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One of the most intriguing ideas in the "Infamous Five" threads was the look at how D+D fantasy and superhero genres are not mainstream - instead things like horror, sex, and intrigue are.

I was at a Half Price books on Monday and looked at the proportions of shelf space per genre was. 3/4ths of the shelves were filled with non-fiction books (no surprise there - 9 out of 10 books sold are non-fiction).

I see business, education, military planning, and therapy games as the game corrolary to this trend. There is tons more money in those games than in hobby games. But since we are in hobby games that is irrelivant.

Military history had two bays of books - this could corrolate with wargames, German board games, and the like.

There are 3 shelves to a bay. The rest of the genres had fewer than a bay so I'll describe them in terms of shelves.

Humor 1 shelf
True Crime 1 shelf
Murder Mystery 2 shelves
Romance 2 shelves
Fantasy 1 shelf hardback 1 shelf paper back
Action/Spy 1 shelf
Horror 2 shelves


While the classics got a whole bay - but that covers thousands of years worth of literature.

So that roughly works out to...

Crime/Murder mystery 30%
Horror 20%
Romance 20% (Note - I'm not saying sex - this was not that kind of store)
Fantasy 15%
Action/Spy 8%
Humor 7%

I figure that action spy books tie into history books so this number underrepresents this area of people's interest. Humor was also small but this could be because it is narrowly defined for book markets (I bought a Matt Gronig Life is Hell book). Actual game books did not get a whole shelf.

What does all this mean, I'm not certain. There are plenty of good horror games on the market, not so much murder mystery.

Anyway I thought I'd throw this topic open for discussion again because it was such a neat idea.

I should have some specific question so here it is.

Since murder mystery/true crime had the most shelf space, what are your thoughts on how to make games that give people the same experience playing that they get reading?

Another thing you could do is look at the best sellers lists. Usually there's a Dean Koontz or something for fiction, and for non-fiction, something about religion or maybe pop-science.

But it seems tenuous to draw too many parallels. Role-playing is a whole different medium, and will attract a different kind audience than does reading, with different tastes. For instance, I'm sure the above % break-down doesn't apply equally to the kinds of plays that people see. For historical reasons and because of the medium itself, plays have their own tendencies.  As does every medium.

What would be compelling, though, is doing a good survey among gamers to find out what they read, or among readers in the general public, and find out if they game.

Er, um, Host Your Own Murder Mystery.

Somehow these are not seen as Murder Mystery RPGs. But that's precisely what they are (assuming you let LARP into the classification). Why aren't there more TTRPGs with murder mysteries? Well, they're darn difficult to come up with. No, really that's the only reason. Each HYOMM is meant to be played once and only once. Most TTRPGs have an expectation of being played many times with evolving plot each time. Even if you play an episodic game, that still means that you have to have a new plot each evening. It's easy to make one up that's simply a series of challenges, or scenes. But coming up with a whodunnit that isn't instantly identified as one of the ones that everyone knows from movies or books is hard, hard, hard.

Yeah, COC play puts itself off as mystery stuff. But it's rarely really any good as such. There's no mystery to put together, just a series of clues set out for the players to find. Really not at all the same thing. In an RPG, once you have the clues, you have the solution. Because they're not indirect, the information is direct. Because if you don't, then you risk the plot not getting exposed.

In a HYOMM, since it's a one-shot, it's OK if only one player figures it out, and all the rest fail (yeah, usually they're pretty gamism based, really). But they can be pretty carefully designed for just the right combination of clues and lack of info to make it somewhat like a murder mystery.

That said, even HYOMMs are different from the murder mystery book. Because the protagonists of those sorts of books are brilliant since they have the author to guide them. In point of fact, many Sherlock Holmes mysteries are insoluble by the reader, since some of the information is not presented until Holmes sums up. Doyle actually fails to give the reader some of the clues that Holmes has. Making it impossible for the reader to figure it out. And even when they do give the clues, often the situation is so torturous that you'd never guess in a hundred years who dunnit. Or the information that they imply is simply not available. A particular color of dirt that says to Holmes that the culprit has been on Haightenberry Lane within the past fortnight, is simply not something that we can know unless Doyle deigns to give it to us.

A HYOMM has to be easy enough to solve that the real humans involved can actually solve it. So they're not precisely the same as the literature, either.

This is a similar problem to the observation about the "big three" TV shows types. You just don't see many RPGs (OK, none) about Lawyers, Doctors or Cops. They dominate TV. But the fact is that, since the players don't have the technical knowledge that the writers do (yes, Crichton is an MD), it becomes hard to simulate the color of the situations in question. So people don't even attempt it.

Which is not to say that it absolutely can't be done. Just that nobody has ever had a complete enough vision of what play would be like to even start designing such a game to my knowledge. We had a long thread about the subject, but little was accomplished, IIRC.

Mike

This is a similar problem to the observation about the "big three" TV shows types. You just don't see many RPGs (OK, none) about Lawyers, Doctors or Cops.

Thread link: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=932">the big three you never see

Law, Medicine, Politics

Paul

Quote from: MatrixGamerI should have some specific question so here it is.

Since murder mystery/true crime had the most shelf space, what are your thoughts on how to make games that give people the same experience playing that they get reading?

Well, I guess the specific question here is how to get murder mystery games to work.  First of all, I agree with Mike Holmes that the overwhelming difficulty of mystery scenarios is the problem of writing scenarios for it.  This isn't a mechanics issue per se -- to be satisfying, mysteries really need non-abstract, consistent explanations behind them.  And that is difficult.  A section of my RPG site is devoted to murder mystery games, including one that I wrote myself:
http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/murder/

However, it's been ages since I did that one because, well, it's a lot hard work compared to the payoff.  Incidentally, while murder mystery novels are comparatively big business, murder mystery games -- while they sell in mainstream stores -- don't seem to be big business compared to other tabletop RPGs.  Having played a few of them, I largely conclude that the designs are weak.  The mysteries seem thrown together and the explanations don't make a whole lot of sense.  I guess this goes back to the problem of mysteries being difficult to write.  The primary feature of the games seems to be the silly pun names of the characters.  To put this in a positive light, I suppose you could say they are being social and humorous rather than challenging.  

Some are clearly RPGs -- I think my "Business of Murder" game is.  However, Decipher's "How to Host a Murder" series do not seem like RPGs to me.  The parts of acting in character are purely extraneous to the game.  The player of the murderer character may not even know that she is guilty until a later round of the game.  

If I run some more, I may get around to writing notes on how to do better murder mystery games.  I don't have a whole lot of advice to offer at the moment.  There are some good advice sections in Flying Buffalo's Mercenaries, Spies, and Private Eyes game.  

As a side note, I don't see why RPGs should give the same experience of reading.  If you look at movies or theater, you'll see very different proportions of genres compared to novels.

Back in college I ran a series of RPG murder mysteries. "Hard to write" is an understatement! I basically ran a series of interrogation interviews with some physical evidence gathering thrown in for good measure. I could only handle a couple of players and it was basically me feeding them information. In the end not satisfying and with no replay value.

These games lead me to the synical conclusion that the crime had to be blantantly simple and the clues like clubs on the player's heads or they wouldn't figure it out.

RPGs have not come up with a good way to do mystery, yet.

There are board games but aren't they just like clue? Not fun if you're older than 12.

I run Murder Mysteries with Matrix Games that work quite well - but they work by abandoning most of the conventions of RPGs.

Players pick a character (one needs to be the detective but the other can be other colorful characters). They play by making an argument each turn for what they want to have happen next. In mystery games this usually means making up clues. Players need to find clues that show who had the means, motive and opportunity to commit the crime. They then argue to arrest that person (a conflict situation) and then hold a trial. It takes 2 to 3 hours to play. The system works fine to do this - I've run these kinds of games for 11 years.

Players have to move beyond playing their characters to telling the whole story.
They have to imagine who they think did it and look for clues to prove that.
They have to narrow their arguments to a specific story so that it is solved - which means letting go of tangents.
The game is replayable because the players never repeat making up the same clues. It is different every time.

Each game includes education sections about how the criminal justice system works. I've got a degree police administration and social work so I'm intimately familiar with "social control." This should clue new players in to what might happen without telling what should happen.

I'm certain their is Big Model explanations of this. Director stance or whatnot.

Right now I've got a Sherlock Holmes book (with another on the way), a Medieval mystery with Roger Bacon as the detective (with another on the way) and a Law and Order like game (with another on the way). They haven't proven themselves with sales but I have hopes.

I frequently think that games like Matrix Games and Universalis are really not RPGs at all. Maybe that is what it will take to make a compelling game in this genre.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press

Quote from: MatrixGamerThere are board games but aren't they just like clue? Not fun if you're older than 12.

Actually, there is a boardgame that is quite popular wth those over 12 and which has quite a bit of roleplaying involved.  It's called Mystery of the Abbey.

Hey Chris,

Since murder mystery/true crime had the most shelf space, what are your thoughts on how to make games that give people the same experience playing that they get reading?

Mark Bernstein's article, http://www.eastgate.com/HypertextNow/archives/Mystery.html">no mystery, is a good starting point. A quote:

"First-person detective puzzles that promise the chance to let you solve the mystery can be entertaining, but they aren't mysteries."

Paul

My favorite thread on running mysteries from the past year or so is this one

http://indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=13089

particularly the post by Chris Lehrich about how a game centered on it would work.

best

Trevis

I don't know if most people notice, but reading a mystery novel or watching a mystery on TV, is a game. And you have been playing.

Are you going to tell me you haven't figured out certain parts of the plot, as you watched? And when they were revealed, you had the smug satisfaction of having figured it out for yourself to begin with?

These shows/books are games, but they don't suffer from simulationisms damn need for cause and effect. For roleplay, we just fall back into old habits in much the same way as adding a combat system. So we think "The players have to work this out, before we go on".

Taking a direct line from the shows, your PC could work things out for themselves over time. Answers are written on paper and tucked away, and at certain mechanically controlled times, a PC 'deduces' these. So what does the player do here? You just have some mechanism by which the player can try and figure out things in advance, and write them down and perhaps put the deduction in a box. At the end of the game, everything he figured out in advance of it being revealed, gives him a point. Pure gamism.

So now they can figure out stuff, but if they fail to, the story still goes on. Just like when you watch a crime show or read a mystery novel.

The biggest problem  with murder mystery games is that the games are usually designed with the players taking on the role of the investigator(s), but the most interesting people in these shows are the suspects.

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 during interrogations.  That way the players are actively creating the game rather than just discovering what the gm has prepared.

Quote from: CaldisThe biggest problem  with murder mystery games is that the games are usually designed with the players taking on the role of the investigator(s), but the most interesting people in these shows are the suspects.

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 during interrogations.  That way the players are actively creating the game rather than just discovering what the gm has prepared.

Caldis, I think that's brilliant.  Mind if I write up a treatment for this and post it in Indie Design?

I agree, brilliant. This would allow a game to retain RPG methods while telling a mystery story. I can see players vying with one another to be the killer since that role might give maore game time.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press

The problem with ideas like Caldis', Chris', and even Callan's is that there's a strong incentive to want to play the investigators, and have the plot proceed directly as a result of the player's ingenuity.

Yes, it's fraught with potential problems, including that the players may "lose," not be able to figure it out, and miss out on lots of the plot in play. But it's the action that the genre demands. In an action fantasy genre, the players' ability to win out in combat with monsters is what's demanded. In supers, the ability to stomp the bad guys is what's demanded. In mysteries, it calls for the players to be the ones to solve the mystery.

I'm not saying you can't do these other ideas. Just that they avoid the actual problem rather than facing it head on. That said, I'm not sure that there is a solution to the problem of the mystery genre. But avoiding the problem is not addressing the lack of such games. The same person who gets a smug satisfaction at predicting the outcome of L&O, will not be satisfied unless they are the investigator - and if the investigation does not proceed as the result of their investigator's deductions, then it doesn't satisfy the standard role-playing angle for the genre. 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.

All of which is to, again, point out why such RPGs don't exist. We all know what we want from the genre. But nobody has figured out how to get it.

Mike

Quote from: Paul Czege
Mark Bernstein's article, http://www.eastgate.com/HypertextNow/archives/Mystery.html">no mystery, is a good starting point.

I stands and scratches me head after reading this article...No a mystery, says he, me's not convinced.

Mr. Bernstein is confusing mystery with hard boiled detective stories. They are very different. In fact crime stories break down into many different types of tale.

Sherlockian stories have the detective find clues and rather cerebrally come up with who done it.

Hard boiled detectives pretty much know up front who done it, they go and question people till someone tries to shoot them. Then they know there going in the right direction. Physical not cerebral.

True crime tales recount how criminals go about planning and carrying out crimes. The Great Train Robbery and Asphalt Jungle come to mind. These are again cerebral plots coupled with the suspence of getting caught.

Psychological crime stories largely ignore the mystery and instead focus on the characters inner lives, Gas Light for instance.

Police proceedurals (CSI, Law and Order) are more like Sherlockian tales but also explore how cops and robbers navigate the criminal justice system. In this way it is as much a political game as a mystery.

I think the required story elements are very different depending on which type of tale your telling so I don't by the argument "No Mystery".

Chris Engle
Hamster Press