What is Main Stream gaming? Another look.

[Paul Czege]

If I were to create a mystery game I'd have the gm run the investigators while the players ran the suspects, play it out as flash backs...

Excellent. Have you seen http://www.halfmeme.com/death.html">The Valedictorian's Death? (I imagine some of the How to Host a Murder Mystery games are like this as well, but I don't know for sure.)

Paul

[Caldis]

Excellent. Have you seen http://www.halfmeme.com/death.html">The Valedictorian's Death? (I imagine some of the How to Host a Murder Mystery games are like this as well, but I don't know for sure.)

Paul

Hah, no I hadn't seen it but I'm not surprised to find it on your site.  As soon as I thought of the idea it seemed almost like a slightly warped version of My life with Master.

Anybody wanting to make a go of turning it into something original feel free.  

Back to the topic, I agree with everything Mike said.  This and other ideas like it are sidestepping the issue, making a different game that creates a murder mystery rather than laying out a mystery and then solving it in play.  Personally I've never had much fun in any game solving mysteries, CoC was way more fun for the color rather than the game play, so I'm willing to try something different.

[Callan S.]

What advantage does playing Callan's version have to just watching L&O and making predictions? For it to make sense in the RPG form, the player success has to affect the action.

Bah, I disagree with that like the notion of having to have a combat system. And certainly while there is no advantage to playing this way to watching L&O, the 'How to host a murder' games are in the same position and are still in the market.

BUT, though I disagree with having to have this 'player success effects  action' it's still a way to expand the game. I'd already envisioned that the players play the investigators. And while the mechanics themselves would uncover clues, the players would also have the option of asking some questions of their own. Ever watched a mystery program and thought "Damn it, go look behind the shed!". Well now you can. Just build into the structure some revelations that only player choices can reveal, and your fine. The game still steams along to an ending if the players don't find these, but if they do they get more points.

Unless were going to hit some 'the players must earn the ending, by their actions' point. On that I'll just say it's up to the designer to determine exactly what they have to earn, and what they just get. Unless it'll be suggested that an RPG has to be about obtaining a particular SIS ending to win, rather than obtaining a non SIS commodity (points) to win. Which makes an interesting question.

[M. J. Young]

Concerning designing a courtroom drama/lawyer role playing game, when we were discussing this a couple years back I undertook to put together some core concepts for how to do it in an RPGnet article, http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/lawyer05aug03.html">I'm Not a Lawyer, but I Play One in a Game. It incidentally inspired a similar effort by Graeme Comyn to create the framework for playing an engineer, at Gaming Outpost, but I don't have the link for that. It's not so tough, really.

I'm going to buck the trend here. I've got a mystery scenario in the works for Multiverser's Third Book of Worlds. It's role playing centered, provides clues for the player character(s) to discover and crack, and is reusable.

Making it reusable was the toughest part. In essence, it was necessary to have multiple suspects who could have done it, and to create a scenario in which subtle differences in what happened would eliminate particular individuals. The crime in question was theft of an artifact from a museum, and it is established that apart from the player character (who presumably knows he didn't do it) there are only six people who might have been able to steal it. Tracking the confirmed movements of the people and the events surrounding the disappearance of the artifact ultimately leads to a single solution. It's been playtested with several different perpetrators. Players usually solve it, but they have to work at it.

So I think it can be done.

--M. J. Young

[MatrixGamer]

Making it reusable was the toughest part. In essence, it was necessary to have multiple suspects who could have done it, and to create a scenario in which subtle differences in what happened would eliminate particular individuals. The crime in question was theft of an artifact from a museum, and it is established that apart from the player character (who presumably knows he didn't do it) there are only six people who might have been able to steal it. Tracking the confirmed movements of the people and the events surrounding the disappearance of the artifact ultimately leads to a single solution. It's been playtested with several different perpetrators. Players usually solve it, but they have to work at it.

Very interesting. Do the players play the suspects? Matrix Game mysteries work similarly - start with a specific crime, limited suspects, the clues that emerge limit suspect further till one is arrested. Matrix Game players can play suspect characters. To the end of the game they maintain their innocence just as people do in real life. They work to create red herring clues to create reasonable doubt, they may even try to run and hide (leading to those wonderful chase scenes). In the end the player gets to sit in the court session that ends the game looking innocent. They may act as their own attorney or not but their role play at the end is wonderful to see. The big difference between MG's and your game is that it is not hard for players to solve the case - because they are making the case up.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press

[Mike Holmes]

Making it reusable was the toughest part. In essence, it was necessary to have multiple suspects who could have done it, and to create a scenario in which subtle differences in what happened would eliminate particular individuals.

The Traveller adventure, Murder on Arcturus Station (#13?), is designed this way.

While I think that this has some legs to it, there are two main problems that I have with it:
1. It's not reusable with the same group of players. I mean certainly not with the same group of characters, right? But even with the same group of players, I don't think it's going to be interesting the second time around. They already know where to look who to ask, etc. The only thing that changes is the outcome of their investigation.
2. It's not a very good form of mystery. That is, I believe that players are really expecting Agatha Christie. When what they get is more police procedural, just going through the motions of collecting evidence, then it's not that intersting. There has to be some "closed room" or similar "trick" to the crime that makes it a true "whodunnit."

As John points out, most such prepared "mysteries" are actually procedurals. CoC, for instance always involves doing your library research, talking to witnesses, and then searching the physical premises. In fact, there are two huge problems with this form:
1. The only "mystery" is that the culprit turns out to have a supernatural nature of some sort. The players know this, but are either expected to ignore it and pretend like they don't believe in that stuff, or they play seasoned "investigators" who have seen supernatural stuff, and they assume the supernatural. In which case it's back to being just procedural. Basically you have an automatic separation of player and character that's otherwise demanded by the form, or you have no mystery.
2. As pointed out by Bryan Bankhead in his series of articles pointing out the problems with CoC, gathering the evidence is always based on making die rolls. Often critical evidence can be missed by bad rolling, and the mystery become unsolvable.

Yes, I'm making the genre likely impossible to create effectively. But that's the point. You can't capture the mainstream without these criteria, and you can't meet these criteria. Hence why there are no (and will be no for the forseeable future) Murder Mystery RPGs that are effective at capturing that market. Creating something else, Callan, can be done, but you aren't, then, capturing that market. Nobody who has the notion that they want to play Lenny from L&O is going to buy that they aren't acting as Lenny, but instead playing a game of Clue of somesuch.

Mike

[MatrixGamer]

Nobody who has the notion that they want to play Lenny from L&O is going to buy that they aren't acting as Lenny, but instead playing a game of Clue of somesuch.

Mike

We are probably only going to know what the consumer will buy by making games and seeing how they sell. By a process of trial and error this potentially mainstream market can be developed. As a set of criteria I'd say that the games need to be the following.

1. Have simple engaging rules. Elegant simplicity might not be appreciated by the average consumer but they will like what works easily.
2. The rules need to be robust and repeatible. So players can't break it too easily and can play again and get different outcomes.
3. It needs to have excellent production qualities. Ron's description of why Graphic Novels sell is on that point - they look good.
4. The effort will need to be sustained so the company that does it will be here for a long term.

Platitudes I know, but true. I'm making my games. Others are making their's. As we have sales we need to share our findings - which I think is happening. All is good.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press

[Mike Holmes]

Hey, I'm not saying don't make these other games. Make them. And sell them, and then we'll see. I'm just sticking out my neck here and saying that they won't have superior sales based on some notion that they're mainstream.

Go ahead, prove me wrong by making the games suggested and selling millions. That'll be the best way to shut me up.  

Mike

[Remko]

I have one tip for murder mysteries. I don't know whether it is contributional, but I'm posting it anyway.

Here goes:
It felt to me that all situations written here use a group of investigators as main focus. I suggest: split them. Why? A simple experience story from a Technical Business Administration student: With other perspectives, problems  and tensions arise. By creating different point of entries, it is possible to get different types of information:

1. Generally known info: This info is known by all the characters.
2. Obscure knowledge: Few people have knowledge about this subject.
3. pretty common knowledge: a lot of people know, although not everyone realises it or sees it as valuable.
4. Black spot: unknown knowledge.

The trick about detectives is all about the combining of information. Make sure that the information is available, but not all players are aware that not all information is present at that time. Write backgrounds so that some persons see it as common information, although it isn't.

Just my thought, shoot it when not agreeing :P.

[M. J. Young]

Chris--the player characters are suspects from the police perspective, but because Multiverser is a campaign system they can't have actually done it unless they decided to do it. (That's not an impossible choice--there is certainly some reason why a player character might choose to steal the object--but it's not been done by any test player to date.)

Mike--Actually, because of the unlimited worlds concept, players do sometimes find themselves in a world and situation familiar from someone else's game. Thus it is reusable with the same player group. (It's usually run as a solo world simultaneous with other solo worlds for the other players. As such, there's no reason why Bill couldn't find himself in the same situation in which Bob was several month real time before. This being a parallel universe to that one, no one here ever knew Bob, and the events surrounding the crime in Bob's experience are completely unknown to everyone but Bill. This adds the new wrinkle that Bill might be assuming it's the same culprit, and so be surprised when the evidence doesn't point that way.)

Rolls are not required for collecting the clues; asking questions is required. The police are involved, and if the player persuades them that he is not the culprit and chooses to work with them, he'll get many of the clues without too much effort. Solving the mystery is in some ways about asking the right questions--who was where and when--which requires thinking through what is important. Even with Christie, small group mysteries are frequently solved by process of elimination.

--M. J. Young

[Mike Holmes]

Sure it works for the Multiverser background. But I think that Multiverser is not what most people think of when they're thinking "Murder Mystery RPG." You're making Multiverser into the "universal" RPG again. You can do anything, so it's good for everything. Sorry, still not convinced. :-)

Put another way, how are those mainstream Multiverser sales going?

Mike

[Callan S.]

Creating something else, Callan, can be done, but you aren't, then, capturing that market. Nobody who has the notion that they want to play Lenny from L&O is going to buy that they aren't acting as Lenny, but instead playing a game of Clue of somesuch.

Mike

Heya,

Nobody? Do you mean the seasoned roleplay who "knows what roleplaying is" and it has to be your actions as a player, that get you to the end? The same seasoned roleplayers who require a combat section in a roleplay game, otherwise anything the game arrives at just isn't meaningful?

I basically agree with you. Roleplay culture is stagnant in it's perceptions with what you 'have to have'. With a newbie, they aren't going to have a bunch of preconceptions that he must fully play out Lenny and it must be player actions that lead to an in game conclusion. Also a newbie isn't going to think that if a game is more like a board game (isn't MLWM a bit like that?), then there must be no exploration in it.

Sadly the marketing ratchet is such that people who'd enjoy this game have probably turned away from RPG's and wont notice this product. While those who have stuck with RPG's have stuck with them because they contain what they enjoy. If they enjoyed the same thing as the people who walked, they would have walked as well. The demographic your left with demands 'play AS Lenny, PLAYER ACTIONS bring about the conclusion' and fiscal pressure backs it up.

For what it's worth, at a technical level, you don't have to have that.

On a design side note, I might give writing this up a shot...it seems much easier to write out than other designs I've considered fleshing out.

[Mike Holmes]

Well, no. I'm talking about the "mainstream" market. Much as this is undefined, I think it's very much not the current gamer market (though there probably is a market for gamers who want more "mainstream" sorts of material to play through, however). I'm also talking about non-canalized folks as well, who don't have the gamer pre-conceptions.

RPGs grab people's attention based on the "You are the character" paradigm. Most new people are attracted to RPGs, when they are over other forms of entertainment, based on this idea. It's a highly attractive form of escapism.

Put another way, for those mainstream folks who want a mystery game - clue already exists. As well as a plethora of similar games. So I still think that the theoretically open market to be grabbed (but which nobody has been able to design for) is that one where the players play the investigator and their actions result in solving or not solving the case. I think this is what would sell to mainstream folks, if, in fact, somebody could do it well.

As has been pointed out, the Host Your Own Murder Mystery series does, in fact, fill this slot to some extent. And even created badly, and sometimes like clue as John points out, they still sell somewhat to that mainstream market. I'd hazard a guess that of all of the RPGish stuff in a game store, those games sell more to non-gamers than any other thing in the store. If they were done better, I think it might become a phenomenon. But, as I've said, I think doing it better is far more easily said than done.

Mike

[Callan S.]

RPGs grab people's attention based on the "You are the character" paradigm. Most new people are attracted to RPGs, when they are over other forms of entertainment, based on this idea. It's a highly attractive form of escapism.

I'll keep that primary grab suggestion in mind. Though I've realised the game I described is essentially participationist, and so now wonder about the number of participationist games around.

In relation to that I also wonder about the number of illusionist games around...a clearly participationist game might frighten long term illusionism players, since it removes the black curtain and they don't even want to think a curtain could exist. So such a product would be very 'yucky' to them.

[komradebob]

callan:

In relation to that I also wonder about the number of illusionist games around...a clearly participationist game might frighten long term illusionism players, since it removes the black curtain and they don't even want to think a curtain could exist. So such a product would be very 'yucky' to them.

But would it be yucky to players that hadn't rp'ed before? It might actually be a very good gateway for them...