One of the most valuable tools for a Night’s Black Agents GM to have behind their screen is the Agent Tracking Sheet. As with similar sheets from other GUMSHOE games, this tracking sheet allows you to record the ratings for all of the PCs’ investigation abilities.
USING THE SHEET
In most RPGs, I generally prefer — as the GM — to let the players manage their own character sheets: Its their responsibility to master their character; it’s mine to master everything else. (If we’re running into problems with that, for whatever reason, then we can audit, consult, and collaborate. But, generally speaking, the long-term goal remains getting the player to a point where they’re in charge of their character.)
So why, in the case of GUMSHOE, is it so valuable for the GM to duplicate this bookkeeping?
It basically boils down to a very specific implementation of the techniques described in Random GM Tip: The Numbers That We Say. In GUMSHOE, if the players look for a clue and have the appropriate investigation ability, they automatically find the clue. By having a list of which PCs have which investigative abilities, we can turn this conversation:
Player: I want to spend the evening studying the strange journal.
GM: Do you have Cryptography?
Player: Yes.
GM: Great. While studying the journal, you notice some strange symbols in the marginalia. You’re able to figure out that they’re some kind of substitution code.
Into this one:
Player: I want to spend the evening studying the strange journal.
GM: While studying the journal, you notice some strange symbols in the marginalia and, with your code-breaking skills, you recognize them as some kind of substitution code.
And this might seem like a very small difference in theory, but in actual practice the difference in flow at the table is significant, particularly when repeated over and over and over again across the entire session. (This is, after all, the central mechanic of GUMSHOE.)
You can, of course, take this a step further and use the sheet to keep track of the players’ spends during the session (so that you know where their pool points are getting thin), but for me, personally, this is the point where I prefer to let the players take care of their own bookkeeping so that I can stay focused on other stuff.
INTERPERSONAL ABILITY
Where I find having the PCs’ investigative abilities at my fingertips MOST valuable is in interpersonal scenes: While roleplaying their conversation with an NPC, it’s just so much smoother and more immersive to simply glance at the sheet and check to see if they have an ability to back up their play (or offer a spend to push things further) than it is to interrupt the dialogue to ask, “Do you have Bullshit Detector? Do you have Flirting?”
This becomes even more true when you have players who get in tune with the system and will naturally flow the scene through their investigative abilities. With everyone on the same page, the result can be a beautiful, silent dance running under and strongly supporting the roleplaying.
And this is where I find that the official agent tracking sheet comes up a little short: It organizes ALL of the investigation abilities — Academic, Interpersonal, and Technical — into a single big list organized alphabetically. I understand the unifying impulse, but in my experience there’s a really good reason why these abilities are split into three categories. I don’t want one giant list; I want three targeted lists where I can much more quickly and accurately find the relevant abilities for the current scene (particularly in interpersonal scenes).
So I reorganized sheet into categories. While doing this, I also took the opportunity to make it form-fillable. If you prefer the original version (with all abilities in alphabetical order), I went ahead and made that form-fillable, too.
I’m not sure who did the original graphic design for the sheet, but I’m guessing Chris Huth (who did the interior layout of the book). All credit to them, obviously. All I’ve done is reorder the information.
REVISED AGENT TRACKING SHEET
(form-fillable)
ORIGINAL AGENT TRACKING SHEET
(form-fillable)
