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  1. - Top - End - #1
    Dwarf in the Playground
    Join Date
    Dec 2018

    Default Running A Mystery That Doesn't Feel Like Cheating

    So throughout the years my group has run a few mystery type games, but they always fell flat. I have a theory as for why but my justifications are pretty much entirely based on how the group felt about what was happening. I want to come to an understanding of this before I run my own mystery-ish campaign and learn from the mistakes of the past.

    My theory
    If you are running a mystery campaign it will end up in one of two ways. 1) way too easy and utterly trivial for your players. 2) The mystery is cloaked in 6 different layers of plot armor or DM related plot garbage and the players will feel cheated.

    Context
    - About a year ago the other long time DM in our group decided to run a campaign.
    - Doesn't tell that it's a mystery based one (Pretty sure this is where it starts going downhill)
    - I show up with my tranquility monk who for flavor reasons has undergone a few of the old school oaths like from 3.5
    - The other players: an awakened mystic, a conquest paladin (there were tensions but nothing too bad), and a lore
    bard. Overall a pretty good composition I thought
    - We investigate the crime scene and try to figure out what's going on
    - Context Clues as well as the DM's clues are pretty obvious and we narrow it down to a few people
    - We later find damning evidence for one culprit and decide to get a warrent and search the guy's house
    - DM gets a bit miffed that we narrow it down so quickly and decides to pivot to the other side of the equation (he admitted to it himself)
    - While investigating the guilty guy's house I decide to do an investigation check to see if there are any markings on the walls or floors, all the while combing over the room to check for illusions, and the mystic used some kind of ability that was basically detect magic to see if there was any shenanigans about.
    - DM says there there is nothing out of the ordinary, however there are a few magic auras
    - The auras are not relevant to the search, but they will become relevant later
    - After staking out the night before we find some more evidence and present it to the guard captain
    - Guard captain doesn't recognize us at all even though we had gone with him on a few assignments beforehand
    - Mystic can no longer mind meld, and the person who we're dealing with can somehow mind wipe people
    - Mystic tries to do some more of his psychic powers, but those end up failing too
    - We end up doing something else for a couple sessions because we're really bored of this plotline and also because maybe the culprit will think they can make a break for it
    - We come back and try to sneak into the suspect's house and do yet another sweep
    - DM is also getting bored of this plotline now and decides to reveal that the auras were being covered up with
    Nystul's Magic Aura, and there was a secret wall made of illusion magic that had stuff behind it so I couldn't tell the difference from it an the wall
    - Great, now we can dungeon crawl through this guy's basement
    - Not so fast, this place has magic traps too that neither our mystic or bard can disarm
    - The traps don't really do much other than force us to use our healing beforehand
    - We get to the end of the dungeon and would you look at that it's the guy we suspected from hour 1 of the campaign
    - A fight with an overleveled wizard/sorcerer mix later and we complete the adventure
    - Close curtains for arc 1

    In order to make the mystery "difficult" for us the DM pretty much had to plot armor every aspect of the investigation and that made us feel cheated. The mystic's entire deal was mind magic and divination esq effects, but they always failed, because plot. I wasn't really built for the purpose of mystery campaigns, but I had a great insight and could never tell that the guy was lying even though every single time it was greater than or equal to 20. The bard couldn't information gather because nobody really had any idea what was going on, and the 3 named NPCs that we did talk to had "said all they knew". And the paladin was... there. Once he finally gave up and got bored there were still traps that we couldn't deal, so we get taxed right before the boss fight and then we end the campaign feeling disappointed, but happy that we can move on to something else.

    So, how do you make mysteries and traps feel like you aren't cheating. Without destroying player agency or your game how do you withhold information yet somehow give the players all the clues they need to come to a reasonable conclusion. How do you use red herrings and traps in a way that doesn't just feel like a waste of time for the party? How do you keep them going and motivated despite all these things? Again, I want to learn from the mistakes of the past so I can improve our future games, but I'm really drawing a blank here.
    Last edited by Allistar; 2019-07-21 at 01:20 AM.

  2. - Top - End - #2
    Ogre in the Playground
     
    Planetar

    Join Date
    May 2018

    Default Re: Running A Mystery That Doesn't Feel Like Cheating

    I found that mysteries worked better when there was more than PCs vs Them, but Team1 vs Team2 vs Team3 vs Team4 and the PCs arrive there and change the status-quo.

    It means that:

    1) You can have very complex secrets, and if your PCs don't find them, they can still steal cooperate / steal papers from one of the team to uncover some informations they didn't get from other teams.
    2) Even if the mystery fall apart, you have a diplomacy game of "which teams will end up winning, if any".
    3) You have a multiple-step discovery, as the players understand "there is one more team in the game, with other interests".
    4) Though you have to make sure your not "playing alone with the players being spectators of the events", players have a significant agency as there are a lot of variables and possible resolution.

    The main problem is that you need to maintain a mental image of all those team, their objectives, and how they should react to PC's actions. And there are additional things to consider:

    1) You don't want your scenario to have "one good ending". If the scenario is as simple as "that guy killed the victim, and should be arrested", the scenario will likely fall flat. You probably want the players to actually have some hesitation on "Sure, he is the killer, but is he the bad guy? There is something weird, did we missed something? Are we just pawned from the lord who wanted to get rid of him?" (without a clear answer).
    2) You have to start by building a status quo between your different teams. This mean in particular you have to deal with divination stuff. If your PCs can break your plot using divination, then your NPCs should have used divination all along. Same for resurrection. This mean you might need to change your worldbuilding in order have a world which is mystery-friendly: peoples don't just kill each other, they kill each others and destroy the body to ashes, and consider animals and plants as possible witnesses. People have way to either protect themselves from divination and mind readers, and this is well-known (it should not come as a surprise to the PCs either), ... The NPCs and PCs are supposed to have lived in this worlds since they birth, they're not surprised by the fact that mental domination exists, by the fact that one can protect against those, by the fact that politicians often have way to avoid having to say the truth even under a circle of truth, ...

  3. - Top - End - #3
    Dwarf in the Playground
     
    GreenSorcererElf

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    Default Re: Running A Mystery That Doesn't Feel Like Cheating

    Quote Originally Posted by Allistar View Post
    Snip
    So i'll admit to not reading the whole sequence of events, because halfway through i can see the DM going wrong already. I think you can do a mystery without the players knowing that it's a mystery from the start, but it requires good DMing and not being petty. Adjusting the plot and using DM fiat to "make things harder" just because the players dealt with your challenges easily is almost never a good thing, no matter the campaign subject.

    What i think is important for a mystery campaign is that the players have to feel out of their depth in terms of information gathering. When you have 5 different, likely valuable leads, it's not going to be hard, and it's not going to feel mysterious. It's just going to be a informational fox hunt to track down the truth. If you want a mystery, the players and their allies should almost have no leads and only a vague grasp on what's going on. Having to guesstimate, extrapolate, assume and such about what everything means, and then adjust their ideas for every scrap of information they find.

    Of course, this means that the DM needs a solid picture of what's really going on, who's where doing what etc, so he can ensure that all the information lines up and there are no inaccuracies. I think that is the hard part, making sure the PCs have correct information, and the right amount of it (i.e. not enough for their tastes, it's what keeps them hungry to find out the truth).

  4. - Top - End - #4
    Firbolg in the Playground
     
    stoutstien's Avatar

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    Default Re: Running A Mystery That Doesn't Feel Like Cheating

    Mystery based campaigns or sessions are hard.
    This first priority is to discuss with the players to see how they want it to be set up: who is really going to solve it the Characters or the players? The difference is subtle but important. comparing some of the sir Arthur doyle short stories vs the run of the 'who done it' novels the big factor is if you read carefully you can solve the mystery at the same time or even faster than Sherlock vs the writer revealing the key piece to solve the problem near the end of the book.

    A player tracking different clues and putting the whole picture together is a very different campaign than hiding stuff behind DC Gates and rolling to solve even if both can be considered mystery themed.

    Easily takes the most prep time as a DM as far as pre session work but can be rewarding.
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  5. - Top - End - #5
    Ogre in the Playground
     
    Steel Mirror's Avatar

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    Default Re: Running A Mystery That Doesn't Feel Like Cheating

    When I do mystery sessions, I try to take a page from Agatha Christie. Everyone is suspicious, everyone has something to hide, everyone is a suspect.

    Okay maybe not everyone, but certainly multiple suspects.

    Often I think a big problem with D&D mysteries is that, to start with, the players have too little to go on. Somebody is dead/something bad happened, but the GM doesn't want the mystery to be easy to solve, so the bad guy covered their tracks waaay too well. Everyone has an alibi, none of the evidence is damning so the PCs just sit there with no paths to follow and the game durdles.

    An alternative is to make it so that several suspects look likely from the beginning, and the adventure is about narrowing it down to which one of these highly suspicious people with a good motive and opportunity actually did the deed. Each red herring the players investigate really does have terrible secrets they are trying hard to hide, just not that they are the murderer.

    This has several side benefits:
    • the suspect will act suspiciously by trying to hide their secret, increasing plausibility
    • finding out the suspect's secret is a pacing aid; while the players haven't solved the main mystery, there is still a sense of discovery and forward momentum
    • the GM can make the investigation process a little easier and rely less on stone walls to stretch things out, because the mini-revalations along the way to the main mystery won't end the session.
    • you can have some of the red herrings be willing to fight to protect their dark secrets, which breaks up the long investigation bits by putting small combat encounters throughout the session.

    There are lots of other things you can do as a GM to reward player ingenuity and make them feel more like they are actually being clever in solving this mystery as opposed to on the rails, but structurally speaking this had made the biggest difference for me. Not going to lie, I'm still not a huge fan of RPG mysteries, but if you want to do one I think Agatha Christie has a lot to teach GMs about satisfying mystery structure.
    For playable monster adventurers who would attract more than a few glances at the local tavern, check out my homebrew monster races!

  6. - Top - End - #6
    Troll in the Playground
     
    Luccan's Avatar

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    Default Re: Running A Mystery That Doesn't Feel Like Cheating

    In addition to some fine advice from others in the thread: in D&D mysteries you either have to forbid the use of divinations and other similar problem solving spells from the beginning or actually plan around them. If you don't, you end up with a bunch of DM plot reasons it doesn't work instead of either not having the spells or the villain(s) actually having a defense.
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  7. - Top - End - #7
    Bugbear in the Playground
     
    RangerGuy

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    Jul 2017

    Default Re: Running A Mystery That Doesn't Feel Like Cheating

    I like to prep a list of revelations that I want the players to discover during the investigation. And then work on possible ways for giving them that information. Designing a mystery is more about figuring out how to give information to the players, not hiding it.

    D&D has a lot of abilities that need to be designed around to be for sure, but at least they are less of a problem if the players don't yet know what they are looking for. And getting clues shouldn't be gated behind skills or pc abilites, that should be more or less automatic if the players look the right places, ask the right questions and make the right deductions. However, figuring out the meaning and implications of the clues should be a puzzle to the players, that's the fun about running a mystery scenario.

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