The Game Is Afoot

When we get together to play RPGs, we engage in playacting. We put ourselves in another’s shoes to learn about an unfamiliar world, the character we inhabit and ultimately even ourselves. Sometimes those shoes are the sand blasted sandals of a barbarian, sometimes the curly toed slippers of some arcane mage and just sometimes we get to step into the beat-worn brogues of a private investigator out to solve some of life’s mysteries.

‘Investigation in a tabletop RPG is fun and engaging because investigation is part of how we explore, understand, and symbolically defeat dangers within the world,’ explains Kenneth Hite, the veteran game designer behind the some of the best investigative games around. ‘RPGs are about stories, and investigation remains the matter of a whole lot of stories that we find fun and engaging in other media as well as at the table. Plus it gives the weedy academic player characters something to do.’

At least when it comes to RPGs, investigations tend to come hand-in-tentacle with the occult so any exploration of the design of these games risks sacrificing some SAN points dipping into ancient tomes and questioning suspects for insight. Still it’s a price worth paying to delve deeper into the two main mechanical approaches that our investigative games most often take and which best capitalise on the unique strengths of the medium.

Despite how common mysteries are, even in games not solely built around them, surprisingly few games actually place investigative procedures at the centre of their design. Even when it is one of the core gameplay loops you’ll often find far less space in a game’s rulebook dedicated to the unravelling of clues and piecing together of plots than you might for combat, this can be especially jarring in games where that combat is often intended to be an uncommon occurrence. 

Investigative abilities are often condensed into just a single skill or two and this lack of mechanical support can easily make creating or running a compelling investigation a challenge. Whilst a skilled GM knows when to improvise or sidestep rules as written, working outside or even against the rules of a game can be a frustrating experience for anyone.

So, how then can you best approach a mystery from a mechanical perspective? 

In detective fiction there is the concept of a ‘fair mystery’; this is where the audience is presented with all the information needed to solve the case before any grand reveal. For some readers, part of the experience here is trying to solve the case before the truth is dramatically disclosed and, in many ways, the narrative here is as much a logic puzzle as a story. 

Whilst these stories may employ a gentle sleight of hand to obfuscate the importance of clues or use later clues to add context to those provided earlier, making it harder to infer the solution before the conclusion, readers should still feel able to infer or deduce the secret at hand.

Of course in a purely literary mystery solving the puzzle is a bonus, not the entire purpose, and getting it wrong is no less fun than cracking the case. Your experience of reading Murder on the Orient Express isn’t derailed if you don’t know how the murderer got away with their crime, and the book doesn’t sit idle, stalled at a red light, until you somehow catch up. In an interactive medium, however, the audience is also the detective and this creates both a space for new innovations and new frustrations. 

The ‘logic puzzle’ approach to a mystery has been adapted for tabletop and computer games many times over and resulted in some of the most celebrated, and notorious, adventures in RPG history. Here players are required to not only find clues and recognise their importance but perform the sorts of deductions that writers often gloss over, a process that can prove infuriatingly linear. Whilst this provides the investigative game player the opportunity to outdo the master detectives; after all, you can ask the suspect whatever question you wish and think outside the box, many a game has ended in exasperation when a player cannot see the intended solution and hence cannot progress any further.

A tabletop RPG with a GM offers an unsurpassable degree of interactivity and responsiveness. The case can be approached from whatever angle the detectives desire, suspects and witnesses can be cross-examined with a degree of care and thoroughness seldom seen in other fictions, and a skilled GM can respond to unexpected inquiries and avenues without rewriting the whole game on the fly. 

Still, all this does present a heavy burden on GMs who must create a challenging, but solvable, scenario and be ready to adapt to their clever players asking unexpected questions.