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.
Games for children: @RogerBW asked what a kids RPG would do that was better than their ‘let’s pretend’? With two young experiments in progress (9yo and 7yo) and as a Beaver Scout and Cub Scout leader, I would add the following for consideration.
I think we forget (as veteran gamers) how much socialisation there is to play an RPG. Over lockdown, I persuaded my wife to play a game of the Dee Sanction with two other friends who’d been roleplaying a long time. She had no idea of some of the common tropes or behaviours that exist - so after being released from the Tower, she had no reason to hang around with the other characters - as she rightly said “they’re dangerous heretics, I’ve never met them before, and I have a night in Tudor London to go explore. Why would I hang around with them?'“.
Most of us would unconsciously just accept ‘these are the other characters in the party, so of course we make common cause, otherwise the game doesn’t go ahead.’ But she didn’t know any of those expectations of behaviours, and the other three of us were so used to them being there that when they weren’t, we didn’t quite know how to respond.
So a structured RPG can teach children:
How to take turns
How to not just add on powers as you think of them
How to defer to others who have the skills you need to succeed
How to lose
How to resolve conflicts
etc.
In terms of appropriate games, I think this is very much age related - the ability to read, reason, comprehend etc. change massively over the ages of 5-10. We’ve had some success with No Thank You Evil! by Monte Cook games. It has a scaled ability approach so a young kids character sheet is simpler than an older one, but you can add on the complexity for a particularly precocious child. It is children playing themselves - unlike Roger’s experience, many kids I’ve observed playing make believe play themselves, but with super powers, and that’s what the idea behind No Thank You Evil is - very much Max in Where The Wild Things Are.
Character design is simple - you can pick cards for powers and items, and resolution just uses D6.
The biggest challenge we have, especially with the 9yo, is that RPGs aren’t anywhere near as exciting as Roblox for him, and all his friends are playing that.
That sounds like she was roleplaying, but the other players had picked up bad habits of metagaming, so they did things which their characters had no reason to do, either emotional or rational.
If PCs are supposed to be a team, establish that in character creation. Have their backstories include their connection with the other PCs, whether family relationship, trusted friends, long-time retainer to another PC with higher Status or ex-husband, infuriating annoyance, but when it really counts, still someone the character trusts.
I don’t understand why campaigns would start out with the PCs as strangers to each other, but explicitly or implicitly expect them to trust each other. That is contrary to how most people work. If we find ourselves in danger and don’t quite understand why, blaming strangers whose presence in your life roughly correlates with Bad Stuff happening is a normal human reaction.
If a campaign requires that I do things which I can’t explain why my character would do, I fear the odds are that it was designed by someone who expects the players to metagame, and it is unlikely to be to my taste.
Because intra-party bickering is annoying if it gets beyond a background level, but at the same time it’s sometimes fun to play a first meeting rather than starting in media res, In single-author linear fiction the writer can say “the bickering is just character colour and never gets too serious”; in games the tools for doing that are rather more heavy-handed.
A group of experienced players can be told this and agree that for narrative convenience there’s a “party bond” to stop differences of opinion getting too severe - indeed, they may simply assume it, because it’s an approach that works well. And if you’re copying genre fiction you’ll do it more or less automatically (the canonical example, I think, would be Legolas and Gimli, whose rivalry is turned outwards to make them more effective fighters). But I don’t think I’ve ever seen it explicitly written down in tole-playing advice.
Or to put it another way: we only have one GM, everyone wants to play their own characters, so it works a lot better if these characters are all in the same place.
Exactly my point about socialisation. Every group has a horror story about the ‘lone wolf’ player who decided that ‘my character wouldn’t hang round with you guys’ and expect the GM to run them a solo adventure. Most of us grew out of that when the GM started saying ‘Nope’.
I"ve been told explicitly going into a large scale LRP “generate a character who has a reason to be at the event” and I’ve specifically had game contract discussions with groups as we’re forming to agree base concepts about player vs player aggression - usually I won’t run or play in PvP games as I just don’t find them fun.
That’s what I meant about socialisation - most of us would forgo playing the ‘lone wolf character’ unless every one else agreed to support it. In fact, in Nordic LRP, there is a common expectation of ‘Play to Lift’ (Play to Lift, not Just to Lose | Nordic Larp) which is very much a meta game consideration. If I have been cast into the role of ‘the greatest swordsman alive’ it’s my job to do my best to portray that, no matter what my actual swordsmanship skills. But it is also part of the other players responsibilities to behave as /if/ I am the greatest swordsman alive.
That doesn’t mean they have to fawn over me - the classic example is Cyrano de Bergerac, where his opponents are so scared of him they send 100 fighters against him.
TL;DR - it is a social game, and therefore there are socialisation rules (which can vary). And if you’ve been playing for a long time, those socialisation rules may be mostly invisible to you.
The starting setup for the Dee Sanction directly opposes everything you’re asking for here. That may make it the wrong game for you, but it doesn’t inherently make it wrong.
I don’t think it is starting in media res for a narrative arc to begin with existing connections between the main protagonists. In any case, if a scene can only have one acceptable outcome, it’s not really a suitable scene to play out. It’s backstory. The players can agree on dialogue and perform it for the others, if they wish, or just write it down as a prologue, but playing it out using the mechanisms for success and failure, not to mention potential Disadvantage Self-Control rolls, would be to accept the possibility that more than one result are possible.
I believe that if all the PCs are supposed to be ‘good guys’ as a condition of the agreed-upon campaign framework, the players should design characters whose personality, goals, backstory and, if using that kind of RPG, Disadvantages, reflect that. Similarly, if the PCs are supposed to belong to ‘a party’, team or other group within which there are mutual bonds of trust and loyalty, the players should create characters which reflect that. Which includes establishing why the characters trust each other and are willing to risk their lives for each other.
The thing is, Legolas and Gimli worked through rivalry to become frenemies and later best friends (romantic relationship may or may not be assumed, depending on the reader). It was, however, not a pre-ordained outcome, which entirely justified playing it out. Out of the rest of the Fellowship, one turned on others within it, and two of them distrusted the others so much that they left them behind deliberately. The only solid relationships of mutual trust were between the characters whose prior relationships were established in the backstory. So, if you play out a first meeting, as opposed to allowing it to be narrated as part of character backstory, it would imply either a Gimli-Legolas relationship or a Boromir-Aragorn one would be okay, or even Boromor-Frodo.
I certainly understand wanting the PCs to bicker and banter, but when it comes down to it, trust each other to have their backs. I just can’t accept “They are fellow PCs” as the rationale for why a character would hang around suspicious strangers or decide to trust them with their lives. It’s such a blatant violation of what I most want to experience when I roleplay, i.e. playing the role of a character within an emergent narrative where the decisions of players and the results of a task resolution system determine what happens. I want to pretend to be someone else and make decisions, in-character, as that person.
I’m quite willing to create only characters who will fit into a given campaign framework, so having my character already trust the other PCs is no hardship. But I won’t make decisions while roleplaying my character which are impossible to rationalize as a decision made by the character, for in-character reasons. Every time a campaign has required such a decision for there to be a campaign, it has made the rest of that campaign unpleasant for me (in both cases, the this was until the end of that session), I found it impossible to accept the premise of the narrative, founded as it was on an inexplicable decision. This is similar to a huge plot hole ruining any chance that I’ll accept the premise of a book, movie or TV show, but even more damaging, as other media can be enjoyed for reasons which have nothing to do with consistent characterization or coherent story, but roleplaying doesn’t really have those things. As soon as I no longer feel like I am playing a character with their own reasons for doing what they do, but simply trying to stay on the ‘right’ narrative track, I don’t really get much enjoyment out of the process.
Oh sure, I’m drawing a contrast to express extreme positions, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing in between.
But as you suggest “you all meet in a tavern and agree to seek adventure together” is a narrative convenience; playing it in present tense is just a way of making it feel more real. (An idea that comes to mind: you wake up with a horrible hangover and your signed copy of the articles of association of the Dungeon Plunderers… guess you signed on last night.)
This can be good or bad depending on the specific situation, I think. I don’t want to break a campaign even in favour of playing my character correctly. (I might have a chat with the GM and say “[PC] really doesn’t like these people, can we sort out a character swap at some point.”)
Best example I can give is from D&D 5e, which I agreed to try with some younger guys who’d been in my Boy Scout group, and I’d introduced to roleplaying some four decades past. They were already playing a campaign and asked me to make a thief character, whose class might or might not have been called Rogue in this edition.
The connections, if any, between PCs, were not mentioned. When I asked why my character was with these people, the DM declared they had recruited my character because they needed a thief. I’d made a dwarven thief, to avoid cliches, and made him wary and cunning.
After dinnr with some important people which the other PCs knew from the last adventure, our adventure clearly started when a strange wizard hired us to break into ‘his’ house. He said he had layered magical defenses and that he was so confident no one could break in that if we could, he would allow us to keep one magical item each, from his collection. If we tried and failed, we’d still get X amount of gold, as long as we entered the house. To prove we’d defeated all the defenses, we were supposed to bring him a scroll which had pride of place in his collection.
I immediately objected when the rest of the players just seemed to accept that now they had a quest and the next thing to do was complete it. This guy clearly doesn’t live there and is trying to hire us to burgle a house which we know has dangerous defences, in return for keeping part of what we steal? That’s literally a worse deal than if we were to scout out houses where valuable things were kept and burgled the ones with poor security.
I pointed out that this was a city and they knew the watch commander. We could ask him who keeps records on owners of freeholds and census rolls for tax purposes, check who actually owns and lives in this house. We might even figure out if the strange wizard gave us an alias or his real name, try to figure out why he wanted the scroll. Seems like the legal owner might have cause to be grateful to us if we told them about the person pretending to own their house and hiring people to break in to steal this scroll.
The other players demurred, “No, this is clearly the story. Even if he’s lying, we’re supposed to fall for it, so we can go into the ‘dungeon’.” I felt like I’d wandered into some bizarre cult, whose rituals made no sense to me, indeed, were not comprehensible to mortal minds, as the Things they served had no form or function, in our world, they existed in a dimension we could not see or even imagine, merely through blind faith could we hope to one day, through glorious madness, perceive just one iota of their primordial natures.
As you said, I didn’t want all the other players’ night to be ruined, so my character went along. But from that moment, nothing the character did made sense to me and, indeed, it felt more like boardgame token than a character. It didn’t really matter what I did or said, the story was decided beforehand and our job was to collect experience and gold at designated points.
At one point, some arbitrary magic made my token turn against the other characters and the DM told me to try my best to fight them. I used stealth, a Wand of Sleep and a crossbow to alternatively put them to sleep and shoot at them from hiding in a dark hall full of columns, moving from place to place after each shot. I put all of them into Sleep or whatever happens to D&D 5e characters when they have no more HP, except one character. At which point the DM allowed the remaining PC to wake all the sleeping ones as a free action and then cast a spell which ended the magic which turned me against them. Which robbed me of eve the mild satisfaction of winning an unnecessarily complex board game.
Needless to say, I have not played with them again, or tried D&D again, for that matter. They seem to enjoy this and that’s fine. I can’t muster much enthusiasm for a game where decisions are not made in character, but based on which NPCs are Questgivers and what the next Dungeon is, regardless of motives or any considerations about personalities, relationships, goals, etc.
