystery #2, or investigating mystery #2 can lead to mystery #3 in the same way that investigating Mystery #1 led to #2.

Either way, I think of these by the collective term “Babushka-Doll Mysteries”, and if you thought a regular Mystery Adventure was difficult and complicated, with a lot of moving parts, each additional “Babushka Doll” increases those problems exponentially. It’s very easy for players (and sometimes the GM) to lose track of the outermost Babushka Doll in the shuffle, or confuse one mystery with another.

g. Resolution

Eventually, though, a solution will appear. Hopefully, at the prompting in-game of the PCs, by finally asking the “right question” (having asked a lot of wrong ones to get to that point), and getting an answer that makes sense of everything that has transpired.

Dynamic, not static

One of the biggest mistakes that GMs can make in implementing a mystery is to have them be static and unchanging. Quite often, the best form of progress in the face of a stalled investigation is for one of the parties suspected to do something that opens up a new line of investigation. Each of them should continually be trying to achieve some personal objective, however trivial in comparison to the mystery itself this objective might be; achieving some milestone in that pursuit changes the context of what has already been uncovered. The guilty party will perpetually be trying to make themselves look innocent, or trying to discover if they are under suspicion; this was the structure of almost every early episode of Colombo, in which the audience had already seen the crime, and might already know who the guilty party is – Colombo would simply stir around, dropping the occasional piece of bait about how difficult the investigation was proving, and see who tried to be helpful in pointing the finger at someone in particular. But he didn’t do so, blindly; he was always very clever at eliciting information that would prove someone innocent, until he found the one party who knew too much about the circumstances of the crime.

6. Solutions

Which brings me to the subject of the solutions to a Mystery. These are not always as simple or cut-and-dried as people might like (meaning the players). This is especially true in a campaign, where plotlines can spill over from an isolated adventure into a larger narrative.

Partial Solutions

Sometimes, you never learn the whole story, or at least, not at the time. There can be plot threads left dangling, to be taken up at some later point in time – that’s part and parcel of a campaign-level narrative. In RPGs, a partial solution usually takes the form of determining who, and resolving the immediate crime/problem, while leaving open a question of “how”. That’s covered under the “deeper mysteries” section of the breakdown of a Mystery structure undertaken above.

Unhappy Solutions

I’ve touched on this earlier in this article, as well – sometimes the solution to a mystery is only a prelude to a deeper problem, of a completely different nature. I am, of course, referring to the problem of the Guilty Mother, which poses a difficult moral question for the Investigators to solve. The solution of the mystery is just a prelude to this more difficult problem – which becomes even more important if there are consequences that will derive from a choice in a future adventure.

Appraising Alternative Solutions

The final item to note in this examination of the Mystery form is the potential for the players to offer an alternative solution to the mystery than the one the GM originally intended. The GM has two choices – he can reject that solution and stick with his original plans, or he can consider accepting it and replacing whatever he had planned with the alternative. To make the choice, if he doesn’t reject the notion out of hand, he will need to assess whether or not the players solution is “better” than what he had in mind.

It could be “better” in many different ways, and even “better” in some and worse in others – for example, one might be more interesting, or more plausible, or create more opportunities for interesting future plotlines, or be more consistent with the established past of the campaign, or simply be a neater package – that’s important if the GM wants to bring this particular plotline to a resolution, which happens toward the end of a campaign. Perhaps the most important possible form that “better” could take is an option that “better” achieves the big-picture goals for the adventure.

Once he has evaluated the proposition, he has three choices, two of which will occur naturally to most GMs out there:

1. Reject the proposition, it’s not “better” enough.
2. Accept the proposition, it’s clearly superior.
3. Take some of the best bits and apply them to the planned solution.

Not “Better” enough

Accepting a different answer means discarding the internal logic that was used to generate the solution and the problem and the pathways from one to the other in favor of revised plot that the GM improvises on the fly.

There may be a contradiction between evidence already obtained by the investigation and the proposed solution. There can be errors in logic. There can be flawed assumptions. These problems might not be noticed by the GM at the time, forcing him to scramble to plug plot holes when they do come to light.

In a nutshell, it means throwing away a lot of what the GM has carefully prepped and replacing it with revised material that supports the new theory, with all the risks and dangers that come with doing so – and that inevitably entails more work for the GM.

So there is a major price to be paid for accepting a “better” solution, one that may not be justified. The GM has to quickly assess whether or not the improvement in the plotline is sufficient to justify this additional workload, and his capacity for carrying that additional load. This is where the ability to zoom out and see the Big Picture is absolutely indispensable.

Accept the proposition

Sometimes, the answer is yes, the improvement more than justifies the dangers and workload. If that’s the case, and the GM has the capability of doing the extra work (in amongst his other commitments), the good of the game demands that he set aside any wounded pride and accept the proposition. And immediately start thinking about how this will impact the bigger picture.

Steal from the proposition

The option that won’t be obvious to many is to steal some or all of the bits that appeal to the GM, that make the proposed solution to the mystery “better”, and revise planned content to add them to the existing adventure structure. This makes these elements of the proposed solution half-right – or correct but misapplied. It’s just about as much work as simply accepting the proposition, but it’s a viable choice when the alternative is to reject the proposal for reasons of flawed logic or assumptions or contradictions with established in-game facts.

I’ve also seen at least one occasion when a player’s half-baked theory illuminated a flawed assumption, error in logic, or contradiction lurking in the tall grass of the adventure – leaving just enough time for the GM to scramble to a solution to his own resulting problem!

Whenever one of the players proposes a theory of the solution, the GM has a lot of quick thinking to do. The decisions he makes in the next few moments can make or break the adventure.

Deciphering The Mystery

Two other articles that are relevant and might prove useful are I See It But I Don’t Believe It – Convincingly Unconvincing in RPGs, about how to roleplay a character convincingly when you want the character’s story to be unconvincing, and The Conundrum Of Coincidence, which looks at the hard reality that coincidence is a real phenomenon that cannot be plausibly replicated in fiction or RPGs without undermining the credibility of the scenario presented. Both of those have an indirect bearing on the subject of mysteries, but ones that are worth closer examination in this context..

Mysteries are hard to get right and do well. We keep using them because they are so rewarding for all concerned when we get them right!