Muse - A New Storytelling Game

[danielsan]

I was thinking about how to make a GM-less mystery "whodunnit" type game. At first, what got met thinking about this was the "monster of the week" thread, where the game starts with the murder having already taking place, and the players direct the details of the investigation through their narration. It would be more CSI than Supernatural, but the mechanics would be the same.

But I keep turning more toward GM-less stuff nowadays. I was thinking that you could use something like this Muse system, with the questions being "Did the butler do it?" and "did Ms. Scarlet do it?" etc. and then players take control of Yes and No by adding things that their characters investigate, creating motive, means, and opportunity as the story builds.

This is just all off the top of my head, but what's everyone's first impressions? Am I on the right track here?     

[Demiurge]

Hi Danny,


You're definitely on the right track!  Muse is a really good platform for developing a story where nobody at the table knows how it will turn out in advance...


--Jonathan

[Paul T]

Oddly enough, I've given some thought to designing a somewhat Muse-like "whodunnit" RPG.

The Muse rules can do pretty much everything you need, except for one thing: the outcomes of game Questions do not in any way interact with each other.

So, for instance, if you have Questions like, "Did Professor Green kill Madame Butterfly?", for several characters, you could potentially end up with multiple killers, or no killer at all. Otherwise, the structure would work quite well.

Please do post if you come up with a clever solution.

I think that, in designing something like this, one way to make it interesting would be to make sure that a characters' innocence or guilt is not predictably good or bad for any given player. So, for instance, one player might be playing to prove their innocence, whereas another might "win" if they can prove themselves guilty!

[Paul T]

Aaaahh... sorry for the double post.

I just wanted to mention:

One cool way to do this would be to set it up as a variant on the social game 'Mafia'. Some players are trying to be the killer, and most are trying to be innocent. But no one knows who is which side. You must play carefully, so as not to expose your role.