If there’s a style of running adventures that a lot of people don’t get, it’s running an investigation.
You’ll find a lot of good advice on the net about how to structure them – I particularly recommend Justin Alexander’s articles on “The Three Clue Rule”.
But ultimately, what you’re wanting to give is this: A sense of momentum.
After every encounter, the players should feel that they learned something. Either they eliminated a possibility or learnt where next to investigate. And when they eliminate something, it’s best if it makes something else clear. Running into dead ends all the time is frustrating, but running into a dead end that means the OTHER option is the only option is great.
It comes back to my general rules of running a campaign. At all times,
- Players should have goals, and
- Players should have an idea of how to fulfil those goals.
If you have five suspects to talk to, and only two of them have useful information, then those without useful information should be quickly eliminated. If you role-play for 30 minutes with a dead-end, then that is going to be wasted time. Five minutes at most! Preferably less!
Keep things moving!
Likewise, don’t bury important clues under a mass of irrelevant information. It’s exactly the same as in a dungeon: everything you mention should have a purpose.
Perhaps that purpose is flavour, perhaps it is direction, perhaps it’s a challenge. But it needs a purpose – and that ultimate aim should be to engage the players.
Get to the point. Present information to the players that allows them to make a choice. And then swiftly get to the consequences of that choice.
Imagine a dungeon room described thusly, “You see on the opposite wall a tapestry depicting a charging knight. On the ground in the centre of the chamber are a heap of skulls and bones, with rusted weapons scattered about.”
This gives the characters three things to concentrate on: the tapestry, the bone pile, and the weapons. In fact, in your notes, the knight animates and leaves the tapestry whenever someone enters its half of the chamber. It then attacks them. The bone pile are the remnants of who it has slain, and the weapons were what those previous adventurers wielded. If you’re feeling kind, perhaps one displays no rust – a magic weapon!
But in this case, everything in the description is pertinent. The bones are a clue that not all may be what it appears in the room. Cautious groups may use detect magic or similar magic to detect the threat – or perhaps a Medicine check detects the bones were broken from weapon strikes.
That’s what you want. If the room also had a painting of a sun on the roof and mold on one wall – with neither having relevance to the encounter – then they’re features that just distract the players and waste time.
The same thing with investigations. Five seamstresses work in a business. One witnessed the murderer. Do you want to spend a lot of time with pointless conversations with the seamstresses or get to the one who saw the murderer? Get to the clue.
You could create an encounter where the players need to determine which seamstress saw the murderer – perhaps a logic problem. But are you just delaying the party rather than letting them move forward? I’d suggest only using such an encounter if it imparted additional information as part of solving it that became relevant later. Keep moving.
And, if you have groups like mine, not everyone is interested in investigations. Providing waypoints where a big revelation leads to another type of encounter, and then the investigation picks up again is good. Having an encounter that delays the revelation? Not as good, as that doesn’t respect those who are enjoying the investigation.
Keep things moving, and keep things fun.
I will preface this by saying that other styles of play are obviously valid, but for my way of running things this advice would not be good. Specifically, I adhere to the following propositions in my game mastering:
– It’s not my responsiblity to prevent players from wasting their time; if they want to bash their heads against a wall (investigatively or otherwise), that is on them. I don’t purposefully try to mislead them, but I don’t correct their misapprehensions or strategy unless these are based on something I miscommunicated (it is fine, though, if NPCs try to purposefully mislead them). If someone in the group gets bored — or starts worrying about the consequences of wasting time — they can step up and prod their companions to move along.
– Sometimes the only purpose of a detail is to provide a sense of versimilitude. If it’s logical for a location to have five streamstresses, that’s how many there are even if it’s inconvenient for the party; if a few extra tapestries in a room make sense based on a room’s function or history, then they’re there even if there’s only one of them relevant to the gameplay challenge. I don’t believe in designing the campaign world around the convenience of my players. More importantly, I don’t always know what will be significant: maybe one of those extra seamstresses could be recruited as a spy to extract the needed information from the one who knows; maybe those extra tapestries could be used to entangle the animated knight. That’s not for me to decide.
– Learning to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant details is a player skill that should be exercised regularly and rewarded when used successfully. Similarly, I create problems and not solutions because it is on the players to make use of the world’s details and their skill to cobble together their own answers. It’s much less fun if I know ahead of time exactly how the group is going to solve an issue — or even if there is a solution that doesn’t carry a heavy cost or create more problems than it solves!
Hear hear.
Bonus points for using “hear hear” correctly! 🙂
I don’t disagree. There’s a balance to be found.
I would definitely include five seamstresses because that’s environment storytelling, and that is important (it can also provide its own clues). But would you have most of the seamstresses provide false clues that send the players in the wrong direction, with only one being accurate?
Perhaps you might – once. But for every clue? After a while it gets tiresome. Players are not real detectives, and your time is limited in a session – especially if you have players who don’t like investigations..
This isn’t too say that things need to be obvious (or that every conclusion the players come to is correct). Players can very easily mislead themselves; you don’t need to help!