A fellow named Caleb asked me in an e-mail recently why I’m not a fan of the way GUMSHOE handles clues. In writing a reply to him, I think I’ve found a better way of expressing my personal distaste for GUMSHOE’s approach than I have in the past.

Start by considering a scenario with locations A, B, and C.

First, let’s assume that each of these locations contains a clue which points to the next location. GUMSHOE says, “Oh no! What if they don’t find a clue? Then the adventure can’t continue!” And in order to solve this problem, GUMSHOE says, “It’s OK. We’ll just remove the resolution mechanic and we’ll simply assume that the PCs succeed.”

Investigative scenarios have been done wrong since the early days of roleplaying games. As a consequence, they’re hard to run and prone to grind to a halt. (…) You have to search for the clue that takes you to the next scene. If you roll well, you get the clue. If not, you don’t — and the story grinds to a halt. (…) GUMSHOE, therefore, makes the finding of clues all but automatic, as long as you get to the right place in the story and have the right ability. (Esoterrorists, pg. 26-27)

In other words, we’ll remove the chokepoint of failure by simply removing the possibility of failure.

So what’s the problem?

Well, now let’s assume that each of these locations contains a monster which you have to fight before you move to the next location.

Presented with this problem, we would expect GUMSHOE to say something like, “Oh no! What if they don’t defeat the monster? Then the adventure can’t continue!”

And in order to solve this problem, GUMSHOE would then say, “Well, that’s OK. We’ll just remove the combat system and we’ll simply assume that the PCs always defeat their foes.”

To be fair, GUMSHOE is right: If you make it so that the PCs automatically win, then they will never lose. It’s tautological and everything. And is there anything wrong with that?

Not necessarily: If the game wasn’t actually about fighting people, there might be little harm in skipping past the fights. But if the game was about combat, then you might have a problem.

And, in my opinion, the actual act of investigation is, in fact, a relatively major component of what a mystery story is about. GUMSHOE says it isn’t because you never see a fictional detective miss a clue. (But if they did miss a clue completely and entirely, how would the reader or viewer ever know? And, in point of fact, there are many mystery stories in which the detective does miss a clue and later goes back to find it or realizes that they missed it only after the crime has already been solved.)

In addition to this, as I’ve discussed in the past, GUMSHOE’s “solution” doesn’t actually solve the problem it claims to be solving: Failing to find a clue is only ONE of the ways in which the clue can fail. Since the problem hasn’t actually been solved, you still need to implement the ACTUAL solution to the problem (which is to not design your adventure around chokepoints in the first place). And once you’ve implemented the actual solution, you’ll discover that characters failing to find any particular clue is no longer any sort of problem… which means that the GUMSHOE “solution” isn’t required at all.

Here’s a common misunderstanding I often see voiced on messageboards: Choosing which direction you’re going to go in a dungeon isn’t a meaningful choice because the players have no way of distinguishing between the choices.

While this can be true, the reality is that it generally shouldn’t be true. And if you’re consistently finding it to be true, there’s probably something wrong with the way you’re either designing your dungeon or running your dungeon.

TWO TYPES OF CHOICE

Before we begin, I think it’s useful to remember that there are two types of meaningful geographic choice that can happen in a dungeon.

First, there’s the type most people talk about: Selecting which encounter you’re going to face next. (In other words, if you go left you’ll encounter the goblins and if you go right you’ll encounter the vampires.)

In many cases, this sort of choice is, in fact, a random number generator: If you have nothing to distinguish between the choice of going right or the choice of going left, you might as well flip a coin. With that being said, however, there are several ways you can deal with that it’s probably a good idea to explore them in your dungeons:

• Foreshadowing. The path to the left has tracks showing that it’s heavily traversed by small humanoids. The path to the right has been surrounded with crude goblin holy symbols and anyone familiar with goblin runes can read the word “NOSFERATU” spelled out in crude syllables.
• Interrogation. Either friendly or otherwise. For example, you revive the goblin scout you knocked out in this room and you force him to tell you that his tribe lives down the left path and that there are vampires living down the path to the right. But his people also pay tribute to the vampires, leaving them totally impoverished but suggesting that the vampires probably have a huge hoard of treasure. (He might be lying about that last bit.)
• Rumor Tables. Or similar rumor-gathering mechanics. The PCs end up with potentially valuable navigation information about the dungeon before they ever go into it.
• Arnesonian Megadungeon. In the Arnesonian megadungeon, lower levels are always more difficult. Which means that PCs always have a meaningful choice when confronted with the option of going down or continuing to explore their current level.

And so forth. The choice only needs to be blind if the GM and/or the players choose to leave it blind.

SECOND VERSE, COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FROM THE FIRST

With all that being said, it can be difficult to consistently avoid the “random number generator” with that first type of choice. And, in my opinion, that’s OK because that’s not the most interesting type of meaningful geographic choice in a dungeon environment. THAT choice happens when you revisit known terrain.

See, the first pass through a given chunk of dungeon is like the legwork in Shadowrun: You’re gathering information. You may not know how this information is going to be useful yet, but the more you can learn the better off you’ll be when it comes time to run the “heist”.

The heist, in this case, can take a lot of different forms.

For example, it’ll probably start small: “I think if we go this way, we’ll hook back up to these rooms we explored earlier. Or we can go down these stairs and go into completely virgin territory. Whaddya think?”

But it can escalate fast:

“Oh shit! We’ve pissed off the dark elves! Do we make a straight race for the surface? Do we try to lead them into an ambush amidst the grotto of dinosaur bones? Or do we try to hide out in that secret crypt we found?”

“Doubling back you discover a warband of ogres and orcs have moved into the cavern. It sounds like they’re heading for the surface. Do you try to sneak around through those side passages and warn your friends? Or just stay here where you’ll be safe?”

“Okay, we’ve made an alliance with the goblins. They’re saying they can help us secure the eastern stairs so that we’ll have a secure line of retreat when we fight those feral vampires down on level 3, but we’d need to pay them some sort of tribute.”

One of the key aspects to this second type of choice is to break away from the idea of “room = encounter”. In fact, it’s most useful to break away from the “encounter” mindset almost entirely. The dungeon has to be a strategic landscape and not just a collection of disconnected tactical challenges.

What can really emphasize this sort of thing is any dungeon complex large enough that the PCs will be visiting it multiple times. (Assuming, of course, that the situation in the dungeon changes and grows organically between visits.)

“Well, it looks like they’ve built barricades in the main hall. Do we send a magical missive to our goblin allies and try to coordinate a simultaneous assault on their flank? Or do we try to slip through the fungal arboretum and just circle around them?”

It’s in this second level of meaningful choice that xandering the dungeon becomes particularly useful. Without the tapestry of interconnections it provides it becomes much more difficult (or impossible) for these kinds of choices to evolve: In a linear dungeon, the bad guys have fortified the main hall and… well, that’s it. You can’t sneak around. And they must have trashed your goblin allies when they came through them. It reduces a rich strategic choice into a boring tactical one.

The challenge: Take three movies that aren’t actually related to each other and pretend that they’re a trilogy.

The outcome:

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off –> Fight Club –> Incredible Hulk

In the first movie, we see Cameron’s adolescent fantasies played out through his imaginary friend Ferris. In the second movie, Cameron is older and jaded and his new imaginary friend is a terrorist. In the third movie, Cameron is exposed to gamma radiation and periodically transforms into the “Other Guy” (who is, in fact, just the latest manifestation of his imaginary friend).

Shakespearean scholarship tends to accrue a lot of weird bullshit: When you’ve got thousands of PhD candidates desperately looking around for original and unique thesis material there’s a mass tendency to just throw stuff at the wall and hope that something sticks. Unfortunately, some of the stuff that sticks is basically a scholastic urban legend: Dramatic, catchy ideas that are nevertheless without any basis in reality whatsoever.

For example, the recent theatrical release of Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing has prompted quite a few mainstream articles talking about the double meaning of the title. “Nothing” and “noting” were homophones in Elizabethan England, which means that the title is effectively a pun — the play is both about “nothing” (i.e., about things which are not true) and “noting” (i.e., spying and eavesdropping). But the claim is also frequently made that “nothing” is a double entendre which meant “vagina” in Shakespeare’s day (i.e., “no thing” or that there is literally nothing between a woman’s legs). Thus the title of the play can be understood to also mean Much Ado About Pussy.

The problem is that, as far as I can tell, it’s not true.

The modern tradition of asserting that “nothing” means “vagina” in Shakespeare appears to date back to Stephen Booth’s 1977 edition of the Sonnets. But Booth doesn’t appear to give any evidence that “nothing” was actually used that way in Elizabethan slang. His claim is based almost entirely around “wouldn’t it be nifty if this sonnet said ‘pussy’ instead of ‘nothing’?” (He also maintains that “all” means “penis” because it sounds like “awl” which looks like a penis. And that “hell” also means vagina because… well, just because.)

This little “factoid” has become popular because it’s so delightfully dirty and you can use it over and over and over again. (Shakespeare uses the word “nothing” more than 500 times in his works.) But it doesn’t seem to have any basis in fact. (If someone can actually cite a primary Elizabethan reference to “nothing” being commonly used as slang for “vagina”, I’ll happily stand corrected.)

It reminds me of the claim that “nunnery” means “whorehouse” in Shakespeare, so that when Hamlet tells Ophelia to go to the nunnery he’s really telling her to become a whore. No. He isn’t. The only Elizabethan references to “nunnery” meaning “whorehouse” are in a comedy where a whorehouse being referred to as a nunnery is a joke specifically because a nunnery isn’t a whorehouse.

Claiming that this means “nunnery” was common slang for “whorehouse” is like watching Monty Python and claiming that “go”, “selling”, “sport”, “cricket”, “games”, and “photography” are all common slang words for sex.

(Although, to be fair, I think we all know that Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs is totally pornography.)

If you’re trying to figure out what the credit line should read as next to “Creator of Roleplaying Games” you’ve got two options:

(1) Dave Arneson, for creating the fundamental gameplay in his Blackmoor campaign

(2) Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, for co-authoring D&D

You’ll notice that neither one of these is “Gary Gygax all by himself”. That’s because there is no functional argument or logic by which Gary Gygax gets that title to himself.