G. asks:
A villain in my campaign has run away to fight again another day. The players want to pursue them, but the villain is in hiding. How many clues should I prep for a revelation that I don’t want the PCs to access?
One thing to consider is what you mean by “access.” There are lots of non-actionable revelations you can have about, say, the Lost City of Arthak-Val without ever learning where it is or how to find it; i.e., without being able to access the Lost City. The same can be true about your villain’s hiding spot.
But if by “access” you mean “learn the revelation,” then the answer to how many clues you should prep is zero. The Three Clue Rule isn’t about how many clues the players need to draw a conclusion; it’s about having redundancy for missed or misunderstood clues. A single clue can (and usually should) be enough for the players to figure something out.
Of course, that seems to be the case here: You have a revelation that the players want (“the bad guy has gone to location X”) that you don’t want to give them.
My personal druthers here are going to default to playing to find out: If the players can figure out some plausible way to learn that information, let’s roll with it and see what happens.
What I don’t need to do, though, is go out of my way to provide them with those leads. The Three Clue Rule, it should be remembered, only applies to essential revelations. If the finding the bad guy is not, in my opinion, an essential revelation, then I’m under no obligation to provide three clues or any clues for it. I’m just saying that I won’t automatically block the players if they come up with some clever idea.
When your first impulse is “you can’t find that information,” however, here are a few things to consider.
First, looking for the thing they want doesn’t find what they want (i.e., the bad guy), but it does find something interesting. In other words, reward the players’ efforts, albeit not in the way they were expecting.
Second, consider rephasing your initial impulse from “there’s no way to find the bad guy” to “finding the bad guy will not be trivial.” In this case, “not trivial” means that there isn’t a direct vector from the PCs to the bad guy. Instead, the PCs will have to work their way through several revelations to get to the revelation they want.
For example: You don’t find the bad guy, but you do learn that the only person who might know where the bad guy is hiding is Sebastian Raoul, his lieutenant. Where’s Sebastian? Well, turns out he’s gone to ground, too. Looking for a lead on Sebastian turns up his accountant. It takes a raid on an armored compound to get your hands on him. He doesn’t know where Sebastian is, either, but he knows that Sebastian’s bank accounts are held in a Swiss bank. So if you break into the bank, you might be able to trace where the account is being accessed from. That, finally, leads you to Sebastian, who can give you a lead on the bad guy. (Although possibly still not directly to the bad guy.)
During this whole sequence, of course, the players are engaged and excited. They don’t feel thwarted. They’re constantly making progress towards their goal!
Meanwhile, the rest of the scenario — whatever it might be — is still going on. Each of these steps along the path to finding the bad guy can also be seeded with additional clues and rewards that can assist or direct the PCs towards the other stuff happening in the scenario.
On a similar note, you can also respond to this impulse by immediately dogpiling the PCs with distractions. Toss lots of scenario hooks at them. Pull out a bunch of proactive nodes. Sure, they want to go looking for the bad guy, but there are vampires attacking the orphanage right now, so that’s going to have to wait. (Note: You’re not making that decision for them; you’re just putting them in a situation where they need to choose between a long-term goal of finding the bad guy and responding to immediate crises.)
DESIGNING VECTOR PATHS
The example of extending the path to a revelation may seem really complicated, but this is why I find thinking in terms of vectors so useful.
To unpack this a bit, it can be natural to think in terms of where the PCs are now and ask yourself, “What do they need to do from where they are to get where they want to go?”
If there’s a clear answer to that, great. But if there isn’t, you can give yourself a real headache trying to figure it out. Which makes sense: You’re basically trying to solve an imaginary mystery for which you haven’t created the clues yet.
This can also lend itself to overly simplistic resolutions: “I’m at Point A, how do I get to Point B?” tends to result in a straight line from A to B, which is exactly what we’re not looking for right now.
Instead, start from where they want to go (or what they want to know) and ask yourself, “How do they get there?” and/or “Why is it difficult to get there?” Then take the answer to that question and ask it again.
So:
- How do they find the Bad Guy? Sebastian, his lieutenant, knows.
- How do they find Sebastian? By tracking his banking activity.
- How do they find his banking activity? By accessing his Swiss bank account.
- Why is it difficult to access the Swiss bank? It has to be identified.
- How do they identify the Swiss bank? By getting their hands on Sebastian’s accountant.
- Why is it difficult to get their hands on the accountant? Because he’s holed up in an armed compound.
Then you just flip this around to determine the path.
The one trick, though, is that the PCs need to understand that this IS the path. Otherwise, they’re just blindly fumbling around. (If you tell them “there’s an accountant named Bartolo Russo holed up in an armed compound,” they’ll have no idea why they should care about that.)
To close the loop, PCs can figure out the path through non-actionable revelations: “To find the bad guy, you have to find Sebastian.” That’s a non-actionable because they don’t know where Sebastian is. You could have them do another investigation to figure out where Sebastian is, or you could pack that into the “find Sebastian” revelation (i.e., the revelation is “you’ll have to find Sebastian, and Sebastian’s only known associate is an accountant”).
One last subtlety I used here is to obfuscate an intermediary step when the PCs were figuring out the path they needed to pursue: They know they need the accountant, but they don’t realize that the accountant can’t send them directly to Sebastian (and they’ll need to go through the Swiss bank). This is a good technique because it stops the resolution of the path from being rote (you discovered all the steps, now you do all the steps); and it can also tighten up the “finding the path” phase of things to reduce the perception of “endless brick walls” without any sense of forward progress.
The particular example given here is also quite linear. This can be fine, but you can add some extra dynamics by providing multiple vector options at a particular step. For example, instead of the accountant being Sebastian’s only known associate, you might have three different known associates the PCs could potentially learn about and use to track him down. (Keep in mind that you don’t need to fully prep a path until the PCs actually take it. For example, you don’t need to prep the accountant’s compound until the players tell you that’s where they’re heading in the next session.)
Sometimes players can simply be satisfied with scenes that aren’t technically clues, in that they don’t help you find the villain, but that simply confirm that the DM hasn’t forgotten the villain and that clues will be coming. Friendly Guard Captain says “Sorry, we still have no coin to pay you. Snakeface ambushed the payroll caravan again last week. No survivors, again, and by the time we got there a thunderstorm wiped out the tracks. He won’t get away with it again — next week we’re tripling the guard. In the meantime, Lady Carol wants to see you.”
Of course, it’s still up to the players whether they’re satisfied to wait for the next ambush and go talk to Carol, or whether they need to go scour *somehow* for clues that FGC missed. Like Justin says, at this point you’re not obliged to give them any more obvious leads, but if they have a good idea then you should roll with it. (Your players are engaging with your game world! You win.)
The subtle trap I just wandered past is of course what counts as a “good” idea. The whole rest of textbook of No-Railroading technique may come into play there. But hey, it’s doable.
This is excellent. It occurs to me that if you really wanted to obfuscate the path using the last example with three associates, you could design it so that a clue from each associate is required to find Sebastian.
Though I’m not sure how to execute this. How would you go about designing a revelation that requires multiple clues to be put together? Do you break it down into smaller revelations?
@Bruce: I talk about this a bit in the RPG Mysteries video.
The key thing is that if you need to combine multiple pieces of information to reach a conclusion, then those pieces of information are not clues: Each piece of information is an individual conclusion.
That means for each piece of essential information, you need three clues indicating that piece of essential information.
You can see a practical example of this in the Eternal Lies Remix.
In these types of situations I like to consider the antagonist’s point of view.
Here the antagonist needs to hide from the PCs but they also need to keep their crime syndicate operating. That means they need the lieutenant but they can’t fully trust that guy so they also need a way of monitoring them. So they reach out to their corrupt cop contact to keep them informed about what the LT is actually doing – that’s another vector in. They also need to keep money flowing: if they use cash then the mule is another vector, if they do it electronically, there’s an (obfuscated) audit trail – another vector. Someone’s bringing them food/drink/clothes/sex etc. – more vectors. They also want to deal with the PCs at some point – perhaps reaching out to other underworld contacts -yet more vectors.
If the PCs really want to find them, then they have a plethora of options which, as a GM who wants to delay the confrontation , allows you to make dead ends, circular paths that take the PCs back to the beginning and so on where the PCs make progress but don’t necessarily get anywhere.