IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 3B: QUESTIONING CRAN

March 31st, 2007
The 17th Day of Amseyl in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

Arriving back at St. Gustav’s Chapel they found Brother Fabitor tending to the altar. When he saw them enter – soaked in blood, coated in ash – he was immediately concerned. The story quickly spilled out (Fabitor: “Wait, you burned down a house?” Tee: “We didn’t burn down a house! They summoned a fire elemental!”). As soon as Fabitor became aware that Ranthir was unconscious, he quickly healed him.

“Oh dear,” Ranthir shook his head. “I shan’t be doing that again. It just seems to work out so well when Master Agnarr does it…” He quickly came to the conclusion that, if he was going to be finding himself regularly in such predicaments, he should start carrying a weapon. He laid claim to one of the daggers the group had found on the criminals they had apprehended, eventually choosing the dagger which had struck Dominic in the shoulder. “That is if Master Dominic is all right with me wielding that blade?” Ranthir said. Dominic said it was fine, “It’s better than selling it on the street where it might end up back in the hands of criminals… and then end up back in my shoulder again.” Ranthir shook his head, “Given my skill with weapons, I’m afraid I can make no guarantees that it won’t end up there in any case.”

After securely binding both of their surviving prisoners (the half-orc and the man with the red top-knot), the party decided to wake up and question the half-orc first. Brother Fabitor healed him to consciousness, and then Tee and Agnarr stepped forward to question the prisoner.

It didn’t take them long to figure out that, contrary to Agnarr’s continued belief, the half-orc actually was Toridan Cran. At this point, Tee turned the questioning firmly towards the assassination: Why had he ordered the death of Phon Quartermail? (more…)

Check out Samhaine’s Player Tricks: Solving RPG Mysteries. It makes a fantastic companion piece to the Three Clue Rule.

Basically, Samhaine gives you a great overview of techniques players in an RPG can use to solve the mysteries presented to them by the GM. Broadly speaking, he breaks the solving of a mystery into three categories:

Deduction is the one most players are familiar with, particularly from published scenarios, where the players assemble so many clues that there is legitimately only one conclusion that can be drawn from them. The GM doles out unmissable clues as the game progresses (faster or slower depending on how aggressive you are, how your skill checks go, and whether you make bad decisions), and eventually you have enough puzzle pieces that the missing one is completely obvious. Even at its fastest, waiting for clues until you can work up a deduction tends to be really slow.

Induction is most useful at the mid-ranges of an investigation, because you take incomplete evidence and try to extrapolate something that explains it (but which might not be the only thing that explains it). Often, it’s the trick you use for figuring out if there are any other things you need to check before deciding you’ve got it all figured out. It’s your main way to generate falsifiable theories: we know a bunch of things, and it seems likely that X would explain them, but something else could explain them. Let’s figure out how we can prove and disprove X; if we disprove it, we need to think about these other clues in a different way.

Abduction in this context really means brainstorming to come up with logical explanations for clues based on known rules, which give you immediate things to check (such as whether those known rules don’t apply in this case). This is the thing you do when you don’t know much at all yet to try to figure out more things. Abduction is where RPG mysteries really diverge from scripted ones: you can jump the clue sequence pretty much whenever you want by working backwards along what seems like the simplest explanation. “The murderer got into the house somehow. One of the ways he could have gotten into the house was the nearby window. Thus, we can check to see if that’s how he got in!” Hopefully your GM has prepared enough for a lot of this tactic, because it basically means trying to skip straight to the solution using common sense and hoping proving or disproving your theories will at least narrow down the idea space you should be looking at.

And then he drills down into those categories to explore specific tips, consequences, and general fallout. It’s incredibly clever, broadly useful, and very much worth your time.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 3A: On the Murderer’s Trail

In which a fire is unleashed which will haunt the wanderers for many moons to come and a man of ill-repute is brought to a much deserved justice…

For the house fire found in this installment of In the Shadow of the Spire I used a set of custom rules I had designed for handling encounters inside burning buildings. These rules were actually posted here on the Alexandrian way back in 2007 and you can find them under the title Advanced Rules: Fire.

Intriguingly, a few months later, I got a bunch of flak for these rules on a forum: They proved I was a hopeless grognard who had never actually played an RPG because it would be completely ridiculous to use these rules to model huge conflagrations like, say, the Great Fire of London. (Which is true in much the same way that it would be ridiculous to use D&D’s combat rules to model the Battle of Waterloo: It’s true, but completely irrelevant.)

As you can see, of course, these rules were designed to handle fires in small buildings. If I was going to expand the system to handle large conflagrations — like, say, a skyscraper — I’d probably look at adding a more abstract system for handling the spread and severity of the fire in areas where the PCs weren’t immediately interacting with it. For even larger conflagrations, it’s likely that I would handle them in a more narrative fashion (as I did in Mini-Adventure 2: The Black Mist), using the larger crisis to frame scenes with more immediate challenges that the PCs could actually cope with. (Unless, for some reason, the PCs were in the position of trying to put out or contain the fire, in which case I’d still try to find a mechanical structure for them to do that within.)

If you’ve read my discussion of Game Structures, you can probably see where I’m going with this: By creating a custom game structure, you’re giving the players a toolkit for interacting with the situation. When properly designed, these custom structures are incredibly empowering because they can isolate the GM’s preconceptions about the situation and give the players the freedom to craft outcomes which are utterly unique.

(As another example of this, consider the heat track used in my Eternal Lies campaign: Robust mechanical distinctions between traveling, camping, and resting at oases were then tied to the recovery mechanics for characters suffering from heat exposure. This created meaningful decisions about rate and method of travel. Once you’ve added the risk of pursuit or the consequences of time passing outside the desert (both of which are true in the scenario), this results in the players making meaty decisions with potentially long-term consequences.)

When designing a custom game structure to handle a situation in your game, the first thing I recommend is making sure that it’s a flexible tool instead of just reinforcing your preconceptions about how the scene should be resolved. (For example, if the only mechanical interaction in your structure for handling house fires is “putting the fire out”, then the players have little choice but to put the fire out.)

Second, the structure needs to either be simple enough that it can be rapidly explained or it needs to be player-unknown (in the sense that the players don’t need to fully understand the structure; they can simply make decisions in character and the GM can use the structure to invisibly make rulings). You generally don’t want to create situations where the game grinds to a halt so that you can explain a custom mechanical structure to the players.

An exception can be made for structures that are going to impact a broad swath of gameplay. (Like the Eternal Lies heat track mechanics, which influenced two full sessions of play.) A related technique is to introduce the custom game structure through minor encounters so that the players can then take full, experienced advantage of it during the big, important scene. (You get more bang for your buck this way, and the players get the satisfaction of gaining and then exploiting mastery of the system.)

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 3A: ON THE MURDERER’S TRAIL

March 31st, 2007
The 16th Day of Amseyl in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

As the party left the red warehouse on Able Row, the rain had started again – a downpour that washed the city clean and left the air fresh and pure. They returned to St. Gustav’s Chapel, where they had Brother Fabitor wake Phon.

When asked about Toridan Cran, Phon shook her head. “It seems ridiculous, but I don’t know any of these names you keep talking about – Vagger, Laucio, Toridan Cran… I don’t know any of them! I’m just a seamstress! This doesn’t make any sense at all!” (more…)

A couple years ago I posted Doctor Who: The Temporal Masters, a fanciful outline of the hypothetical season of Doctor Who I would create if I wanted to craft a villain suitable for replacing the Daleks as a rival for the Time Lords.

Martin Tegelj has taken that material and is doing something incredibly cool with it: He’s designing scenarios for the Doctor Who Roleplaying Game with the aim of turning The Temporal Masters into a full campaign. He’s currently written up the first two installments and posted them online in beautiful, fully-produced PDFs:

Part 1: A Conversion Before Christmas

Part 2: Something Old, Something New

I’m super excited to see how Martin is going to develop the raw material here, and I can already see that he’s adding some really great new ideas. Check ’em out!