Running a Mystery Adventure

I've already mentioned having run my mystery adventure, The Web of Wavemeet, and the fact that much of my inspiration in how I laid out the adventure came from the Alexandrian's Node Based Scenario Design. In this way, I was able to lay out the adventure such that each location, or node, had different clues pointing at other locations, or nodes, so that the players always had something to do. Here are some other pieces of advice on running a mystery adventure.


1. Complicated, but Not Too Complicated.
In one of my previous posts, I talked about running Heist Adventures, and I mentioned that players tend to make things more complex than we, as game masters, expect them to. This is true with heists, it's true with mysteries. (It's often even true with straightforward hack and slash dungeons, but that's not what we're talking about right now).


With a mystery, there is a delicate balance. If the characters are solving a crime (which is not the only type of mystery), you want there to be multiple suspects and you don't want it to be immediately obvious who did it. At the same time, you don't want the players to go off the rails looking into the deep details of the lives of people who you planned on being just background NPCs.


2. Clues, Clues, Clues-Give them Clues
Having lots of clues is really useful. Not necessarily clues that point to the direct end, but clues that can lead to places deeper into the mystery. Any place that the players go to should have multiple clues (at least three, based on the Alexandrian's three clue rule which is described in the post linked above). These clues can all lead to the same conclusion, or they can lead to different places to find more clues.


But the important thing is that there are clues, that the clues are obviously clues, and that the players find them. If finding a clue is reliant on players making a perception check or asking the right questions or noticing something minute in your description...there's a decent chance your players will miss it. If that clue is the only way of solving the mystery, then the players will get stuck and you'll either have to change the adventure or have them fail it. You can have clues that are miss-able, but there should be more clues that are easily found and the miss-able ones shouldn't be essential.


3. Different Ways to the Same Conclusion
With a large number of clues, it is good to have different sets of clues or paths that can get to the ending. This way, players feel more clever when the path they chose reaches the right conclusion (even if the other path or paths would have brought them to the same place.)


4. Motivations
A lot of the stereotypical RPG characters would walk away from a situation when they found that there was a mystery about. Unless the team is built around solving mysteries, it's important to make sure they have a motivation to seek out answers.


In The Web of Wavemeet, the players are smugglers whose contact fails to meet them. Many smugglers might then turn around, so when I designed the characters, I made sure that each of them had a reason for wanting to seek more answers. Maybe a character wanted to complete the deal for a sense of honor. Maybe one had personal ties to the contact. Maybe the contact had made an individual deal with one of the PCs that was more important than just the deal at hand...


With pre-made characters, it's easy to design a motive into their backstory/personality layout. For a one-shot adventure, this is recommended. If you're trying to work a mystery into a longer campaign, it can be more complicated. However, in a campaign, players tend to get connected to different characters and things in the game world. Look for motivations in the ongoing connections that the PCs have formed thus far in the campaign.


Conclusion

What are your thoughts? Do you have any other suggestions for people looking to run a mystery adventure? If you have run a mystery adventure, what did you find worked/didn't work?

Web of Wavemeet Review

It's been almost a month since I ran my adventure The Web of Wavemeet, a mystery adventure in a tabletop RPG system of my design. I figured it would be good for me to share with you my thoughts on how things went.

I don't want to share too much about the adventure right now, as I may use it as an adventure that I actually publish with my system in the future. However, the basic jist is that the PCs are a group of smugglers who arrive in a town to find out that their contact is missing. As they explore the city looking for their contact, they find that there are many strange and interconnected things going on in almost every form, be it magical, political, or otherwise.

1. I Think People had a Good Time

I always have a really hard time knowing for sure how much my players were enjoying it. Sometimes I think I did awful, but I'll be talking to someone afterwards and they'll say it was one of the better sessions I've run. Other times, I'll think things went really well and find out later that my players just weren't in it.

But, in this case, even being a one-shot where a lot of the players didn't know each other to begin with, it seemed like people were really getting into it. They were making jokes with each other and using voices for their characters and generally seemed to be having a good time.

2. Players New to the Craft

Of the players we had, 3 of the 5 were completely new to tabletop RPGs. This is a blessing and a curse for something like this. Being a playtest of my own system, it's helpful to have someone new so that I can make sure the game makes sense to someone who doesn't have the assumptions that come with having played other RPG games. However, it also means that these players are less inclined to recognize if something is a bit off, not having anything to compare it to.

Afterwards, one of these players did comment that it was a bit slow. I'm not sure how much this complaint is genuine versus how much it is just unfamiliarity with the hobby. From where I was sitting, things seemed to move fairly quickly, and it seemed like the players always had at least one place to go. I only remember one point in time where players seemed to sit and have a long discussion about the plan without moving forward, and this was only about 20 minutes (which may have only been that long due to a combination of off-topic discussion and multiple players getting up to take restroom breaks at that point in time.

3. The Mystery

To plan the mystery, I utilized the 3-clue rule as explained by Justin Alexander here: http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1118/roleplaying-games/three-clue-rule

Specifically, I used a node-based design as described here: http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/7949/roleplaying-games/node-based-scenario-design-part-1-the-plotted-approach

From the starting location (A), I had three different clues (or logical pieces of information that the players would have), each of which pointed to a different location (B, C, and D). At each of those locations, there would be three other clues. Two of these clues (one each) would point at the other two locations indicated by the starting location. The other clue would point to one of three locations deeper into the mystery (E, F, or G).

Once in the second tier of locations, each of these locations would have three clues. Two of the clues would point to the other two locations at that tier. The other clue would point to the location of the final confrontation where everything would come together (H).

Because of this, the players always had a good number of clues pointing them at varying sources of information and allowing them to choose between it. It seemed to work well, and it's certainly a format that I'd like to use more in the future, potentially on a wider scale.

Of course, something that I was afraid of, was that the players could just take a straight-line path to the end. They could go A-B-E-H without exploring C, D, F, or G, effectively missing more than half the adventure. Of course, it's very unlikely players will visit every node, but taking a straight-line path runs the risk of being far too short of an adventure, as well as failing to see the depth/complexity of the mystery itself. This wasn't what ended up happening when I ran the adventure, but it was something that was discussed/could have happened. (The players didn't know how the clues were laid out, but at their first tier location, they almost followed the clue to the second tier one, which is the second tier location that points the hardest at the final location.)

Overall though, I would say that the mystery format was successful and that it went well. I will possibly make a post later with some additional thoughts about running mystery adventures, hoping I can add something to what's already been said in the articles above.

4. The System

There are definitely some things that need adjusting, but I think a lot of it just had to do with how I'd set up the player characters. Character creation is the biggest thing my system is still missing, so I put together characters trying to keep things relatively balanced with each other as well as with the adventure.

With each other:

Honestly, it's hard to say how well the characters balanced against each other without more/longer play-testing. There were definitely some over-powered abilities, but if each of the characters had one equally overpowered ability, that's still a form of balance.

With the Adventure:

The players were definitely too powerful for the adventure, rarely running into any real trouble. Based on how they had been doing to that point, I increased the difficulty of the final encounter on the fly, but they still were able to win without too much difficulty (although, this may have been different if they hadn't used one of their overpowered abilities to incapacitate the boss while they took out his minions.)

As formerly mentioned, some of their abilities were just too powerful for the adventure they were handling. I'd designed the characters to be a little better than starting characters would be, but they weren't supposed to be that astronomically good.

Also, there's something about probability that I'm still trying to work through. To begin with, it seemed like their rolls were on the whole much higher than I'd expected. However, later in the game they seemed much lower. I designed the system using die pools to avoid constantly getting super high or super low rolls, since a die pool has more of a normal curve of probability. I was discussing it with one of the players a while after, and I think that the probability may not actually have been as skewed as it seemed, just that when you're rolling that many dice, a super high or low result sticks out and seems more notable than rolling a 20 on a d20, so they stick out more and seem more common even if they aren't. (Apologies on the run-on.)

5. Moving Forward

I've recently put together the character sheets for my upcoming Toybox campaign which uses the same system. I definitely took into account the lessons learned when deciding what powers to give the players in the campaign. However, it'll still be something I'm sensitive to going into the campaign, and I've warned my players that adjustments may be necessary as things go along if any of the characters are over or under powered.

I've also tried to make a few other minor tweaks to the system itself based on the results of the one-shot, and I am looking forward to how things turn out.

I've been laying a lot of ground-work for the Toybox campaign, and I'm very excited to start it next month. I'll keep you all updated on how it goes.

Thinking About Character Sheets

In preparation for this weekend's session, the Web of Wavemeet, as well as my future Toybox campaign, both utilizing the system of my own design, I've been thinking about character sheets.

My system uses four primary Factors to determine character ability: Body, Mind, Voice, and Essence. When I was building my pregens, it was easiest for me to lay things out in a quad-type layout, with each factor getting it's own section, under which I list the resources, skills, abilities, attacks, and armor associated with each.

I've been debating if this is a reasonable way of actually laying out a character sheet, or if it would be better to have a section that gives the core factor values with their resources and maybe armor separate from a section for abilities separate from a section for skills and so on. I think this second is probably be better way of doing things, which is unfortunate just because it means reformatting everything I've done.

My next concern is, perhaps, less significant, but not insignificant altogether. How to layout the sheet. Do I want to have a portrait oriented page, or landscape?

When I first started getting into Numenera, I thought that the character sheets looked really cool. They had this cool tri-fold structure where they folded up like pamphlets, which seemed new and nifty to me. They also had a lot of really cool decorative drawings across them, which was pretty neat too.

However, when I started designing characters and trying to put the information on them, I found that these sheets weren't the most efficient. I was frustrated with not being able to really list out my abilities, or even my equipment very well. I felt like there was a lot of wasted space. To begin with, there were entire sections, mostly those on the front, that I either wasn't using at all or was using very little. But, on top of that, all the nifty drawings and artwork, while looking cool, was taking up space that could otherwise have been used for actual information.

Because of the lack of space, if I was using the Numenera character sheets, I would have to have another page on which I printed the full text of my abilities, which, in my mind, sort of defeated the point in having them written on a character sheet.

Recently, Monte Cook Games has come out with a character portfolio that you can download and print which addresses this, mostly by adding a lot more pages in which you can put additional information. I'm fine with that.

But that didn't exist at the time, so I made a bunch of my own character sheets. Since a majority of my experience before Cypher System had been 3.5/Pathfinder, I laid out my custom sheets more or less exactly like the ones for those games, and this worked for me. Eventually, I made sheets trying to imitate the trifold layout of the Numenera sheets, but making a better use of the space. This worked out pretty well too.

But now I'm just trying to decide what to do with my own.

What do you think? Are there character sheets that you've particularly liked or not liked? What do you like or not like when it comes to character sheets?

Pre-Planning: Web of Wavemeet

This weekend I'm going to run a playtest adventure of the system that I've been designing, a system I'm planning on starting a campaign in during late January (more on that to follow in the future).


I've had most of the outline of the adventure done for more than a month now. I fleshed out a lot of the details a couple weeks ago. I've got everything stated out and planned as far as I can foresee things. But I'm still fairly anxious about it.


For one, the mission is a bit different than those that I normally plan. It has a mystery-element to it which I'm hoping I've been able to pull off well. I am missing one connection I'd like to have, but hopefully that's either a) unnecessary or b) something I can come up with before this weekend. I'm very excited about running a mystery, just because I haven't had much opportunity to before. In the past, it seems like whenever I plan a mystery, a group falls apart before really getting into it.


Additionally, I'm just anxious about trying my system for the first time. I have a lot of faith in my system and feel that it's been built up and designed on things I've seen work well in varying games. Still, I think there's an aspect of 'I made this thing, and I'm worried people won't like it' about it.


The adventure is called the Web of Wavemeet and focuses on a group of smugglers who arrive to sell their goods to a contact and who get caught up in the strange goings on of a port town recently beset with nightmarish monsters.