MU* Mystery RP

Misadventure

Short version:
Players like to have prompts for RP.
Mysteries are a thing to RP around/through.

Two extreme opposite approaches can be described:

There is a specific set of clues and information to reveal a specific "solution"
Player brainstorming is used to formulate the "solution" behind the scenes

Does one approach appeal more when you are a player vs a staffer/ST?

Other thoughts:
Should players be allowed to fail in finding the "solution"? (this could happen for both extremes)

Does player mental engagement matter have value vs creating dramatic/engaging/amusing scenes ? Meaning what's the worth of actually thinking things through vs posing whatever is enjoyable? No, no one needs to present real world expertise for verisimilitude.

Does some level of verisimilitude matter, or is entertainment enough? What if entertaining is expected to result in optimal outcomes without significant relationship to those results?

This could apply to anything that has a resolution end state.

Some will value one or the other, this is asking what you, the individual, think.

ZombieGenesis

I handle this in one of two ways in the games I run. These are generally used for GMless RP as most of the people I RP with use Ares and asynchronous RP.

1: I've set up a plot where the story can be advanced by completing a number of scenes. I provide a page with a number of prompts and some hidden information for when certain benchmarks have been met. When the players meet those benchmarks, they reveal the hidden information and RP accordingly. One scene leads to the next(scene prompt, action prompts, clue prompts, scene close) until the mystery is solved.

Sometimes I also give the players one scene with various prompts and then have them submit a job when they're ready to move on to the next one.

So here, we use specific clues that lead to a solution.

2: Sometimes we don't have anyone who is running the plot, but we still want to do X, Y, and/or Z. So we do our RP and lean on the system to see how things go. We treat it almost like a game of Clue. We use "oracles" to answer various questions, come up with our guesses, and then determine how correct we think we are. Then we roll to see if we're right and RP accordingly.

For example, through RP and various oracle checks, we're pretty sure the killer(most of my RP happens on horror or superhero games) is the sheriff. Based on how the oracle checks went, we're 75% sure. We roll to see if we're right. If we are, we move on with the plot. If we're not, we RP how our characters found out we weren't and go back to the drawing board.

Not everyone's cup of tea I'm sure but it works for us and we have a great time with it.

hobos

@Misadventure said in MU* Mystery RP:

Two extreme opposite approaches can be described:

There is a specific set of clues and information to reveal a specific "solution"

Player brainstorming is used to formulate the "solution" behind the scenes

Does one approach appeal more when you are a player vs a staffer/ST?

One approach appeals to me so much more than the other, and that is that the GM has already built out the world and whatever happened has already happened. The clues and evidence laid out in the world can bring players organically to the solution.

Other thoughts:
Should players be allowed to fail in finding the "solution"? (this could happen for both extremes)

Definitely. Although I think sometimes staff can add in new information that can help guide players on the right track, if they want to, but failures should be definitely possible, even multiple failures in a row.

Does player mental engagement matter have value vs creating dramatic/engaging/amusing scenes ? Meaning what's the worth of actually thinking things through vs posing whatever is enjoyable? No, no one needs to present real world expertise for verisimilitude.

For a mystery plot, how is it fun if there is no mental engagement? That's how I feel at least, and I love mysteries. The thing I love most about them is genuinely trying to figure them out. I think it's actually even better if you can pick up some new facts in terms of real world expertise when it comes to trying to figure out your mystery. A TV show where they get all the forensics details wrong doesn't appeal to me much. Of course it doesn't have to be as hardcore and tedious as it might be IRL, but it's nice to learn things and have a high level of believability to a plot.

Does some level of verisimilitude matter, or is entertainment enough? What if entertaining is expected to result in optimal outcomes without significant relationship to those results?

A nice amount of verisimilitude makes things entertaining for me. Due to the limitations of the medium, it's of course necessary to suspend disbelief about some things, and kind of gloss over other things. But in general, verisimilitude is nice.

I love putting together puzzle pieces myself, but it would seem a bit meaningless if all the puzzle pieces were perfect black squares and once I had lined up a certain amount of them in rows, someone would generate an AI art image onto the section I had lined up. And then I'd line up more perfect black squares and the image would just get generated a little more.

Maybe that makes it relatively simple for game-running but it takes like 75% of the fun out of it, for me. The only fun left is writing and acting dramatic. That might be good for Social type players but I usually get Explorer on the Bartle-type quizzes.

Ghost

My GM approach:

I feel that sometimes GMs get caught in the trap of writing some puzzle or riddle that feels obvious to them, but then in roleplay it's like you're in a game of 30 questions but aren't sure if the wrong answer is gonna get your PC killed:

"Is it...a chair?"
"No, guys, the riddle clearly says 'I wait by the eastern wing of the sky in june'..."

My method:

Decide the kind of investigation (murder, robbery, etc)
Decide what really happened. (The cook killed the maid!)
Get an idea of 2-3 ways it could be solved, leave some evidence, and then let the players show you how they intend to solve it.

If they head towards one of the 2-3 ways you were prepared for? Great. If not...wing it and have fun with it.

Edit. Other things.

I will let them fail, but mostly if they try to metagame (see next point) through it or ignore the investigation for other things.
I will require players to actually roll relevant dice to receive evidence/information no matter how much PlayerA tries to convince me how it could be researched over the internet with no experience in real life.

I think the main point is to give the players a scenario to run through where they're doing stuff. So you have to let them do stuff to resolve it, and railroading never makes players feel like they're accomplishing anything. But, if they're successful I usually end the investigation with someone stolen from other pieces of fiction, like a car chase or a hostage situation.

Misadventure

@ZombieGenesis said in MU* Mystery RP:

I handle this in one of two ways in the games I run. These are generally used for GMless RP as most of the people I RP with use Ares and asynchronous RP.

1: I've set up a plot where the story can be advanced by completing a number of scenes. I provide a page with a number of prompts and some hidden information for when certain benchmarks have been met. When the players meet those benchmarks, they reveal the hidden information and RP accordingly. One scene leads to the next(scene prompt, action prompts, clue prompts, scene close) until the mystery is solved.

Could you elaborate on this part? Is this information hidden in the sense the characters won't know it until they choose the right actions/make the right rolls, but at least one player does know the info OOC? Or is it somehow hidden in another way? Like players submit the right rolls, the answer is unlocked from a +jobs queue type thing?

GENERAL NOTE
Mysteries are a convenient way of talking about this sort of thing, but I do hope I am being clear that I think this sort of thinking applies to just about every kind of story situation. What actions have the expectation (from the story maker and the participating players) of making progress towards resolving whatever in the way the players and their characters would prefer.

ZombieGenesis

@Misadventure For elaborate things, I've used +jobs, but I usually create a tabbed box on the game wiki. The first tab has the prompts that should be used for the scene. Another tab has the "reveal". This could also be multiple tabs if there are potentially multiple results.

faraday

I don't do plots with actual mystery for the players any more. Every single time I've tried - and I'm talking many games, across many years - it's been either:

Players figure out the mystery in 0.2 seconds even though the characters should logically struggle more to piece the clues together.
Players cling to red herrings like a dog with a bone, then get frustrated and bored when their investigations don't pan out.
Players show zero interest in the mystery and just go about their daily lives expecting someone else to solve it.

It's just not worth the effort/frustration for me.

Misadventure

@faraday

My parallel story of sympathy:

For a tabletop RPG:

I tried to communicate a basic structure for organizing an investigation along the lines of the Clue board game, adding in the basic journalist questions and a generic list of types of sources of information like the media, subject matter experts, NPCs they've met with prior experience in a topic - especially any that have been already named in the setting, or specifically the given storyline.

I had a personal mystery arise for a player to give them a persona storyline
They brainstormed a list of the seven likely causes from specific things to generic

They investigated six, declared it unsolvable.

The seventh? Their background nemesis, whom* they betrayed in the area of the current situation.

So, I feel ya.

*trying out using whom, no idea if it's right.

hobos

My experience here is probably pretty different because it's not primarily in tabletops or MUSH-style games.

The favorite mystery I ever investigated in a game was when there was one PC who killed another PC and tried to hide it. In this game you were able to find tracks of people, investigate bodies and get information from different types of wounds, judge people's recent locations based off things like what they smelled like or the type of dirt on their boots, search locations for objects that had been hidden by PCs, overhear distant conversations, hide and stalk and eavesdrop, etc.

Due to all these mechanics and the fact that the original mystery was actually an organic player-provoked event, things were a bit different than I imagine they would be if a GM had to go lay out clues and drop breadcrumbs. Plus, the players didn't even necessarily need to solve the mystery. Things happen all the time that don't get investigated, and murders go unsolved, and so on.

There were times during the initial course of this story (my character was a city guard) that I imagined, as a player, that the murder-victim had actually just quit the game and not been murdered at all. The murderer was a great liar and gave no sign of lying. It was just my luck to be roleplaying a weirdo who was overly-convinced of foul play. Many times I amused myself by being absurdly dedicated to finding out the "truth"... and then, it turned out to be actually the truth, as evidence gradually came to light. Other players began to realize my character was onto something, and their characters got involved in the plot too, and it turned out to be an incredibly epic and memorable story.

Ganymede

@Misadventure said in MU* Mystery RP:

There is a specific set of clues and information to reveal a specific "solution"

Player brainstorming is used to formulate the "solution" behind the scenes

Does one approach appeal more when you are a player vs a staffer/ST?

I think the important issue is the purpose of the mystery.

If the mystery is to advance the plot, then I prefer there to be one or two "solutions" that will aid in moving the plot forward. If the mystery is not essential to the plot, then I prefer letting the players come up with a plan, so that I can save my brainpower for something else.

Misadventure

Mystery: where is the spoiler function???

Another angle to look at it is this:
Does a story creator lay out what is happening
OR
Does someone suggest an event or situation and the players make up how it goes?

Excessive examples, trying to get away from actual mystery and more into an as yet unknown set of actions that are likely to succeed:

Gm says there is a locked door, a chasm to cross, and a riddle based on murals in the rooms before and after the chasm. The GM lists lock picking, a movement type skill check, and perception checks as likely solutions. Being reasonable, they will also accept typical ways around each obstacle like teleport, flying, eidetic memory, lore skills, etc.

VS

The GM says there is a cleverly difficult set of tests between the players and their goal. They players then decide that there is a very difficult and trapped, locked door that leads into a set of rooms that goes nowhere. Another player suggests that hidden in these rooms is a mechanism that makes it possible to open/reveal the real door a distance away from the one they came through, so going in is still necessary. Someone says it was known there was a key to this difficult door, and it might be safer to try to find or reconstruct this key in a side scene. And that's just to get to the physical-bravery challenge ...

Another example:

GM says an enemy raiding force of some strength is threatening the city. GM decides they are crafty, and send small bands to harry people on the three routes but they know a really less known way and are moving their main force quietly through there and hope that some troops are out chasing the retreating small bands, and the main force arrives unexpectedly, they will likely take some important ground/fortifications and the situation is dire.

The players may have rolls like warfare, or scouting, or backwoods lore that they could roll to know about the possible use of the back way, or the GM could decide that the players get to decide how they allocate their forces.

VERSUS

The GM says a large raiding force is on its way, maybe even establishing what sort of force in terms of culture and technology. After that the players decide how the attack happens, and create scenes that produce the drama, tragedy, loss, and courageous sacrifices that make a good war tale. Maybe they go with the hidden attack route, but decide that there are no distraction attack bands, and ultimately scouts will report back that they didn't see an army, except those who encounter the army and likely are ambushed, but we can play that out, and either they return with the news, or the fact they didn't is the warning needed.

Players could also be suggesting rolls and letting the results vary up what happens, including adding details to justify a result, like oh there should be a lore check to see if we think of all the hidden ways, and no we failed that roll, but no one will forget that high valley that should be snowed in as a route, so maybe there are forgotten tunnels through the mountains.

Ganymede

@Misadventure

I prefer it when the Storyteller acts like a storyteller.

Start with the narrative:

"The door between you and what lies behind is locked. What will you do?"

Then discuss the options:

"Can I pick the lock?"
"Sure."
"Hm. I'm not really good at it. Can I bash the door down?"
"You can try. Go ahead and roll a Strength check."
rolls
"Okay, you succeed."

Then, back to the narrative:

"You apply force where necessary with the two-handed axe at your disposal. The door can't dodge. Eventually, you break it into splinters, and are able to walk into the darkened room that was behind it."

And so on.

I don't think it needs to get any more complicated than that.

Misadventure

@Ganymede said in MU* Mystery RP:

I don't think it needs to get any more complicated than that.

It diesnt need to be. However, STs are often in short supply or have no "authority" on games, so an approach where you can upstep a player, or a player-ST's ability to spark and resolve a scene/storyline without as much preparation or reliance on staff (game authority) might be useful.

I definitely encounter folks who really prefer to come to the right answers, risk on the right actions - to make choices without knowing exactly how they will come out.

And I definitely encounter folks who do fine with there being no failures or costs they don't suggest.

On MU*s, I most often I encountered make work +jobs towards automatic success with a few or no points of choice that really affected the outcome.

My example is waaaay back when Peverel had a Duchess(?) be poisoned despite the players efforts. And I am not sure the players really had a chance to learn about the poison or the plot before hand. Assuming they did, the players missed all of it.

So if Staff don't want to present choices with consequences, they wouldn't always have to "act like a storyteller".

Or they could focus on what the crucial story decision points they create are and go from there.

Ganymede

@Misadventure said in MU* Mystery RP:

My example is waaaay back when Peverel had a Duchess(?) be poisoned despite the players efforts. And I am not sure the players really had a chance to learn about the poison or the plot before hand. Assuming they did, the players missed all of it.

I don't mean to be curt, but so what? You can do everything right and still fail. Life is full of events which cannot be prevented.

On that same game, if you will recall, I had an entire plot derailed because of a lucky shot to the BBEG's face. So what? I pivoted.

I am all for player agency, but players also need to realize that, in a good story, you cannot control all of the narrative.

Misadventure

@Ganymede the point is most players and most play I saw after that did not include the players failing. Likewise, not everyone thinks as you do, or enjoys as you do.

I think that should these things should be a conscious stance and not something that isn't stated or acknowledged.

Whatever the position is with these various approaches, if they are acknowledged they can be leaned into to create a better experience.

EG if you are aiming for PC failure and fatality to be a thing, maybe working on fast or character generation or personal; player stables or pre-gens to jump right back in helps. Maybe communicating better about what's expected in terms of character ability requirements or player questions for information will help.

A mismatch of expectations only leads to suckitude.

Intent -> All Players Expectations-> Game System Design -> ST Communication

Or maybe players will never actually put the effort in, and it may as well be diceless and failless. But then how would the insider clique know they are better than everyone else?

faraday

@Misadventure said in MU* Mystery RP:

The GM says there is a cleverly difficult set of tests between the players and their goal. They players then decide that there is a very difficult and trapped, locked door that leads into a set of rooms that goes nowhere.

This style is common on Storium. The storyteller lays out a scene set and some challenges. The challenge cards are bounded with certain outcomes for success or failure, which keep the story from going completely off the rails, but within those bounds the players can make up anything reasonable.

It works, but I've always found it a bit unsettling. Like you're always in this gray zone where you don't know what the storyteller will find reasonable or not before you write your move/pose. I can't even imagine how I'd do that in something like a tomb raider challenge or murder mystery without the larger context of what's going on (which only the storyteller knows).

It's very different from the traditional "The door is locked" style @Ganymede described.

Misadventure

@faraday is that unsettling feeling because you can't ask questions and explore the situation and whatever lore you might have access to, or that enough information isn't presented in most challenges or something else?

faraday

@Misadventure said in MU* Mystery RP:

is that unsettling feeling because you can't ask questions and explore the situation and whatever lore you might have access to, or that enough information isn't presented in most challenges or something else?

All of the above, at times, but mostly it's that you know the narrator has some kind of overarching story vision--you just don't know what that is.

So the example challenge above with the plane crash... I could probably safely give my character a cut or concussion, but would I derail the story if I gave them a broken leg and hampered the group's mobility? Who knows.

Or in another game, we came across some completely unfamiliar desert aliens and had to try to communicate with them. All we had to go on, lore-wise, was a brief description of them in the narrator's set pose. I have no idea what the narrator has in mind for these things, yet I have to describe my character interacting with them?

Some folks may like that degree of creative freedom, but for me it's like... FLAIL.

Misadventure

@faraday those are great examples.

I've seen games where the players really are fully going to make up something like a new species and or a new culture with little to no detail, but usually that means there will be a brainstorming moment where the players define at least some of the ideas, enough for folks to get going, but also with the understanding that the act of creation by the group is more important than any defined sense of where it is going.

In other words, it literally is a bad idea to make plans or defined content of any kind that remains out of player knowledge.

=============================

My personal approach as an ST is to definitely have structure to what HAS happened, and to how NPCs will continue to act. Then the players act on that, and we see where it goes, though the typical motivator is something needs to be stopped in the near future and that moment of crisis is essentially the decision point and end of the story.

I would like to think that players would want to suggest NPCs, relationships and events, and either create them or submit the general idea to the play group or an ST, etc. For all that it's good to have an organizing and creative authority, it seems like there is room to make things in the game and utilize player creativity. Maybe even just suggestions of things they'd like to see for their character, other players characters, and the setting and story at large.

Ganymede

@faraday said in MU* Mystery RP:

All of the above, at times, but mostly it's that you know the narrator has some kind of overarching story vision--you just don't know what that is.

Personally, I think this is what separates a role-playing game from an improv session, and it is a matter of expectations.

When I sit down to play D&D, I'm generally expecting to react to the narrative meaningfully. When I step on a stage, I'm generally expecting to generate my own narrative within the confines of the space and the openings provided by others. And when I role-play on a MU*, I'm expecting something in between.

I prefer the first example, but I realize it's hard to come by.