KapCon XXX - Game 4
Designing a murder mystery is not easy. Figuring out the complex interlocking clues that lead to one unique solution is so hard that even most detective fictions don't actually do it, they chat by allowing bridging facts to be introduced in the denouement. Even novels like Ellory Queen's where the novel explicitly claims at a certain point that the reader should be able to solve the thing relies on a very judicious treatment of some information completely at face value and some information as a distorted mirror of the real situation. I think the basic gist of The Simple Art of Murder is probably still more or less basically right in that regard. Sometime I should really get around to staging a debate between TSAoM and PD James' The Art of the Detective Story.
In role-playing games the lure of the mystery remains very strong, occurring in some very surprising places. Just a few posts ago, I failed to mention that 5 points are available in the Tribute for discovering the plans and motivations of the Minotaur. It's basically made a simple murder maze into a mystery, and I think Donna probably did that because to simply have the events of the game be meaningless was just literally unthinkable. My post-grad research into the American remakes of Japanese horror films suggests that this need for rationality is not universal across all cultures. Explaining the "mystery" of the threat that the Minotaur poses to the world really just prompts other logical problems- like, how does he feed his army of monsters on a barren rock carved into the Labyrinth? Basically you need to read some facts straight, even though they immediately make no sense.
Malcolm's solution to this problem was Columboism (if you were wondering what I missed from having a thriving community it was this post). Decide at the start what the answer is, and then just enjoy filling in the gaps. That is to say, you can't lose if you don't play. It does sort of presuppose that the interesting bit is the how rather than the what, and that it's possible to keep straight all the facts. I can't quite invasive, even after all these years, how you can undertake a satisfying investigation knowing the answer- which is Colombo's big advantage vis Colomboism.
Robin Laws' solution is to guarantee a stream of information, on the basis that if new fodder for ratiocination is continuous, the problem will eventually be so well defined that finding the answer become unavoidable. I think this slyly side steps the two real logistical problems with mystery design, which are coming up with a coherent set of clues, and in assembling them back. Whatever reservations I have about his solution, Malcolm nailed his analysis of those problems.
The answer that's come to the fore in recent years though is to decide after the fact what really went on. The first game I encountered which does this is Dirty Secrets, but it's the ontological engine behind A Taste for Murder, Wicked Lies and Alibis, and as it turns out, Brindlewood Bay.
Essentially you play through a series of scenes where you win the right to specify a story event or ascribe a meaning to an action. In Dirty Secrets these are declared as official "crimes" or "clues" via an adversarial dice contest that's explicitly intended to promote "blocking" behaviour to force the group to acquiesce to your version of events. It's actually not a bad game provided that you ignore every scrap of advice it gives you on how to use it's mechanics. In Wicked Lies you are given the right to free-narrate some scene that incriminates your fellows, and the group effectively votes on which version of events that found most compelling.
In either case, there's a final mechanics-driven resolution which then needs to be fitted to the facts- basically the exact opposite of Sherlock Holmes' famous maxim that you must start with facts and develop theories. Sometimes this can require quite the mental gymnastics so the better iterations of all these games is driven by an early theory that guides your fact-creation. Welcome to Colomboism 2.0, where uncertainty and predetermination cohabit.
Game 4: Brindlewood Bay
This game ran in what I've come to realise is my energy low-point round - Round 2 on Day 2. I've been a bit casual about recording exactly what round I played what when, but empirically it's been a round where I've had poor gaming experiences at KapCon. It was somewhat comforting therefore to relax into Donna's very safe GM hands. The table also had a strange extra dimension because it was Game 4 with another specific player, who'd come over from the Wairarapa. I have never before played 4 separate games with the same player, and I think it was very lucky that he and I really clicked at the table. Stupid Rimutakas!
The slight additional spin that Brindlewood Bay puts on Columboism 2.0 is the pre-prepared set of clues, which I've subsequently learned is very well explained on their blog. The game allows you to form a theory with as many facts as you can explain, then sort of discard the rest, and decide whether you've succeeded on a kind of part score. In addition, BB "tropes" the game, adding tinges of horror elements explicitly referencing Twin Peaks.
One thing I really noticed was that the story density was very manageably low. Effectively the GM cast was 1 victim and 3 possible suspects. That's low, but it's not crazily low - the effective number of GMCs in Freeze | Thaw | Broil this year was about nine, The Rabbit Snare was about a half-dozen, The Heat Is On was about a dozen. The latter two parts of last year's trilogy blow that average out a bit, at about twenty GMCs that could be meaningfully encoutered. I think there's a kind of square relation in the density of available story as you increase the number of GMCs, but it's equally a trade-off about your ability to manage those numbers. Of course, every single character the GM controls is also a Hidden Goblin. A lot of my prep for Gumshoe for the past few years has been in trying to cram in as much stuff as possible so that the world feels increasingly dynamic. This seems like the kind of game that would lend itself to developing a wide and complexly inter-related world over multiple sessions.
I picked up a PDF of this after the session, it seems pretty ideal for the kind of gaming quite a few of my friends enjoy so hopefully I'll get to see this game in a bit more detail.
In role-playing games the lure of the mystery remains very strong, occurring in some very surprising places. Just a few posts ago, I failed to mention that 5 points are available in the Tribute for discovering the plans and motivations of the Minotaur. It's basically made a simple murder maze into a mystery, and I think Donna probably did that because to simply have the events of the game be meaningless was just literally unthinkable. My post-grad research into the American remakes of Japanese horror films suggests that this need for rationality is not universal across all cultures. Explaining the "mystery" of the threat that the Minotaur poses to the world really just prompts other logical problems- like, how does he feed his army of monsters on a barren rock carved into the Labyrinth? Basically you need to read some facts straight, even though they immediately make no sense.
Malcolm's solution to this problem was Columboism (if you were wondering what I missed from having a thriving community it was this post). Decide at the start what the answer is, and then just enjoy filling in the gaps. That is to say, you can't lose if you don't play. It does sort of presuppose that the interesting bit is the how rather than the what, and that it's possible to keep straight all the facts. I can't quite invasive, even after all these years, how you can undertake a satisfying investigation knowing the answer- which is Colombo's big advantage vis Colomboism.
Robin Laws' solution is to guarantee a stream of information, on the basis that if new fodder for ratiocination is continuous, the problem will eventually be so well defined that finding the answer become unavoidable. I think this slyly side steps the two real logistical problems with mystery design, which are coming up with a coherent set of clues, and in assembling them back. Whatever reservations I have about his solution, Malcolm nailed his analysis of those problems.
The answer that's come to the fore in recent years though is to decide after the fact what really went on. The first game I encountered which does this is Dirty Secrets, but it's the ontological engine behind A Taste for Murder, Wicked Lies and Alibis, and as it turns out, Brindlewood Bay.
Essentially you play through a series of scenes where you win the right to specify a story event or ascribe a meaning to an action. In Dirty Secrets these are declared as official "crimes" or "clues" via an adversarial dice contest that's explicitly intended to promote "blocking" behaviour to force the group to acquiesce to your version of events. It's actually not a bad game provided that you ignore every scrap of advice it gives you on how to use it's mechanics. In Wicked Lies you are given the right to free-narrate some scene that incriminates your fellows, and the group effectively votes on which version of events that found most compelling.
In either case, there's a final mechanics-driven resolution which then needs to be fitted to the facts- basically the exact opposite of Sherlock Holmes' famous maxim that you must start with facts and develop theories. Sometimes this can require quite the mental gymnastics so the better iterations of all these games is driven by an early theory that guides your fact-creation. Welcome to Colomboism 2.0, where uncertainty and predetermination cohabit.
Game 4: Brindlewood Bay
This game ran in what I've come to realise is my energy low-point round - Round 2 on Day 2. I've been a bit casual about recording exactly what round I played what when, but empirically it's been a round where I've had poor gaming experiences at KapCon. It was somewhat comforting therefore to relax into Donna's very safe GM hands. The table also had a strange extra dimension because it was Game 4 with another specific player, who'd come over from the Wairarapa. I have never before played 4 separate games with the same player, and I think it was very lucky that he and I really clicked at the table. Stupid Rimutakas!
The slight additional spin that Brindlewood Bay puts on Columboism 2.0 is the pre-prepared set of clues, which I've subsequently learned is very well explained on their blog. The game allows you to form a theory with as many facts as you can explain, then sort of discard the rest, and decide whether you've succeeded on a kind of part score. In addition, BB "tropes" the game, adding tinges of horror elements explicitly referencing Twin Peaks.
One thing I really noticed was that the story density was very manageably low. Effectively the GM cast was 1 victim and 3 possible suspects. That's low, but it's not crazily low - the effective number of GMCs in Freeze | Thaw | Broil this year was about nine, The Rabbit Snare was about a half-dozen, The Heat Is On was about a dozen. The latter two parts of last year's trilogy blow that average out a bit, at about twenty GMCs that could be meaningfully encoutered. I think there's a kind of square relation in the density of available story as you increase the number of GMCs, but it's equally a trade-off about your ability to manage those numbers. Of course, every single character the GM controls is also a Hidden Goblin. A lot of my prep for Gumshoe for the past few years has been in trying to cram in as much stuff as possible so that the world feels increasingly dynamic. This seems like the kind of game that would lend itself to developing a wide and complexly inter-related world over multiple sessions.
I picked up a PDF of this after the session, it seems pretty ideal for the kind of gaming quite a few of my friends enjoy so hopefully I'll get to see this game in a bit more detail.