Whodunnit Story Game

Hi everyone,

It's been a while since I last posted. I'm still working a lot on my Creative Commons game system, and it's actually shaping up pretty well for release. Got a couple playtest sessions going on in the region.

But my other major interest in game design, since the system I previously discussed here was intended to be rules medium and cross-genre, is casual story gaming.

Essentially, now that I've worked for so long on a more traditional, mainstream system intended for campaign play, I think the most interesting thing to me would be to create or collaborate on a book of Episodic or One-Shot story games, with light imaginative systems tailored specifically to one game and encapsulated in 10 pages or less each. One of the ideas I had for this project is to have a game of Sleuths, a whodunnit, where each session is one mystery and it can be played only once or in episodes. The problem is I found it completely untenable to have a game with 3 to 5 detectives running around all doing something interesting. The genre relies so heavily on those a ha moments of finding clues, that 4 people stepping over eachother to find those clues and have the dramatic limelight seemed like it would be no fun. So I came upon the idea of instead of having everybody play sleuths and have a gamemaster, why not have no game master, and have everyone be suspects, trying to prove their innocence.

The Sleuth would be a communally controlled character with players vying in some for control of the Sleuth to push the story in the direction they intend.

But I'm having trouble getting much beyond the conceptual phase. As for mechanics, here's the ideas I've got so far:

Characters have certain a characteristic called Credibility which should allow them in some way to avoid suspicion. Players begin play with a certain level of suspicion depending on their profession or something like that. For instance, a pickpocket might start with more suspicion but have the ability to plant evidence or something that could be worth starting with more suspicion. This is all really loose, I'm not sure exactly how any of this should function or if more characteristics should exist.

Before play, each player collaboratively creates a scenario, a victim and chooses a murder weapon.

I was thinking basically the game would be a sequence of turns where players take their turn crafting alibis and casting suspicion on other suspects. When a character has suspicion cast on them, they must devise an alibi to defuse the suspicion. All players vote on the characters alibi to decide whether or not it's credible. If a player votes that a characters alibi is not credible they must provide a reason why the factual elements of the characters alibi are somehow conflicted.

When a character successfully defends themselves with a successful alibi they gain points which can be used to fuel certain abilities and to gain temporary control of the sleuth.

So that's what I have so far. I really like the idea, and I think it could be really strong and fun, but I'm not sure how to make this into a game. For instance, how do you win? Do you win if your character is not found to be the murderer? That seems like it might suck to be singled out as the only loser of the game. Of course it's a story game, so the telling of the story is the fun, not necessarily the winning, but if the intent is only to tell a story, then what's the end game, and what is it that drives the story succinctly to the discovery of the murderer if not the players themselves attempting to spare their own characters from that fate? And if it is the aim of a player to not be found the murderer which would make sense, there seems to be a necessity for some sort of mechanic that keeps people honest when alibis are being played.

What do people think? I don't have much, but the kernel is strong. Throw anything out there you think, I just wanna start really chewing on this and see what answers come out.