I've just finished 'Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon' which is a Meg Landsglow mystery by Donna Adams. The blurb that says a laugh on every page is about right. Highly recomended.
Now I want to write a humorous mystery. :) I'll try to resist as I'm up to my hips in 'Anoniblogger', and I've almost got 'A Simple Mystery' done. But I have to admit as a way of drawing a lot of bizarre, yet true to life characters, mystery has a lot going for it. In fact, thats one of its key functions. So if you can come up with a list of hammy characters who are interesting in odd ways...
Thought #3: Most gaming mysteries are too hard. I've played more than a few, and the larger majority were plainly too hard. Now, I'm brighter than the average bear, but less effective when it comes to laying out lines of logic for a mystery, and I had lots of problems with a variety of gamemasters. Worse, I've played with one guy who fits the term supergenius, and we did not come remotely close to the answer to the mystery (granted that was an extremely hard and very bizarre world). I've seen gaming groups be stumped for long time periods.
An unnamed GM, a good guy, rotated in for me one day, he had a mystery he wanted to run. So we supers ran around the city for five hours of real time trying to discover the hidden location that he assured us wasn't that hard.
One solution as MJ would say is the 'floating clue', but more is needed. Game Designers need to get over their fear of making it too easy. The mystery is supposed to be solved in most cases by thoughtful, diligent players. Thats the goal. I think a lot of game designers have other goals in mind like ...All the facts to solve it were laid out.
Occasionally, this is going to result in a mystery being solved waaaay too quickly. I'm reminded of a player I ran in Naja World who after arriving, and I gave a tiny bit of description, he asked for clarification of one point,a nd then revealed one point about the world in less than two minutes into the world.
It happens.
And frankly, I think the attitude of the gm should be pleased respect at that moment. "Man, this guy is smart!" is not a bad attitude to have.
Let's aim for seventy percent success rate instead of the current ten to twenty percent we're hitting now. If a player went into a duel with orcs with the expectation that he'd most likely lose, that wouldn't be much fun as a game, now would it?
Thought #4: Razzle-dazzle up the mysteries a bit if you can. This isn't as big of a problem. But an atmosphere dripping with dread, or a haunted mansion where you have to find the ghost's secret, or a series of blatantly whacked out characters like the murder victim in Leaping Loon who liked to ride around on teh robotic mail cart with fake blood dripping off onto the carpet as he pretended to be dead....until he actually was...well, it all helps.
Thought #5: It seems to be possible as I've seen it on TV to have 'Not A Real Mystery' mysteries. Sure, you have to track down the villainous vandal, but...when you walk into a location, the lout in the back looks around panicked and then runs away. Ah ha! A clue! Chase him down, force him to confess...maybe he's not the bad guy, but he saw somethign,a nd he's afraid of the bad guy...and so you track down the new bad guy who's the local fencing master who sets his students on you, and after you disarm the punks, he confesses that he's been blackmailed by the real bad guy who's gone off and kidnapped your henchman who came down with food poisoning the night before and you left him behind in the inn....And you have to track them down to the cave where the villain has his stolen loot and he threatens to toss your henchman off a cliff unless you let him go...
Not really a mystery as most of the 'detecting' consists of being a bloodhound.
Thought #6: Consider adding some of that Contingency World Carrots to your Mystery Stew. "If the players finish with the mystery before it seems appropriate, then activate the contingency." Or you could simply activate the contingency when the initial mystery is over. However, there's a different feel to A where its to finish up a theme, and B where its the epilogue.
I suppose a good end to a mystery might be where the bad guy breaks away, and finds a defensive place....climatic sword duels on castle walls or the 'I'm going to blow the building and take everyone with me'...
Here's an idea. Lay out the mystery so that you think it's too easy to solve. Maybe it's too easy, maybe it isn't. If you're wrong and it isn't, great.
If you're right, have a backup plan: That's What He Wants You To Think! The solution isn't the real solution, only a red herring carefully set out by the actual villain. Have a few more clues (again, go for "too easy," you might be wrong this time), and by the time the party tracks down the genuine article, the session won't have been too short.
I like it a lot. Maybe after I finish A Simple Mystery I'll try Easy Red Herring.
Some of those television mysteries are not whodunits but howtogetems. Columbo is famous for this--we know who the killer is and how he did it before Columbo knows there's a murder, and he knows who the killer is pretty much as soon as he's met the suspects, but his entire effort is to find the mistake the killer made so that he can prove it. That's where Harry is in his world at the moment--he knows who the murderer is, really, he just hasn't figured out how to prove it.
The moving clue is a significant aid to game mysteries: making sure that someone gives the detective the necessary information is the trick. Of course, the more difficult problems are those in which the essential clue is "what the dog did in the middle of the night" or in the Agatha Christie mystery "Why didn't they ask Evans?" (The former, "The dog did nothing in the night," which is the interesting point, since had there been a prowler outside the dog would have barked, so the crime was committed by someone in the house. The latter, Evans was the upstairs maid who had attended to the needs of the dying mistress of the home for years, but they got one of the servants downstairs to witness the signing of the new will by the mistress on her deathbed, because the mistress was already dead and the downstairs maid would not know that the woman in the bed was an impostor. Clues like these are extremely difficult, because they require the detective to recognize that something is missing that ought to be there. The easier clues are that something is there that ought not be.)
Graeme managed to solve The Mystery of the Vorgo, with a minimum of magic (which was supported in the scenario). So I think that was well designed (which I hope I can say without impugning his cleverness in solving it).
But I agree, mysteries are difficult to write and even more difficult to design as game scenarios.
I'm going to mention Seth Ben Ezra's (Dark Omen Games) noir detective game Dirty Secrets. It uses a very innovative system to create a mystery to which the solution is determined by the game mechanics themselves, and is unknown to anyone at the table until it is revealed through play. I've not played it, but I find the concept fascinating.
--M. J. Young
How to get ems...another nice sub-genre.
The 'clue by ommission' should probably be listed with a bright red stop sign. "Use extreme caution. Don't consider this unless you are a very experience gamemaster with successful mysteries under your belt."
My main point is not that mysteries are difficult, although this is true. My main point is that mysteries are made to be too difficult to solve by most or even the vast majority of gamemasters. We as game designers need to simplify and make easier mysteries.
Wodium's Possible Red Herring, and MJ's Howtogetem, and my Not Really A Mystery are all ways of making it easier.
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With a Howtogetem, I'm thinking it would be hard to do as a Columbo style mystery as a lot of verser would just whack the creep, and have done. However, if you had an Alien SF setting at a cosmopolitan city, and the murderer was a high official...ahem...
In the Perseus Arm, the Great Guilds ensure peaceful trade between solar systems. The Guilds are ancient, some tens of thousands of years old, frequently the founding races of a guild have transcended to energy states, or gone extinct in some catastrophe or interstellar war. But the Guild lives on.
And so it is that Guild Emmisaries such as Trade Arbitrator D'gubsik of the Harouk species, have vast powers of personal defense. This allows them to be sent to a planetary civilization for some time alone, and for them to be secure in their persons. However, they have little in the way of attack powers. But if attacked....well, one Arbitrator stood off ten thousand soldiers for a week before rescue could come. Such defense can be lethal or simply kilotonnes of sleeping gas and forcefields that can stand up to tacnukes.
Such powers are directly controlled by the Emmissaries' AI. This AI knows what its boss does, but the AI is fairly hypocritical, but rule-bound. If it can be publically proven that the Emmissary is guilty of certain crimes (including murder of a sentient in alliance with the Guilds), then the AI will shut down all of the Emmissaries authority including his key to his space ship and his defensive powers. He can then be captured and jailed and punished by the local civilization.
The Harouk are nearly eight feet tall, bipedal, grey-green skin approximately elephantine, with antennae of flesh on the crown of their head, with endo and exoskelatonal elements which helps make them very strong. Some of them enjoy hunting, and some are bigots who feel that any civilization without interstellar capabilities of its own are not truly sentient.
The locals were developing space stations, and asteroid mining when the Guilds approached them three decades ago. Now they have four colonies in other solar systems, and extensive space industry, but they are still clearly on the bottom rung of interstellar society. They still carry laser blasters!!
The Ygournki are about five feet all, yellow skinned, very industrious and possessing of two opposable thumbs on each hand which helps to make them extremely precise crafters. While they have some tendency toward violence, they frequently react by going into a temporary shock/paralysis to excessive violence. Outright sociopathy is practically unknown. Murder is usually a matter of extreme rage among them, or desperation.
The Ygournki simply lack the ability to deal with the Haroukian Trade Emmissary. They are not connected enough politically, nor do they have the cold logic necessary, nor do they have the Terran mindset of bearsarks which might deal with the problem directly. They also need this trade because without it, their economy would crash badly. Happy about this situation, the Haroukian is considering sending for some of his twisted buddies so that they can all play.
Enter stage right...the verser. Innocent schmucks to his left, vile scumbag in front of him, avenging force of justice coming right up.