Roger touched upon something I’ve been pondering recently. He mentioned that mysteries are solved by the players, rather than their characters - I have started to feel this too, but I realised that rather than adding to the fun,it actually distances me from my character. I’ve been struggling to articulate it but I’ll try:
When I’m roleplaying, that’s what I want to do. I want to pretend I’m someone else while dicking about with my friends and having a bit of a laugh. I can do this while pretending to be a big strong fighty man or a wizard, because I am not expected to use my own combat or magery skills if it comes to a fight.
However… when it comes to a mystery/investigation game, I find it very hard to try to do this in character. If there’s an actual mystery, clues, something strange going on, I will be using my observation skills, note-taking, evidence collation and knowledge of popular fiction to work out what is happening - and that’s me. I find a tension between thinking through a mystery and roleplaying; a dissonance. I’ve realised that my own tastes are more towards fairly simple scenarios so I can focus on playing my character, rather than complex machincations that involve me (i.e. Nick (which is my name, I should point out)).
This may also be, now I’m expressing it, why I don’t really like political games either - these are going to involve my own social and manipulation skills, and this is likely to conflict with the character I’m playing (largely because my own skills in this department are basically zero).
Purely personal choice of course, but I’ve realised this is why I struggle to feel a sense of character in investigation games. I keep having to exit my mental simultation of the character to think through the evidence. Does anyone else feel similarly or is it just me?
Edit: I don’t really get this with exploration games - I think I find it easier reacting to new environments than trying to delve into clues. This is may be completely hypocritical of me, but it’s how my brain works.
Do! GURPS Mysteries is excellent. I would very much like to find a work or product that contained genre analysis for caper/heist and secret-operations adventures in RPG similar to that which GURPS Mysteries has for cozy whodunnits, police procedural adventures, thrillers, and hard-boiled detective adventures.
Because of the issue that you raise, I recommend that one not attempt to GM actual mysteries, but design and run investigation adventures instead. That is: design not a puzzle, but a situation of conflict in which characters will respond to events.
Dr. Watson noted the existence of cases that Sherlock Holmes was able to solve without leaving his armchair, but he never wrote any of those up for publication. The published adventures are all ones in which Homes had to take action. He would go somewhere to look for clues, meet people and talk to them, do things either to find or to elicit information, provoke the malefactor into revealing behaviour…. Sometimes he would actually prevent the crime rather than solving it.
One common mode of failure for mystery adventures in RPG is that the players start arguing out of character about theories of the crime and complaining that the mystery is too obscure. Very often they do this without their characters actually being anyplace, so you can’t even have a goon with a gun barge into the room. Placing shock collars on roleplayers is not allowed outside the academic context, and so I recommend investing in one of those pocket-sized air horns and an A3 or larger placard that says
You do not have enough information to solve this mystery.
Go somewhere and do something. You are detectives: go detect.
Most of the mysteries in my many successful investigation campaigns were extremely simple once the PCs had the information, but getting the information was an adventure. In others, the PCs never did solve the whodunnit, but they caught the villains somehow else.
Everything @Agemegos said. Indeed, GURPS Mysteries is very clear that you shouldn’t use complicated mysteries out of a book, because the mystery-solving ability of even the best players is way lower than that of a reader (even if they’re the same people).
Another approach I take is to solve the mystery in character, i.e. the solving happens entirely within the mental overlay in which I’m running an emulation of my PC. (Not everyone plays this way, fair enough.)
I remember the days in which puzzles were considered an important part of a dungeon design, and similarly it was just assumed that the players would be solving the puzzles themselves - if Og the Fighter is played by a guy who does cryptic crosswords for fun, while Pretentioso the Sage is played by Dave who finds his challenges in lifting heavy objects, it’s Og’s player who’ll come up with the answer. But puzzles have largely gone away as a component of adventures, while mysteries can still be a thing, and I think that’s because one can do more with them than asking everyone to step out of character and solve the puzzle.
This is the thing I explicitly struggle to do, and the thing that I find takes me out of character. I can roleplay, or I can think about mysteries, but personally I find it very hard to do both.
Not with my GMs of yore. They’d rule that Og wasn’t smart enough to solve the puzzle and banned him from trying, so Og’s player sat around bored for an hour while Dave tries to solve the crossword.
