But notice I used “player” in the singular.

When it becomes “players,” things get muddied. I’ve been in situations with four other players, where three are ready to have the gods fire an arrow from the sky into the lever that opens the door, but the fourth player says, “No, I’ve almost got it figured out!”

I’ve tried myriad approaches to this: letting the 3 players deal with the obstinate fourth, letting “majority rules” dictate and letting down the fourth, trying to provide a blunt clue (which can backfire!), etc…

One player who is stymied is easy to deal with, but a handful who experience the game differently get far more challenging.

Damn players….

Furthermore, a GM should never hinge the entire adventure around one clue or plot element without providing alternatives for getting such crucial information.

I like the ideas in this article. I also agree that each situation is different. We all have “off” nights where we collectively can’t think our way through a wet paper bag let alone solve a mystery. A good GM will help things get back on track with one of these methods or come up with something else.

A GM shouldn’t let such a situation bog the game down in minutia for the duration of the session. That only increases player frustration and tedium, neither of which makes for a good game session.

Also, of course, when the players are stuck they’ll cut the DM a lot of slack once they twig that they’re being helped.

For instance, the party had been making headway against a cult, but have recently been stymied by a large group of refugees. Despite my best efforts, the party is not connecting the dots that the two are related. So their resource on the cult (a somewhat eccentric professor) starts asking them all kinds of questions about their experiences so far.

When the party gets to the problems with the refugees, Professor NPC notes that they’ve otherwise been well-behaved for the most part, and off-handedly asks if the party suspects a connection between them and the cult. Light bulbs went off so fast around the table, it looked like someone turned on a chandelier…

I don’t think I’ve overused this technique, but it does seem to risk becoming a habit. I’ll have to change tactics next time; thanks for the ideas!

Another thing I often see is the players running after a red herring. These take time, but are also a great way to let the players do what they want giving them the sense of free agency. I try very hard not to shut them down. For example, I once had a player pursuing an NPC who he thought was a vampire. The chase rolls got progressively harder and eventually he found what he thought was the vampire’s lair. In fact it the house of some harmless old lady who woke up in the morning to find the doors and windows in her home no longer squeaked since the PC had been oiling everything as he went to avoid making noise.

[roxysteve] When I restart my CoC campaign, the first session is likely to be a review of information uncovered thus far. Or I could just forge ahead and remind the players as I go, I suppose. Cairo will be much more interesting in that case.

As a player I am not great at problem solving but I like to be given the chance. I recently played in a game which had me frustrated beyond belief simply because the GM no sooner posed an interesting conundrum than he promptly fed us the answer to it couched thus: “As a longshoreman you would know that blah blah blah so it takes about an hour for you to figure out the answer is ‘giraffe’”. It made me want to scream at times.

In a D&D context, having posed a riddle so cunning the players weren’t able to figure it out I’d get their cleric to pray for guidance and drop hints as dreams.

[Donogh] The initial conditions of the scenario state that this isn’t a desirable path. Sometimes it really isn’t, like when you’re not playing D&D and can’t simply sandbox the night away because the options are huge but boringly mundane due to the absence of wandering monsters. Think “Traveller”. Or that castle assault at the con that was described in the article.

If your idea is workable then there is no problem to begin with and everything is jake.

Should be:

You remember THAT LIBRARY or THAT SAGE had all sorts of information on this. Now you’ll have to RETURN TO ORBIT or DO A FAVOR FOR THE NPC or SNEAK INTO THE DATA VAULT AT NIGHT if you want the information.

Hit and Run: If your players like to beat up NPCs for information, improvise a small hit and run attack on the players, with the NPCs heading for the hills. Ignore the dice that say the NPCs are all dead or all get away. One or more turns out to be alive and present. At least one goes down and gets captured, and that one has information the players need.
If they don’t like beating up minions, the clue could be on the body.

Going Fishing: If your players try *anything* that remotely could work to find them information, let it work. If they aren’t searching near the heart of your mystery, give them a clue to a clue, something that leads them toward knowledge.

My players recently wanted to find a “Mirror Shop, where we’ll ask about magic mirrors.” I had no mirror shop prepared, and I didn’t think magic mirrors were on sale, but I had the saleswoman remember NPC with information the players need who “came in last week asking for the same thing.” A clue to a clue.

As has been said often in the Stew, don’t let bad dice rolls stop the investigation in its tracks. A bad roll could be interpreted as “You know something is going on here, but you don’t have the foggiest notion what it is. You remember / had all sorts of information on this. Now you’ll have to / / if you want the information.” In other words, a failure during investigation is a setback, not a roadblock.

I’ve only run into one of these type mysteries…it was terrible. The DM threw up a chromatic wall that required a different type of magic for each color. As the lone surviving character (and a fighter to boot), I sat there scratching my head for a half hour and then decided that it was time to get dinner. The game never recovered. Later I was shown the actual solution for the puzzle, but it rested on me having prior knowledge that i just didn’t have.