Eric, in the thread boredom, suggested that someone devise a ruleset for playing quirky mysteries a la Miss Marple or Jessica Fletcher. I'd prefer to expand it to include Columbo and Sherlock Holmes, and Tommy and Tuppence, and Nick and Nora, and Hercule Poirot, but let's see what we can devise.
In thinking about mysteries, my usual advice is that the writer, or the referee, must start with what actually happened, then from that determine what clues are immediately available to the observer and what else can be discovered by investigation, and making sure that there is enough information in all of this to reconstruct the crime. That's the way I handled it in Mystery of the Vorgo.
However, I'm aware that Seth Ben-Ezra, author of Legends of Alyria, has a very effective little game out there called Dirty Little Secrets which approaches the Noir Mystery genre from the other end: the players create characters and facts along the way, led by mechanics which ultimately determine who committed which crimes. I've not played it, more's the pity, but the concept is intriguing.
Our idea also suggests that the player character, a Verser from another universe, is neither perpetrator nor investigator nor victim, but an outside interested party who might or might not be suspect (as the investigator told Peter Davison's Doctor in The Black Rose, just because you're from another planet does not eliminate you from suspicion of murder--it just means we're a lot less likely to find your motive) but in some way has an interest.
Not so long ago I ran a murder mystery in Harry's Mary Piper Alpha setting; but then, Harry was a Junior Investigator in the Durnmist City Watch on duty at the time the murder was reported, and so he was roped into the story already. With that one, too, I had most of what happened worked out before he reached the scene of the crime, and thus it was easy for me to answer his question by thinking through what I knew had happened and occasionally rolling the dice to determine whether the outcomes made things easier or more difficult (e.g., did someone involved in the fight drop his weapon such that it is unclear who held it?).
I was once in a game of twenty questions in which the person answering the questions did not know what the object was but thought he would answer randomly yes or know and see what object fit the answers. In the end, there was no such object, and that's the risk of any mechanical method of running the mystery: if the resolution is mechanical, it might yield an impossible result (Peggy killed Sue at two o'clock in the afternoon, and was herself killed by Chuck an hour earlier). You have to have some way of making the outcome plausible.
Also, one of the tropes of such mysteries is often that the detective knows some seemingly irrelevant bit of information that solves the case. This trope is particularly challenging, because if the player is to solve the case he has to be made aware of the seemingly irrelevant information without being clued to the fact that that information is critical to the solution.
I will mention Ron Edwards' Moving Clue at this point, a mechanical solution to the problem that arises in mystery games when the players fail to ask the right question of the one character who knows the critical piece of information. By the moving clue, the critical pieces of information are known by one of the characters likely to be questioned, but the referee does not know which one--he only knows that one of them knows, and when the player character asks the right question it will be addressed to the right character.
That, anyway, is a start on the problem. I need to turn my attention to a lot of other threads tonight, and perhaps some others here will contribute to the project with ideas that will make such a scenario workable.
--M. J. Young
I agree about expanding it.
The advantage of the outsider perspective is that the detective can do the heavy lifting are regards the detecting, and only present to our hero, the continuing summary of the case. At which point, the hero can offer some helpful advice on solving part of the mystery, and offer help if violence or some form of derring-do is needed.
I'm reminded of the blonde guy detective in Matlock who ran around as Matlock's gopher, and probably beat up a few fleeing murderers.
This is very much a Murder Mystery Lite idea. Which considering how hard MM's are, might be a good thing.
Now obviously, you can w/o much difficulty turn it into something more heavy, probably using the same ruleset. Its more up to th eintent of the GM and the player.
Now the seemingly irrelevant bit of info clue can fit in very nicely with the Lite version. Our hero may come from a future time period and thus he knows facts that only the villain who imagines himself on teh cutting edge of science....
"Bwahahahaha....they will never figure out my murder method. Only four people in the world can even understand the theory behind it!"
The advantage of the outsider perspective is that the detective can do the heavy lifting are regards the detecting, and only present to our hero, the continuing summary of the case. At which point, the hero can offer some helpful advice on solving part of the mystery, and offer help if violence or some form of derring-do is needed.
Meh. That reads to me like, "the advantage is that the referee can tell his story to the player and make the player feel like he's part of it when his input doesn't really matter at all." I suppose the notion of player character as bodyguard for the detective works, as long as we know that there are going to be frequent problems. You might pull off a Nero Wolfe thing in which the verser is Archie (Wolfe is the brilliant and severely overweight detective who never leaves his home but sends Archie to gather all his information and report it to him). At some level, though, it seems very much as if the referee is directing the scenario and the player is along for the ride, and I personally do not like that kind of play.
YMMV, as they say.
--M. J. Young
Some players like to be taken by the hand and led through the adventure. Not the majority, tis true.
The advantage is that most of the time MM's don't work. Flat out failure. So this is a way of making a sorta MM to slake the thirst for MM. Diet lemonade may not be real lemonade, but its something.
And you should make it so that at least one of the puzzles presented to the verser is mission critical. Solve it, or the murderer goes free.
Nero could work too.
I have an idea, outright in its simplicity so much that it may seem to make the issue too easy. Give (hidden) intellect, ed lev, or most especially intuition checks when the player is about to leave a clue or has seen one that is relevant and doesn't seem to attribute importance to it; even if all the referee says to him about it is "you feel that there is something here of relevance", or more specifically "you feel the half-empty wine glass on the counter may be relevant", this is especially necessary in situations where the character's non-physical attributes have exceeded those of the player, but even otherwise; having a place described to you and actually being there are different from one another entirely. edit: of course, on a roll of 40 you can always feel free to present misleading information =)
Well, I really like the Archie-to-an-NPC-Nero form; but the initial question was how to make Jessica Fletcher/Jane Marple mysteries work with a verser. So I'll wrap up that idea by saying that our Nero Wolfe-like detective has to need an assistant whom he will pay well and house and feed and clothe, whose job is formally "secretary" in that he is to take notes of all interviews, but who is really Wolfe's investigator; and the verser has to be given the opportunity to apply for the job. That the verser is skilled in the use of certain weapons (a revolver would be top of the list, but swords and knives would also be of interest), and possibly that he has other skills in stealth, lock picking, and questioning suspects would all make him a prime candidate. I think, too, the fact that he has no family in the area would interest Wolfe, because it means he won't want off to visit them.
Now having said that, I'll close down that piece, because it's pretty straightforward at this point--just hire the verser to work for the genius who never leaves his home, has a gourmet chef prepare his food in-house, and demands not to be interrupted for one hour a day while he tends his orchids in the penthouse greenhouse, and you've got your set-up. It's a bit like Why Spy in that regard, only that the employer is private, the tech level is a bit lower, and the investigations remain local.
So then, how do we connect a verser to someone like Jessica Fletcher or Jane Marple?
One possibility is to suggest that the lady does not drive, does not have a license. Fletcher is a good candidate for this, because she's a successful novelist who has enough money that she could easily hire a car when she needs to go somewhere. That raises the problem of putting the verser in the position of seeking employment as a driver. I'm reminded of the opening of Highpoint, where Mr. Kinney is in the middle of nowhere and a wealthy less-than-healthy elderly woman calls to him from the back of her car because her stubborn adult daughter has run off toward the edge of the cliff leaving her driverless for the moment and concerned whether her somewhat distraught and beautiful daughter might do something untoward. Kinney, out of work, is easily persuaded to take the job of "babysitting" the daughter, which gets him into the adventure of the movie (her brother pulled a scam in which he managed to pose as a money launderer and got both the FBI and the Mob to give him money, and then vanished presumed dead with no one knowing where the money is).
Anyway, you could bring the limo to some secluded location where the verser is, have the family member driver fight with the elderly non-driving detective, and in the process get one of them to offer the verser the job of driving for a famous mystery writer. If he takes it, you're golden. Of course, if he doesn't, I'm not sure where you are.
You've then got something like the Wolfe scenario, except that the woman is going to leave the driver with the car sometimes and do her own legwork, and they're sometimes going to be in the thick of things together.
There's also the potential here (and probably with the Wolfe scenario as well) for the detective's friend on the local police force to become curious and suspicious about the verser, which adds an undercurrent plot element. For the record, verser divergents are like identical twins--they will usually have the same DNA profiles but different fingerprints. (Temporal divergents will have the same fingerprints and DNA profiles).
So again we have the situation in which the verser is employed by the detective, and so is always around when there's detecting being done.
I'm not sure how you do that with Jane Marple; she's not the wealthy type.
--M. J. Young