I find myself really puzzled by a statement Ron makes in the Air Patrol Ronnies thread:

Let's talk about investigations as game processes. More blunt facts: players don't investigate anything, or rather, not when "anything" means a fictional situation. They never do; it's not possible. Investigations may be venues for something else interesting, in which case the "something else" needs to be understood as the point of play. Or they may not, and if not, they're merely transitions and Color in terms of what really matters, which in many cases is what is discovered (and hence guaranteed to be discovered).

Gareth,

The coolest part of your Mage game was the data synthesis and analysis, right?  The data collection process was just as Ron said: (a) a means to an end, and (b) opportunities for cool color.

It sounds to me like you and Ron are simply using the word "investigation" differently.  He's using it for data collection, and you're using it for the whole process of collection-synthesis-analysis.  (Just like when two roleplayers argue about "discovery", and one means "the GM tells me what I see next", while the other means "I analyzed the data and found a pattern!")

Or maybe not.  I can't make heads or tails of "it's not possible to investigate a fictional situation".  I've had Call of Cthulhu scenes that exactly reproduced the process and experience of actual data collection.  Which is boring as fuck.

Maybe?  I don't know.  I mean, do you consider breaking into a cop shop to lift the physical evidence "data collection" or "the point of play"?  I'm not really seeing a hard line between the two.

The view that this sort of action is the point of play makes a certain sense, but it was to contrast with that position that I wanted to show that we enjoyed the other bit, the analysis, as well.  Even though we weren't rolling dice, it was not excluded from being engaging and interesting in it's own right.

Hmm.  How about this:

• Breaking into the cop shot could be a viable point of play.
• Seeing the physical evidence could be a viable point of play.
• Poking around inside the cop shop to potentially find the physical evidence or not find it could not be a viable point of play.

By "data collection" I meant the task of finding data, not observing or physically taking found data.  Perhaps I should have said "data mining".

"It's the kind of thing where you have players riffing off each other, where player 1 raises factoid A, and player 2, raises factoid B, which they have learned through play, and they go back and forth a bit and come up with a hypothesis, which they can go out and test.  And that is what they then do, and the GM feeds the back results, and that serves to confirm or refute the hypothesis, and therefore they either have a new direction of travel, or go back to speculating about other possible solutions."

Personally, this is a style of play that I dont like.  Its basically the players guessing what the GM wants.  Its kind of like a more involved version of 'guess the number Im thinking'  Is it 4?  no.  Is it 17?  no, but Ill give you a hint, its less than 15 and more than 2.  Is it 9?  no.

Yes, it isnt as random and arbitrary as that, but its still a bunch of players (not characters) trying to guess/deduce what the GM thinks the clues should mean.

No, I dont know the solution to that if someone does , please tell me. Even in games that arent supposed to be investigation games, there are often periods of play where the characters are trying to work out what is going on or why something is happening, so I think the situation is broadly relevant.

Well, so what, if we are enjoying it?

Now I'm not saying this can't break down.  I fully acknowledge that can happen.  But I could just as easily say that readers of an Agatha Christie novel are "guessing what the author wants".  It's true enough, but it's also popular enough to be its own genre.  In addition I don't think the criterion about players doing it is a negative; it's players who address premise, players who step up, players who explore, not characters.

Gareth, that's not really fair. You asked 'How is this not "really investigating"?'. It's still possible for you to enjoy something even if it turns out not to really be investigating.

Personally I think stefoid's number example is actual investigation, if at the less complex end of the investigation spectrum. What I think Ron is refering to isn't even that - it really is the GM deciding the pace and whether you have futtered around enough to move on to the next penciled event. In the number guessing game, unless the dudes just cheating, you have to get the number right to move on. What Ron's refering to, if I understand him, is a GM who lets you stew for how long he thinks he needs you to, then you find the gun in the alley. You only find the gun when he wants you to, while with the number guessing game you might just nail it on the first guess, whether he would want you to or not.

Callan wrote:
Gareth, that's not really fair. You asked 'How is this not "really investigating"?'. It's still possible for you to enjoy something even if it turns out not to really be investigating.

Personally I think stefoid's number example is actual investigation, if at the less complex end of the investigation spectrum. What I think Ron is refering to isn't even that - it really is the GM deciding the pace and whether you have futtered around enough to move on to the next penciled event. In the number guessing game, unless the dudes just cheating, you have to get the number right to move on. What Ron's refering to, if I understand him, is a GM who lets you stew for how long he thinks he needs you to, then you find the gun in the alley. You only find the gun when he wants you to, while with the number guessing game you might just nail it on the first guess, whether he would want you to or not.

I would measure unless the GM makes up game like the number guesser, or clue sweeper or the rules already have something like those (or a player makes it up on the spot and it's used), it doesn't matter if the players initiated the 'investigation' - it's still that thing Ron mentioned.

If players press on in a fictional direction the GM didn't decide stuff in advance about, it doesn't mean no ones predeciding things and it that it then becomes like a real life investigation. It just means the person who is in control isn't aware they are, nor is anyone else aware they are.

Well it does matter, because (what you deduce from) Ron's argument suggests that it's always GM-driven outcome manipulation.  But if it's not prepared material the GM is insisting upon, but something the players chose to explore of their own volition, then I don't see how that argument holds.

I'm not sure what you mean about the number thing.  There is a big difference between "I'm thinking of a number", in which I can always change the number, or not think of one at all, and a situation like "I have written a number down on a piece of paper, which I have placed in this sealed envelope".  The latter can be checked, and the problem with the former lies in the fact that it can't.

So it not just a guessing game in which the players are being strung along at the GM's whim.  There is a solution; the "clues", as such, do have a particular, grounded, meaning.  It's not an arbitrary process.

I don't follow your last paragraph. I didn't refer to anything being undecided, I referred to things not being plotted.

Gareth, in terms of my first paragraph where the GM or the rules have a number guesser, or a clue sweeper, or a guess who built into them, and in terms of your question "But to say it never happens, that it's impossible?" I agree an investigative process does occur. It's not impossible. But with air patrol, I'm not sure it has components like those in the text.

Then there's something else you want to say is investigation.

But if it's not prepared material the GM is insisting upon, but something the players chose to explore of their own volition, then I don't see how that argument holds.

All I'm saying there is that if the players are going off piste, then it can't be argued that it is a "panama canal" style event in which the GM decides to shepherd them to the next prepared stage, because clearly there is no next prepared stage.  I have no idea what you might mean by someone still allegedly leading them without knowing it.

I'm of the opinion that the GM presents data/clues to the players.  They through their characters analyze the data and make individual /group decisions what to do next.  I have run numerous adventures where they made incorrect conclusions and paid the ultimate price.  One of these was an actual murder investigation.

Www.dreamborn.com. (Omnificent Roleplaying System)

Hey Kent, I've seen that work great, and I've also seen it suck.  What do you do to make it work?

As a GM I have to be able to quickly adjust based on what the players do.  I never present a no win situation but sometimes they get over their heads.  My group and I have an understanding that THEY must play their characters, NOT me.  If they do something really stupid I let them and they know this.  They know sometimes the best action is to runaway.  I have found that after adjusting to this type of play that the players prefer it.  They have become very good at analyzing the situation and knowing their limitations.

Www.dreamborn.com

I dont want to speak for Ron here but I think you are missing at least a part of what he was saying.

He was holding the fictional situation as what was important in the game and that resolving the situation would move the game forward.  From the sounds of your mage game I dont think that is what you were going for.  It sounds like your group was revelling in the "WODness" of the investigation, you were interested in the process rather than the results.  If you take it in the context of the game in development you can see how the process of investigating wasnt really what the designer was going for.

Well, I have acknowledged that it may well be the case for a given game that the investigative structure is really just a device for getting to the good bits.  But the statement seems to a great deal further than that, which is what I find surprising.

I'm not convinvinced that the WODness was very important.  I'm a techie by trade, and have been lucky enough to work on very severe, complicated and important faults.  Which I loved, it suited me down to the ground.  So I would likely have engaged strongly with the investigative process whatever the setting or issue at hand might have been; it's just the kind of thing I enjoy.  So I certainly agree that the resolution was not more important than the process; the process was the point of play, not a device for getting somewhere else.  But if that isn't really investigating a fictional situation, what is it?

My understanding of the original quote from Ron was that when the players are 'investigating' a fictional situation, in fact that activity only has the appearance of an investigation because the result is pre-determined and inevitable.

At first look that appears to be an incoherent argument because it's judging what an activity is based solely on what the outcome of that activity will be. However the activity itself and it's outcome are two different things. Also the outcome is not necessarily guaranteed. In a given game there may be several mysteries, and it's quite possible that the players may resolve some of them through their investigation and not resolve others.

Let's consider an Agatha Christie mystery. Typically there's a main mystery (the murder - who dunnit) but also numerous other issues that come up. There are secret relationships between characters, apparently incriminating behaviour that has other explanations, etc. In an RPG the players may uncover the murderer, but fail to discover other valuable facts that might prove useful later in the campaign.  That's another thing that differentiates RPGs from mystery novels. At the end of a novel it's all over, but in an RPG campaign the characters in the mystery may have roles with respect to the characters that extend far beyond this particular incident. Uncovering information incidental to the murder might be highly valuable later in the campaign - or not depending on how things go. In fact they may never figure out the murderer. May be the murder is just one event in an unfolding drama, and whether they find out the perpetrator isn't vital to the unfolding of the campaign but merely means events will trend in one direction rather than another.

Ron makes another observation that investigations are merely transitions and colour. Ok, I'm not sure what that's about, but even if so I don't see why that stops them being investigations.

It's true that readers of a mystery novel never investigate anything because they have a passive relationship to the material. They can 'actively' consider the evidence the author provides, but they can't question the characters or look for specific clues at locations in the story. They can't make their own enquiries. Players in an RPG can do these things, mediated by the Narrator.

So I have to agree with Contracycle. I think players in an RPG can investigate, but it's possible Ron had some special or specific meaning of the term in mind but I have a hard time imagining what that might be. Without input from Ron I'd say the investigation into this issue is coming to a close.

Simon Hibbs

Hi everyone,

My thinking is that it is much more important and useful for a bunch of people to discuss in-play investigations as they see them, in the excellent spirit of inquiry that Gareth set the foundation for in the first post, then for me to tediously try to explain what I meant in a very specific context to Pat about his game.

I mean, if Gareth really wants me to, I'll try, but I do think that "Ron said something kooky," "what does he mean," "let's challenge it and see what he says" is kind of a boring or even personality-centric kind of topic and can't possibly be the real thread topic. If someone else had said it, would it be as interesting?

But the more general question stated here, and the range of experiences and ideas that have come through in the thread so far, are way better than that. My take is that the thread topic really wasn't about me and that specific set of statements, so much as, what are investigations. So I'm happy that what I said prompted this much thought and dialogue.

Best, Ron

Hey Gareth,

I hear ya on the investigative problem-solving.  I'm fuzzy on how that fits into roleplay, though. 

When my D&D group of real-life engineers got to a super-complex dwarven puzzle door, they spent hours trying to solve it.  Which was fun, and totally "the point" (i.e. rewarding on its own merits) for that duration.  But we stopped roleplaying.  It was as if we'd been having this adventure in this dangerous cave, and then an NPC handed us a sudoku, so we players stopped the adventure to do sudoku.  So that'd be a weird reason to play D&D -- we should probably do sudoku instead.  Personally, I like roleplaying cave danger way better than sudoku, so I was kind of pissed about the dwarven door.

I bet you've done more of this than I have, so I'd like to ask: in your experience, is real investigation (of the type you've described, which I agree is real) more often (a) its own game, or (b) an integrated part of an RPG (which presumably does stuff other than investigation too)?

There was recently a bit of an investigation sub-plot in the D&D game I run.  The usual: oh no, someone is stealing orphans.

The PCs ran around and investigated a bit.  Used skills, interrogated people; you know, the usual.

They picked up a lead and, being the violent thugs they are, killed the suspect and all the suspect's friends.  It's what passes for justice.

There was a very real possibility that they would have settled on a different suspect.  Or they might have reached the conclusion that they didn't know who was stealing all these orphans.  Both of those outcomes would have been perfectly fine and functional.

It seems reasonable to characterize that as the PCs doing the investigating, the interrogating, the killing.  The players were not doing those things.  They're pretending to, though.  Maybe pretending to investigate is enough.

So that's a specific anecdote.  In the most general sense, my understanding of this topic is that it is about a pretty fundamental question:  Is the fiction available to the players as a subject of the scientific method?  In my opinion the answer is "It depends; it might be." and perhaps I'd even go so far as to say "It depends; it usually is."  Perhaps unfairly, I guess I'd characterize our topic's original statement as the answer of "No, it's literally impossible."

Cheers,
Roger

David,

I agree that in in some sense it could be argued that being genuinely engaged in an investigation is a form of "stepping out of the game", in the way you describe with the dwarven door.  But I would suggest that this is equivalent to players actually, personally stepping up, or actually, personally addressing premise. I would agree that with the murder thing I mentioned above, I suppose it could be said that I was "not roleplaying", in that I was engaged with it directly rather than through the vehicle of my character.  I don't think that is inherently a problem though.

But I would also agree that, aesthetically as it were, it is a problem when this content is divorced from the rest of the setting and colour. I dislike the sort of puzzle you've described, and indeed puzzles of that nature in general for that reason.  But contrast that with a classic form like the locked room murder mystery; you can do that completely within the context of the imaginative setting and all its colourful details.  I played in a game that was builkt exactly like this, a sort of intro to Call of Cthulhu done for two of us who'd never played any of it.  And we did that all in character, from the dinner table conversaiton before the grim deed, to roleplaying through the interviews with the residents of the house, to poking around in the coal cellar.  In this case, my character was also being sort of framed for it, so the frustration of the mystery I felt as a player mapped directly onto the frustration I felt on behalf of the character.  All in all it worked wonderfully, and was one of the most powerful experiences I've had in RPG.

So, when it coincides with the topical content of the game as a whole, I don't think the personal engagement produces a problem.  What it shouldn't do is contradict the content (one of the Fighting Fantasy game books required the player to deduce binary arithmetic, frex), and it shouldn't stop the progress of play until the investigation is complete (like your door).  But as long as it avoids those, it can be integrated and healthy and conducive to deeper engagment with the game as a whole.

Well put, and I agree completely. 

As for not stopping play and not breaking aesthetics, the solution I keep coming back to is to design scenarios in which the acquisition and analysis of puzzle pieces entails appropriate fiction.  That is, investigation in a Cthulhu game should involve grabbing evidence from a claustrophobic crawlspace and then scrutinizing that evidence via a demonic spell that has some chance to kill you.  Not exactly revolutionary, but pretty reliable, I think. 

Of course, such play tends to leave "the point" a very open question -- are we investigating as a vehicle to experience claustrophobia and demons, or are we tacking on that color to spice up the investigation that's the real meat of play?  This could be an academic distinction ("who cares?") or a point of pretty serious clash within a group (if I'm all about reveling in demons and you're hand-waving that to focus on problem-solving).  I still don't have a good way to forge agreement on this via design; I tend to resort to pre-game chat.  Great when the players are self-aware and adept at communicating this stuff; useless otherwise.

I know that was a semi-tangent, but I think arguments about whether RPGs contain "real" investigation stem largely from this type of murkiness.