3 Approaches to Mysteries

0:20 Hello, Adventures, the podcast for role players and game masters to help level of your game. We are your aventuremasters. Jason Platina, I'm Joe McCall and Jim Crocker. So today, Jim, you left me a cryptic message on what we're going to do today, and I think we should all band together and figure out what it is you want to talk about. Yes, yeah, yeah, I when you were asking for topics here, when you're asking for topics, I wanted to talk about a thing that there's different approaches for, but that I see a lot of new dms asking about, and even some experience dms, and that's how to run mysteries in their D and D games. Because of the way D and d's past fail resolution system works, it's not necessarily great at running who done It's and you've got to kind of tweak things a little bit to make them work. I have got a couple of questions that you can ask about the kinds of mysteries that you can run, and then three different approaches for how you might put together an interesting mystery over a session or a couple of sessions. That's great. All the all the advice I've seen on running mysteries in D and D as can be summed up in one word, don't yeah, or at least at least band zone of truth. Yeah. And that's the thing that we're going to talk about, is is diven and in particular divination and how you handle some of those things that that that you can that might feel like ways around that you

1:53 know, you're like you're flying and your dimension, doors and all this kind of stuff that that that might pose barriers to that. And I've got some approaches to that, and you know, ways that we can think about how we might use those or you know, put some boundaries around them and make them interesting, make them tools that help you solve the mystery, as opposed to you know, shortcuts that allow you to skip the mystery entirely and get straight to the solution. Awesome, let's let's get straight to the solution then, all right. So I think the first thing that we want to do is decide if in this mystery, when we watch mystery shows on TV, when we watch procedurals. There are two kinds of procedurals, and one is what we might think of as as a who done it right, as an Agatha Christie, where we're not sure who committed the murder, and we're trying to figure it out and piece that together and gather clues and stuff like that.

2:46 And that's you know, where you get your like your knives out, your glass onions and stuff like that. Murder, she wrote, murder, she wrote maybe murder, she wrote yeah. Yeah. But the other kind of show that we get is something like the sent Natasha Leone, the one from Natasha Leon series poker Face, where at the beginning of the show you see the crime happen. You know what the crime is, you know who did it, but the challenge is to prove that they did it right. So we might call something like that like a how done it right? Or you know or but but the challenge there is not that we have no idea who committed the crime. It's putting together the evidence to prove who did it and get them put away or you know, arrested, or essentially you know that the you know, maybe that the mayor of the city or the head of the thieves guild gives you the go ahead to go after that person, right, and you can do either of those. And I think the advice I'm going to give for these three different approaches that you can take. And it's not to say that these three approaches are exhaustive, but they are the ones that I tend to use if I want to get this kind of story across. It's what I look to. You can kind of use that for either of those approaches. So let's start. I've got three methods here, and I've kind of given them names, but well we'll talk about what the what that looks like. The first one is what I call the pool of clues, the pool of suspects, where the solution is confined to a certain

4:17 number of suspects, but as the DM, you don't decide in advance who's guilty right or what their method was. So maybe you put together you have half a dozen possible suspects that you present to the party, and you say, you know it can be this guy who is you know, we've got a victim here. So this is like your knives out approach, right where you've got these this group of suspects and you know that one of them did it, but you're not sure which one, and the goal is to go around and figure out together enough evidence to prove that it was one of those people that did it, So in this case, you might introduce four, five, six subjects. One of the things that's really good with this is you introduce enough suspects to match the number of party members that you've got, right, So if they want to split up, you can have each one go investigate one of these suspects, if you want to do that. And then you put together a pool of clues, and you want to make that like maybe three times the number of suspects you've got, right, if you've got five suspects, maybe come up with fifteen clues or something like that.

5:31 And you make these clues fairly general, but that point to something to do with the victim. You know, if the victim is like a wealthy smuggler, right, maybe one of the clues is a list of contraband deliveries. Maybe one of the clues is a counterfeit custom stamp, right. Another one might be if you've decided he's poisoned, then you know a mortar and pestle with a deadly night shade crushed in it or something like that. But what you want to do is make sure that you kind of distribute these clues around. You encourage the players to interact with the locations of the mystery, places where you know, the actual scene of the crime and other places where people might have been, and with these suspects, and you want to make sure they create a situation like you would in a good mystery novel, where all of these suspects have reason to be guilty, all of them have means, motive and opportunity, and then it's sorting out who was responsible and what you did. And so then what you do is you kind of put the players in contact with these suspects in these locations and have them make appropriate skill checks to gather information. If they are roughing somebody up, you can roll intimidate, if you know, I mean literally, you could have the good cop roll persuasion and the bad cop roll intimidate, right, and success in that

7:03 produces one of those clues. And you can also have clues that say something like a suspect admits to being there the night of the murder or something like that, right, And then you can attach that to whichever those suspects you want, And then you decide on the number of clues that they have to gather. You know, maybe it's two per player character, right, that gives them the opportunity to go around and do different stuff. And once they've collected that, you know, that number of clues, then you say, okay, you guys, put your heads together and do the detective thing where you go, well, this clue means that, and that means that, and that points to him and this this was a red herring. You know, that doesn't mean anything. And then once you've gathered that number of clues, you tell me who you've decided the suspect is based on this information, and you're correct, that's who did it? Is murder on the Orient Express.

8:00 It was all of them, yes, spoilers well or yeah, but but I mean and and like you know, I have heard objections to the idea that, like you know, this is just the quantum ogre thing where you don't know what's going on. But it's what you've done is it's not like it could be anybody, right, you know, it's this defined group of suspects and you're narrowing down. You know, this is like actual police work, right, But all you're doing is you're imposing this you know, this structure, this framework on it. And Jason, you know, when you start asking about like zona truth or divination or something like that. What you're going to say is, look, you can get information using those spells, but what that will do is that will produce a clue. There's no single action you can take that will shortcut this process, right, you know?

8:50 But yeah, you know, and you know, all zona truth tells you is that someone is lying, not what they're lying about. And that's why I go back to that at that Poker Face show where the fun thing about that and if you get the chance to watch this show's amazing. But Natasha Leone's character has a like, basically a bullshit detector. And we'll see a crime play out at the beginning of the show and she'll be somehow kind of on the periphery of it. You know, somebody gets murdered in a bar. She's working there as a cocktail waitress, right, and she'll you know, and then we'll see how she's connected to that character, and she'll kind of move around through the people that might be responsible and someone will say something she'll go bullshit and she goes like, he's lying about that, but I don't know why, right, but he's lying, right, And then the show is about her figuring that out and making those connections and things like that, and you could do that same thing in your D and D game.

9:46 That was a common thing in the If you've played the Phoenix Right games, if you have Fantastic games, they were originally on the Attendo ds. They were remastered on the Switch. It's like twenty or thirty bucks for the whole trilogy and the If you like like mystery games, it's it's it's hard to sell a game where you're playing a lawyer as the hero, which is just feels weird. But you know, in a game in a genre where you're you can play as like, you know, fantasy creatures and you can blow things up. You get the biggest guns in the world. I'm gonna play a lawyer today. But they are amazing games. The stories are fantastic. Even if you just like watch a playthrough on YouTube. I'm a big game Grumps fan. They have an excellent play through with that at the time of this recording, and they're in the middle of and it's just hysterical to watch them play it. But there is there's something to like interviewing someone and long story short, there's a mechanic in the game where you can tell if somebody has like a secret to hide and you have to drag that out of them, and it's not always for guilt, In fact, very rarely is a for guilt, but they have they just have their reasons to not be telling the full truth about this thing at that time, whether it implicates them as being somewhere they shouldn't be. Yeah, my wife didn't know that I was there, and they're putting something as simple as that, or it's like someone's just embarrassment. I'm trying to think of a really good I feel like modern but modern mysteries do that a lot, right. It made you think somebody is really guilty, and then you find out, well, they just cheated on their test or or they were right their wife didn't know where they were. It's called a red herring, right, And it is one of

11:16 the oldest tricks in the book literary devices, the same thing literal device is literally a trick in the book. Cannot be any more literal with the trick in the book. Oh god, I hate that it made that joke. So but yeah, the the lying for for a reason that is not because you're guilty is going to be key here. Yeah, the other game that that used to play big the the I think underrated rock Star game La Noir. I love that game. I was just thinking about l A Noir the other day and a lot of that thing. We have PlayStation now and I can't doubt. Yeah, Hello Adventurers, just stepping in here to remind you guys that we're actively looking for submissions for our Hello DMS episode that gets reported every month. Send us your burning D and D questions to Helloadventurers podcast at gmail dot com, or send us a voicemail by visiting helloadventurers podcast dot com slash voice. Don't forget to begin your message with Hello DMS. You can't wait to get your questions and talk about them on the show. Send us your questions today. That's Helloadventurers podcast at gmail dot com, poorly the voice at helloadventurers podcast dot com slash voice. Now let's get back to the show.

12:43 So the second approach that I have here is kind of a variant on the first, but I'm going to it's what I call the emergent solution. And in that case, you don't have to have a pool of suspects. You can just present it to the players and give them a number of clues they got to figure out and leave it in the hands of the players. Right, you just say to them, who do you suspect of this? Give me, give me the three people you suspect of this, the three NPCs, or we can make up somebody new that you know that you want to do this. And when they find those clues, rather than having like a pool of specific clues they pull from, you can say, okay, what's a clue that points at the suspect you think did it? And you know, just put that bit of the world building and the mystery construction in their hands and again decide how many clues they have to collect before they can then prove that the person that they want to pin it on actually did it.

13:41 Now, this requires a lot of trust right at the table. It requires that, as the DM, you trust that the players are going to be reasonable about it. They're going to do something interesting narratively, and this is a lot closer to the kind of thing you might do and some of those like indie sty games that I'm fond of. Right, you know, then then the much more kind of procedural things of D and D that you're used to, and the other thing that you can do with the with the emergent solution is you can decide, regardless of what you do, you get a clue. And this is going to kind of kind of go into my third approach, which borrows something from a system called the gum shoe that some of you may be familiar with. You can decide that you know, if you go somewhere or you talk to somebody, you're going to get a clue.

14:31 But the dice, the role that you make for your skill check determines what's the cost of getting the clue, not necessarily do you get the clue or not, because at some at some point it might be you know, it might just be not interesting to just fail to find something. But certainly, you know, if failing to find something means you know, if you find it but then you get in but then that triggers a fight, or you know, you find it but then that closes that area off to you or something. You can decide whether that's going to work there. But you can make it completely open ended if you want to, Like I said, if you trust the players and they're creative and they're sufficiently interested in that, this is definitely a thing where you know, if you have the kind of players that are like, we don't want to do that much work, why are you laying this on us? You're the dungeon master. You're supposed to come up with this stuff. This approach is not going to work, and that's okay. It's not going to work at every table, sure, but that absolutely is a way that you can do a really interesting mystery that if you have the right kind of players, they'll be super engaged and involved because they're coming up with it as you go and as you play through. So the third approach that I've got here is what I call core clues fixed solution, Right, So this is where you decide, you know exactly who you want to be responsible for it, where as the DM you need it to be, you know, the comptroller for the city that's been embezzling. But the interesting thing is how are they going to figure this out? And in

16:03 this case, essentially what the And this is true of any RPG mystery, which is the clue gathering the investigative process is acting as a timer and a narrative device that leads to the climax of that story. Right of confronting whomever is responsible of sicking the cops on them whatever it is that you're going to be doing in the story. But it's always a timer that leads to that. And in this case, the clues are there. You know what the clues are. You don't necessarily have to have them in specific places. But again, whenever they go somewhere, they're going to find a clue. And when you put all those clues together, they conclusively point to this person that you want. But again you're imposing this structure that says you have to have at least x number of clues before you can go to the magistrate and say this person did it, We can prove it, and so we're going to go after them. And again that requires a little bit of, you know, willingness on the part of the players to have this system imposed on them.

17:07 But if you're going to do a mystery and you want it to be interesting and give everybody a chance to use their different skills, you've got to set up a thing where you impose on the structure the idea that they can't just shortcut it by using speak with dead, by talking to the corpse to say, you know who killed you? And they go, is that guy there there we go. Mystery solved. And you definitely want to make sure that if you know that your players have access to those abilities, that you've got like a reasonable way that they can use it and get something effective but not shortcut the adventure. And the best way to do that, of course, is to you know, you can write in your notes if they you speak with dead on the corpse, the corpse will tell them, well, I got stabbed eighteen times in the back, and so you know that it's somebody that you know, or or it was a single expert, you know, stab between the ribs and and and I barely felt it before I was dead, So you know that clue is that you know they were shanked by an expert or something like that. I was going to suggest something a little more cryptic, whereas like, you know, they could use a nickname that could apply to several people. There's a lot of there's a lot of there's a lot of room for messing with any of these structures, I think.

18:26 And yeah, like I always liked the idea of almost like you're giving clues to who it's going to be, but you haven't necessarily introduced that character yet. Yeah, but so so funny enough though, in just us talking about mysteries and probably the last the third, the third way to do a mystery that that Jim you were talking about brought up something that I remember one from Sly Flourish that we talked about I think a week ago, a couple of episodes ago. Yeah, we talked about a couple of episodes ago. I'm gonna try to think that was the last episode that we had talked about Slide Flourished. One of the things I know he talks about a lot is mysteries. And I remember an article that I actually just pulled up from the Alexandrian dot net that I'd found when researching for a different way to do a Baldersgate Avernus adventure from from Watson to send to Aurness the other then I had found the three clue rule. So yeah, you know about this, Jim, Like, essentially, for any clue that you want to give a player, you have to have three that lead to that clue that leads you to the next clue essentially, And like the three is like the minimum. Really you might even want to have four or five sure, because every time, like if you leave a clue then you're like, my players are going to get this, They're not. They need like three times the reinforcement essentially. Yeah, And this is also one of those places where if you're running a mystery, one of the challenges and one of the things, like you said that

19:59 that can stemy DMS is what it means to give the players, like and I'm gonna use scarequ's here a clue, right, And people's brains don't work the same way. And if and you know, and certainly one of the other things you can do is if you want a structure that leads players from one location to another location, to another location to another location, and you just want to structure it that way, where it's you start at the docks, you go to the you know, you you start at the docks, you go to the merchant quarter, you go to the you know, the nobles townhouse, and you end up at the magistrate. Then the clue can be, you know, you find a perfumed letter which tells you the next place you need to go is the merchant's quarter. You know, rather than like being subtle about it and having them figured out, just go ahead and give them that information, tell them where they're going next step out of care you know, you know whatever, meta game a little bit. And that's totally fine because that's you know, that keeps the game moving. That's the process. Tell them. Don't just tell them what the clue is. Tell them what the clue means, because as experienced adventures, they would be able to figure that out. My wizard has a twenty intelligence, I do not sure. So you know, him seeing you know whatever, like like some kind of alchemical code written on a you know, on a piece of parchment,

21:30 is going to tell him exactly where to go. That is a player I might be going, Yeah, I don't remember eight sessions ago when you described me seeing a paper like that on the wall in the potion shop. Right. So so that's where there's a couple of things with that, right. So One is when I'm recapping a session, I am not. Sometimes what I'll do is I'll make sure to mention those important pieces of information. Yeah, lipshade right on it. Not unlike you know when you're watching a show and like something like three episodes ago, like it's like three right right previously now, and you're like that happened a while ago. Oh, we're going to get something about that, like a classic classic cartoon cartoon TV.

22:14 Yeah, especially mysteries. I feel like that, like if it's if it's like a season long payoff for something, they are going to show you something from the first or second episode of that season. If there's going to be a payoff for this episode, Yeah, exactly. And I feel like I've seen it, especially in like Game of Thrones, where they like they previously on, they show you and you're like, oh, they're going to talk about this now, sure, Okay, they're going to catch us back up with with this person or that thing. One two is essentially when I give clues to my players ear Muff Jason, I give cluse somebody players, I'll escalate them, right, So the first one might be like a real clue, the second one's like a little clue with like a little nudge to it, and then the third one is what you're saying, like, and this one is a perfumed letter, like addressed from there's a return dress. Somewhere around clue seven or eight, we'll start figuring out. Yeah. I was like, yeah, no you won't, but yeah, you kind of you.

23:21 And I think that's where you have to kind of gauge things as a d M and just say, Okay, they're never going to get for your knife. For your knife, clue you find a paper in your back in their back pocket that says, go to the bath house. Guys, what could this guys? What could this mean? One of the other things that we want to keep in mind here is that the higher level the characters get, the more resources they have and the more ability they have to get around traditional methods of investigation. Right, So this is something that I think is typically you're going to want to do this in the you know, mostly in the lower lene levels. Once they start you know, fighting demons and stuff like that, they've got more interesting things to do than solve murders. So this is going to be relatively low level, like kind of load to mid level that you're going to be engaging this sort of stuff. But one of the things that this that this can do is it can get into talking about because for the most part, if you're going to have these kinds of investigations, typically they're going to happen in some kind of an urban setting. This is where you can start to get into if you have players that are interested in this kind of thing, if you as a DM or interested in this kind of thing. How does the law work regarding stuff like this? Regarding divination spells? You know, if you go into you know, do they use zone of truth in the courts or are the gods like no, that's reserved for like we're not going to do that in service to the state.

24:52 But that's nonsense, you know, is divination Like do you have to be a licensed diviner of something? Find? You have almost for a court to accept what you found as evidence like that, Yeah, I was gonna say something being illegal has never stopped any of my party. But it won't be Essentially, it won't be admissible because exactly you didn't. You didn't you didn't follow protocol in using that you had to have not unlike you know our laws here that like just because you find something like well, did you have probable cause? Did you have a warrant or anything else? Because if you didn't, then it's inadmissible. You cannot use it, and they're they're free to go. And that's now you're you just let a murderer off the hook and now you can And one of the wonderful things about the fact that you're designing a fantasy legal system is you can peeback you know, the way that fantasy legal system works on the mechanics that you're imposing on that. So if you're like, okay, you need to find seven clues before you can definitively point to a suspect, and then we moved to the part where you take them down. You know, the law of that city is you must present seven pieces of evidence before you know, we will you know, sign the writ that authorizes you to, you know, pursue this this important citizen for whatever crime. The rule of seven exactly there. That sounds like at quest, he said, those are the approaches that I typically use. I'm a big

26:26 fan of that first one of that that pool of clues, pool of suspects, but kind of constrains the field of play. It gives them specific directions to look at, but means everybody gets a chance to do something interesting. You get to introduce some NPCs, and those NPCs that you introduce the suspects, the ones that turn out not to be guilty, they can become part of the campaign as well. And I really like two that like there's a time limit on that that can that doesn't like it doesn't have to be a set time limit either, because there's no saying that. Essentially, if your player go down a rabbit hole and they're really focused on that one person, like like you know, you got to get going home, like yeah, no, you got it, let's go yep. And it's a thing that also allows you to sidetrack in the middle of it, right. So, so you know, if if you find four out of the seven clues, but then you realize that there's this whole smuggling ring that you want to break up, you can take a couple of adventures, you know, a couple of sessions, go off the side, have them bust up that smuggling ring, and when they come back, they've still got four out of seven clues, right, and they can just pick right back up and you know, and proceed with it from there. Yeah. So I guess the first question that you ask is this a who done it? Where you're trying to figure out who's responsible for it? Or is it what we might call a what done it? Where you know, maybe is the DM you know, you do a scene where everybody says what it is? Maybe the villain even sends you a letter saying wah, I did this, but you'll never prove it,

27:57 fools, Oh like Professor Moore, Yes, yeah, exactly that kind of thing. You can totally do that. So I know, I love I love all of Jim's big bats, and they're just selling eighties cartoon villains. Just the guy from Bullwinkle at the top, slightly relash. I'm a dude of a certain age, my friend. So absolutely, But determine whether it's a who done it or what done it? That's the first thing you do. You know, what is it that the players are trying to figure out? And then put one of those structures over it to make sure that you get a compelling story, a compelling narrative that gives everybody a chance to use their various different skills to get at the true And we've got our our pool of suspects approach, we've got our emergent solution approach, where you just put it all in the hands of the players. They but they just need to, you know, come up with a certain number of successful tests in order to do that, something like you know, a version of sort of the old fourth Edition Skill Challenge, right, we kind of kind of make that into our mystery and the third approach is something similar to what we might have in the gumshoe system. You've got core clues, and those clues are always going to get found, and they're always going to lead to your you know, your preferred solution that you've said in advance, but they just need to find a certain number of them before they can actually act on that solution.

29:15 But it will always lead them to where you want to go. And those are three approaches to mysteries. And I would love to hear if anybody else has had success with trying to do it differently, love to hear about that. You can tell us about your attempts in a mystery, hopefully successful attempts if you've gathered enough clues. Tell us about your mystery games. That's Hello Adventurers podcast at gmail dot com or tell us yourself helloadventures podcast dot com, slash Voice. There's a couple of cool pre made games that that I've used that or that that are great mysteries. I've brought up d M. Dave a lot. He has one called Doppelganger City that is very much a a who Done It? That uses they use the doppelgangers in shape Shifters and like, it's a pretty cool approach to not even knowing who the characters even really are yet, which as a whole in different way or two is that's a very fun one. And of course this cant keep mysteries, which is a compilation of one shots that do internect with each other, and there is an overarching mystery to that. Cool. So if you want to see how it's how someone else already did it, start there and see how it goes.

30:14 But I think that's all we got. Anything else, no, great, thank you, yeah, so, thank you so much for listening to Hello Adventurers. We're your hosts Jason Portiso, Jim Crocker, Andrew McCall, Produser editor Engineer Jason Portiso. Music by Nixt Starrier, artwork by Kristen Broderick. You can reach out to us with any feedback for suggestions by emailing Hello Adventurers podcast at gmail dot com. Hello Adventures is a JTP audio production. Goodbye Adventurers always is it Crue