The hardest type of adventure to both prep and to run is the mystery. When done well, the mystery is a thrilling ride from scene to scene collecting clues that build into a satisfying reveal; be it knowledge gained or villains thwarted. When a mystery goes wrong though, it can fall somewhere between caught in the doldrums and a root canal gone wrong. What makes a mystery too mysterious for your players, and how do you salvage a mystery gone wrong?
Fumbling In The Dark
Most mysteries go wrong due to a problem with either the flow of clues or the quality of the clues presented. From a high level, the goal of the clue is two-fold: to drive the mystery to the next clue and to help build to the eventual reveal. The clearest example of this is Law & Order, where in the first half of the show each scene reveals a clue which directs the detectives to the next scene, culminating in the arrest of the suspect.
When the flow of clues is too slow, the mystery stalls out and the players are unsure of what to do. They begin to wander around trying to guess where to go next, they get antsy and look for some action (i.e starting a fight), or they give up on the mystery all together, waiting for the next clue to be delivered to them.
When the quality of the clues is poor, the characters are unable to use one clue to move to the next one or cannot connect the clues to put together the reveal. The end result is the same, the players have too little information to know what to do next, and the game stalls. This effect is made worse if the game stalls out just before the reveal, where there are no more clues to hand out.
There are signs at the table when your mystery is having a problem:
- The players cannot remember the early clues later the mystery, and the GM has to remind them of what they’ve found.
- The players start suggesting actions outside of solving the mystery, trying to exit the story.
- The players start suggesting more aggressive (read: violent) actions on the people within the plot, out of a growing frustration.
- The players are having trouble remembering what the goal of the mystery is in the first place.
- There is a rise in gaming distractions (e.g. flipping of books, checking the internet, etc).
Put A Lamp In The Window
If you detect that your mystery has gone dark you need to first figure out what the source of your problem is: flow of clues or quality of clues.
Flow of Clues
If your clues are not flowing well, you need to consider how to speed up getting clues to the players. In your prep, you should make sure that one clue leads to another. During play, you have a few options to increase the flow. One solution is to do some aggressive screen cutting, ending the current scene and cutting into the next one as soon as the clue is found (see Law & Order). Another, which may be harder during the game, is to make up a new clue and drop it into the scene to move the story along.
One special note, if you are running a game with a pass/fail skill mechanic, like d20, a failed roll to find a clue will always stall out a mystery. Change what you have characters roll for so that finding a clue is not a pass/fail. See this article and the Gumshoe system for ways to remedy this problem.
Quality of Clues
If your clues are too opaque you need to figure out how to help the players understand the meaning of the clues they possess. In your prep, you want to make sure that you note exactly what each clue tells the players about the overall mystery as well as how that clue links to other clues. During the game, you have several options to help the players better understand. First, you can allow the characters to make additional skill checks, to provide new information. You can have the players use an expert NPC, who can provide additional information about one or more clues (i.e. the entomologists in Silence of the Lambs). Finally, as a GM you can work with the players to walk them through the clues, asking pointed questions to get them back on track (I have had good success with this method in the past).
Giving Them A Night Light
There are things you can do proactively to help your mystery run well. Here are a few suggestions:
- Use recaps at the start of your sessions to help remind players what has gone on in the past sessions. This is especially important if your game does not run weekly.
- Have your players use a clue map to visualize and organize their clues so that they can see how clues relate to each other.
- Give out clue cards for key clues. It helps the players visualize the clues and you can write the important facts on them.
Like A Rainbow In The Dark
Making a good mystery is no…um…mystery. By keeping a healthy flow of clues, and making sure that your clues both lead to the next clue as well as help complete the reveal, your mysteries will be entertaining for you and your players. When running mysteries you need to watch for problems and when they arise, make adjustments to keep the mystery moving.
What problems have you run into when running mysteries, and how have your overcome them? How do you help your players keep track of the clues in a mystery?
I’ve played in mystery games and they kind of left me burnt out on them. It started to feel like they were foregone conclusions and we were just going through the motions to solve them without our characters mattering.
What I really wanted was the feeling that we could meaningfully fail to solve anything and still have a satisfying game.
I’ve encountered all of the above problems as a DM and as a player, probably like anyone trying to do mysteries.
It’s very difficult to find the right balance. I’ve even tried (as a DM, or “Storyteller” in that case) stalling on purpose, just to see what happens. A hint: nothing useful. What might work in Scandinavian crime fiction doesn’t fit in mystery games.
What I find helpful though is watching mystery shows – I haven’t watched Law & Order, but The Mentalist, Elementary or even Broadchurch for a longer story arc can be helpful too. Well, any series with a plotline is good to watch and learn from (The Good Wife, The Americans, Justified to name a few). It seems to me that attention spans of TV viewers are more similar to those of role players (in terms of episode to episode continuity, flow and quality of clues, depth of supporting characters and “villains of the week” compared to NPCs, etc.)
And BTW – do you know any good outlining (or similar) apps designed for writers that might be helpful in designing a long story arc mystey campaign?
(For now I’m using a spreadsheet table).
I don’t know if anyone else will find it useful, but I love the “mystery generator” system in the Deadlands Noir game. Simple and easy as any Savage Worlds rule is.
Not sure if this is exactly what you’re looking for, but I use Cmap Tools (http://cmap.ihmc.us/) to construct a flowchart for campaign story arc contruction. It’s free and has worked well for me.
It looks quite promising for collaborative players-DM notes, but I’ve used mind maps with mixed success.
I thought about something like Scrivener, just less bloated.
I just quit being so attached to my mysteries. The best thing in the world was when the players sat at the table, all consumed by the story, going over each clue. They were completely off the track. But it didn’t matter. They were coming up with some FANTASTIC story ideas. I just picked one and ran with it. Sure, I needed to fudge my OWN story to fit with what they were seeing. But that doesn’t take too much work since they were fitting every one of THEIR ideas into the story frame I had given them. Minimal work on my part. Validation for paying attention on the part of the players. A story we all love and build together. I call it a win! 🙂
I always use Roy’s method. By far the biggest problem with standard mystery scenarios has nothing to do with the pacing of the clues – the problem is that the scenario is 100% straight railroad track. It only works on TV because the show is scripted.
In an RPG sometimes I don’t even start with a solution, and if I do it’s only a vague idea. The only way to make the scenario interesting is to let the players come up with ideas and then run the scenario on the fly based on their ideas. Any scenario needs to be driven by the players, not just have them following the GMs script to act out the story he’s already written for them.
Buy every player a 50¢ tiny notebook. They will keep track of every clue you throw at ’em. More info here -> http://violentmediarpg.blogspot.com/2013/10/props-profiles-and-profits.html
Other than that if you find that you’re particularly proud of how subtle/clever a clue is be prepared to un-subtle it in play or drop in a more obvious clue. Always try to include multiple clue paths to reach the correct conclusion. Also plan for what happens if the mystery doesn’t get solved or the players jump to the wrong conclusions. Which is admittedly much easier to say than do. If you’ve got a firm vision of the crime in mind you should be able to improvise what you need for a good game. Mysteries are pretty easy to conceive but difficult to run well.
Perfectly agree on “easy to conceive, but hard to run well”.
Keeping track of flow and quality sounds easy enough. Now I just have to debug and make sure that my quality is the same as the players perceive… and figure out if the difference is because of the inferences I make without consciously considering them.
Great ideas Phil! I love mystery games and gravitate toward them; Call/Trail of Cthulhu, Ashen Stars, Night’s Black Agents…
There’s a nice technique I stole from the adventure Terra Nova for Ashen Stars. For mysteries with a number of suspects, you don’t decide who did it ahead of time. You roleplay a number of suspects, each of who could have done it.
The first suspect your players latch on to, you make her the red herring.
The second suspect your players latch on to, she’s the guilty party.
You need to have floating clues you can then drop just ahead of the players to first make the red herring look guilty, then exonerate her. And to shift the attention back to suspect number two and then prove she did it.
This works best in a closed off location. The players and the suspects are stuck together. A manor house in a storm, or as in Terra Nova, a crippled starship.
I wrote and published a short mystery encounter/mini-adventure called Haiku of Horror: Autumn Moon Bath House, which is a ghost haunting, curse and murder mystery. Sometimes a ghost encounter means laying it to rest, though many times adventurers just kill the ghost and move on. This encounter comes with a curse imposed on the party forcing them to lay the ghost to rest, or forever be haunted by the ghost itself (no matter where you are).
To keep the mystery simple there are 4 clues to discover, 3 of which are discovered through conversation with 3 NPCs and 1 by searching a room. The adventure offers suggestions to the GM when PCs are not getting the clues – like having one of the NPCs approach the PCs to offer a clue, etc.
I built the adventure to be a mystery, but a relatively easy one, and one the PCs have to resolve to remove a curse. I think it works well as a mystery adventure.
I used to be a great fan of open-ended, improvised adventures heavily dependent on player ideas. They require a lot of cooperation and players that actually like this kind of RPG, which is not always the case…
So, discuss the mystery style with your group: you might hear that linear and “scripted” is not bad at all, if the story that players unfold is really interesting.
I’ve run a few mystery adventures. Some were kinda “meh” but one was a smashing success that my players still recount 10 years later. Here are a few thoughts on ingredients for success:
1. Make sure you have the right group! Many GMs overlook this: not everyone’s play style fits with mystery adventures. Kick-in-the-doors gamers are not going to have the prolonged focus or attention required to appreciate a mystery story.
2. Give the players and their characters adequate reason to WANT to solve the mystery. Start by aligning the goal with their general motivations: Good versus evil, discovering arcane knowledge, gaining prestige, becoming fabulously wealthy, etc. Next, ensure at least one character has a personal connection to the story: a relative in trouble, an NPC ally requesting help, a homeland under threat, a personal item stolen or reputation besmirched, etc.
3. Put “guard rails” around the story. The party may wander badly off course, so prepare clues or NPC interactions to nudge them back. The party may dally too long, so prepare a sequence of events that remind them the rest of the world is still spinning. These events should start out mildly bad and escalate to provide dramatic tension in the story.
There is a little known video game called Covert Action that has a terrific crime and mystery system that I have always wanted to adapt to RPGS. In nutshell, the crime is determined in advance. All the actors have a role. Mastermind, safe-cracker, kidnapper, etc.
All the criminals do their business on a timetable. If the character doesn’t act the crime happens on schedule. However, they leave behind a variety of clues. Coded messages, clandestine meetings witnessed, suspicious characters, safe houses and bases.
You always have plenty of clues, but the clock is ticking. You need to convert raw clues (e.g. a coded message) into evidence and you need to track and capture participants. If you don’t have evidence you can’t hold a suspect. Even if you capture a key participant and break up one plot, the Mastermind just keeps trying to fulfill her ultimate goal.
I think this would translate really well into an RPG. Characters are never lost and they have lots of meaningful choices. Follow the shady guy around and try to locate more safe houses? Decode the cryptic message (It takes at least a day and the clock is ticking)? Stakeout a suspected safe house?
Whenever a bad guy finishes a job, they go into hiding. If you wait around too long, they all go into hiding after the caper and the Masterminds big plot ticks towards completion. In the game the big challenge is to capture as many of them as possible. It’s also possible to turn double agents with certain special clues.
Failure is meaningful, people might even die, but it’s not the end of the world or the mystery. Something bad happens, but the Mastermind leaves behind yet another clue and the PC’s are one step closer to stopping a bigger plot.