I have a small issue: I have two player groups with which I play the same campaining. I am seeing two completely different approaches and both seem to always somehow break down the scenario. I'm wondering if I should change the way I build most of my scenarios around an initial investigation, the progress of which determines the difficulty / difficulties of the events / battles near the end of the scenario. The players are having a hard time doing any proper investigating or hunting for clues and seem to mostly just bumble their way from one fight to another.

For example: objective = discover a hidden cult on an agri world before their actions corrupt the entire world's aquifer, and thus the crops. Inquisition's interest piqued after people started disappearing at regular intervals, which was suspected as cultist activity.

I embedded hints as follows: roll for clues at local administratum archives, roll for Inquiry to receive clues through talking with locals OR law enforcers. Also, clues could be received by requesting the player's local informant to assist in investigation, OR by just being in one of several certain locations in nighttime.

Group 1: Search old archives for records on local missing persons etc, stop there. Never question any of the villagers. Spy on local law enforcers persistently, though no clues are found (wrong target). Mostly ignore designated informant. Group is still stuck (and a bit frustrated, though I am still unwilling to railroad them onward) as they seem to have a hard time actually doing any investigating.

Group 2: Speak to some locals. After no information received (due to poor skills and dice rolls) complete give-up. Group proceeds to make enemies with local law enforcers, leading to tension and potential confrontation. After parading their part in an inquisitorial investigation in the village the scenario takes place in AND almost having a shootout with the enforcers, I punish this behavior by having them attacked by frantic cultists in the middle of the night. The attack leaves the informant dead and one of the players injured. Players continue to act violently towards the (innocent) enforcers (who are just doing their jobs) and wind up causing another scene and getting arrested for a short while. During this time the cult gets a head start and all hell breaks loose. Result: two of the three players escape with their lives and the planet AND the orbiting grain fleet are annihilated by an Inquisition commandeered warship. I wound up dealing the survivors some insanity as they had to watch and witness the millions of lives being extinguished due to their foolish actions earlier.

Any tips for encouraging the investigative aspects of the game, and punishing incorrect behavior (such as blowing cover in an undercover investigation, causing unncessary deaths etc)?

Maybe you should consider playing another type of campaign with this group, and playing this campaign with another group. Roleplaying is after all supposed to be a fun thing, but it certainly sounds like you and your players are more frustrated than entertained. You because you are trying to force them to play a style that they do not enjoy, and they because the sort of scenes they want to play does not yeld rewards but punishment in this adventure.

However, if you want to encourage investigation with this seemingly reluctant group, it might work to start them off on a breadcrumb trail that is fairly obvious and let the story mostly be about how the acolytes follow the leads one by one and discover the true horrors of the plot successively. Line the road with challenges that your players appreciate. Maybe these need to be of a more physical nature, such as violently interrogating a group of enforcers that are suspected of hiding signs of witchery. Remember that different Inquisitors have quite diffrent ways to work. See Inquisitor Ryykehus for some inspiration of a more "straightforward" approach :-) The important thing to remember is that the players should always automatically get enough information to carry the plot along, and to get the important information about the big bad plot. Do not make this information dependant on skill checks, or anything more than a minimum of initiative from the players. Certainly in this first adventures you need to make it darn obvious and unavoidable that the plot is revealed to the players. The really tricky part is making them feel like the acting heroes when they are following the trail. It will definitely help to make the plot quite standardized for heroic fantasy or sci-fi. Build it in the same structures as movies and books you know your players like to read, that way their acting will feel "natural" to them. Use simple tricks like orders found on killed cultists that are signed with only an "H", later let a higher ranking order be signed with "Harrix", and as end boss let them kill this Harrix. Presto: a feeling of progress!

Once you have played one or two adventures in this style, you will likely notice that the players start to take an interest in the plotting and scheeming and start to ask themselves, and NPCs, questions like "why?", "who did this?" and "who is behind all this?". That is when you start slowly letting the control of the pace and direction slide over to the players. You can ease them into the mentality of taking charge by giving them multiple-choice-options. Example: Their informant tells them that there has been sightings of the mystical purple robes in three different locations around the city, the platforms where grain is loaded on surface-to-orbit shuttles, the abandoned temple and the wednesday parties at Lady Shambleys palace. Then let the players choose what order they want to visit these places in. It might work to advance the plot to the next step once they have only visited two of the places. You know this will have worked if they ask you "but hey, what about the abandoned temple? What would have happened there?". Then they are hooked.

Also: be prepared to cheat. Once the players take initiative (like group 1 spying on some people) let something related to the plot happen so they feel rewarded for coming up with things. Make up undercover cultists among the villagers meeting a cult brother to recieve assassination orders for example. The important part is not that the world you thought up is consistent, but rather that an interesting and captivating story is told. Once you have shown your players how fun investigative play can be (or found other players) feel free to be much more demanding in order to hand out leads.

Oh, and don't try to steer your players by punishing their characters . Rather talk to your players about how and what they want to play.

The biggest trouble I've had with designing investigations for my games has always been not giving enough clues and making the (incorrect) assumption that my players will find come to "obvious" conclusions on their own. I've learned a couple of ways to deal with this.

First, design multiple different "paths" of clues. While it may seem breathtakingly stupid for the villians to leave so many different clues laying around, realize that the PCs likely won't find all of them. They will, more likely, find one path and follow it. If you have one path of clues available, it can be missed, overlooked, misunderstood or simply lost.

Second, don't have major clues depend on die rolls. If a single bad roll, or even a set of bad rolls, can derail the investigation then your in trouble. While you shouldn't hand feed the players the clues, neither should the entire game hinge on a single roll.

Third, don't assume that the players will come to the same conclusions you do. After all, you know what's going on. Sometimes, stating "the obvious" is actually essential.

Finally, and this a hard one, don't be afraid to change things in mid-stream. As long as you don't contradict the facts as the players know them, you can always adapt things. I've literally re-written entire mysteries on the fly when I realized that the players crazy theory was better than my original plan.

LuciusT said:

QFT. If there's one thing I've learned from running RPGs it's that the players will almost never see the world the same way you do. They'll ignore the clues that you think are obvious and they'll seize on the most random, irrelevant things and clamp down like a pit bull.

For group 1, I think a little railroading is actually in order. Gamers often talk about railroading like it's a bad thing, something that should be avoided at all costs. But sometimes railroading is a good thing. If the party is wandering around aimlessly it's because they don't know what to do next. Railroading in this instance gives them something to do, so it's a good thing, at least until they get going on their own steam.

The best advice I ever heard about railroading is this: If you're not sure how much is too much, keep pushing harder. A group of players will complain if you're railroading them too much, but they will rarely say anything if you aren't doing so enough. Push hard and find the point where they start to resist, then back off a bit. That's how you'll figure out how much is too much.

For group 2, I think a different approach is in order. You've been trying to "punish" them for going after the wrong group of people, which is railroading them, but they aren't backing down. Rather than complain about the railroading, this group is apparently going to fight back until the whole game crumbles around them. In this case, a better approach might be to change the planned story to suit what they have obviously decided they want it to be. Make at least some of the local law enforcers into cultists, working from within the system to further the cult's goals. Let the party find these "dirty cops" out and pursue them back to the cultist lair. Instead of presenting the party with a stop sign, just send them on a little detour and try to bring it back around to your planned scenario as opportunity provides.

Remember, RPGs are a group activity. You may be the one who spends all the time setting up the world and preparing the drama, but that doesn't make the story "yours." Everyone is involved in telling this story, and two different groups will naturally collaborate in a different way. If the party is listless and spinning its wheels, grab the reigns and drive them towards something exciting. If they have a plan and a headstrong idea (even if its not exactly what you had planned) then make it work. Change a few details if you have to, the only things you need to stay consistent to are the things they already know. In both cases, encourage the players to "role-play" their planning stages. The ideas they throw out will help you see where they think the story is going. I can't count the number of awesome ideas "I" had in a game just from listening to them spitball things.

WHAM said:

Any tips for encouraging the investigative aspects of the game, and punishing incorrect behavior (such as blowing cover in an undercover investigation, causing unncessary deaths etc)?

In a perfect world, there shouldn't be any such thing as "incorrect" behaviour. The players are the heroes, the lead actors, the stars. Their decisions guide the story as much, if not moreso, than your planning. Don't judge your players' actions based on what you expected to happen, rather allow their creativity to shape the mound of clay you have placed before them.

Does this mean the Big Boss won't yell at them for blowing cover? No, of course not. Actions do have consequences and exploring those consequences is a big part of what role-playing is about. But games are about fun, first and foremost. If the players choose to blow their cover, things will probably go south for them for a little while, but they should still emerge victorious if the dice are on their side. Then the Chief will yell at them for blowing their cover, but he'll let them off easy since they still saved the day. Suspended for a week without pay. Fade to black. Okay, now it's next week. Moving on.

As far as encouraging investigation, others have already said it: don't let the big clues rely on dice rolls. If you absolutely must roll a die to maintain appearances, make it as easy as possible. Keep the target number low, throw out ample bonuses, just plain fudge things if they "missed it by that much." Make sure they get the information they need, and if they misinterpret that information (which they will ) then roll with their interpretation instead of letting things drop dead "because they're going the wrong way."

LuciusT said:

As others have said, this is critically important to avoid slowing the game to a dead stop. Major clues should be automatcally found by the players, skill test and rolls can then be used to see how well the interperate them. Good rolls would have them putting more things together or seeing through deceptions whereas failures would perhaps steer the party off in the wrong direction (perhaps targetting the wrong organisation). That way failure does not stop the advancement of the story, although additional clues might be required to get the party back on track, and possibly make the adventure that little bit harder.

The second Haarlock's Legacy book Damned Cities (planning on running it for my group soon) provides a good murder mystery and some hints on running such hings (basically saying the same things as LuciusT).

WHAM said:

I had another thought about this, but it was too late to edit my first post:

Among GMs, there is a common attitude that the players should have to "earn" their victories. That the only way to provide a true sense of accomplishment is to present a true risk of failure. This is definitely true, from a certain point of view. The problem, at least as far as RPGs go, is that a lot of mechanical aspects of the game rely on dice as a randomizer to make the outcome unpredictable. Because of that, GMs designing their stories will take the idea of "risk of failure" and take it to mean "a chance the heroes won't succeed on this roll."

As long as the roll in question is not mission critical, that's fine. The trouble arises when the roll is mission critical. Those rolls should not have a chance of failure. Not a big one anyway. And there should be at least one backup to get the mission critical stuff done in the event that such a roll does fail. Making players earn their victories doesn't necessarily have to mean making them roll well on a set of polyhedrals. In point of fact, that's not earning anything, that's just getting lucky. To make your players earn their victory, focus on making the non-random things hard.

Give them a riddle or a puzzle to solve, without a time limit. Let them make intelligence rolls if they're well and truly stuck, but otherwise let them try to solve it on their own.

Put them up against a group of enemies who threaten them, but who the heroes can most likely defeat even if they get a few bad rolls. The dice will dictate the details of the fight, but the fact that the heroes will win is never really in question (unless they really unlucky.)

Maybe give the boss a forcefield that makes him invulnerable. Make sure they know he can't be hurt until they find a way to the field, and make sure the means of dropping it is (a) not something that can be done in one turn and (b) NOT something that they have to make a roll to figure out how to do. They might need to roll something to actually do it, but they shouldn't be sitting there going "WTF now?!" As long as they know what they need to do, they will have fun doing it, and when they finally get the forcefield down and start fighting the boss for real, they will have a sense of accomplishment for making it happen.

I find the three clean ways to encourage investigation, keep the story running, and generally make the players feel accomplishment while still making them work for it is by having a persistent world, rewarding their actions with something even if they are way off base, and "invisible railroading." Don't do it to groups that live on the thrill of the mystery, but the group that rolled three assassins, two guardsmen, and pysker...they might need some prodding.

1. Persistent world. Every organization and NPC is pursuing their own interests, regardless of the players. Your plot outline is really only there to give a general course of events. If organizations are doing this, they create events and friction which broaden the clue base. Okay, they didn't figure it out that someone is starting a cult. Fine. The cult does a ritual, leaves traces behind. Ok, the players miss all those...but the enforcers don't. Que Enforcer shootout and resulting evidence. Still can't figure it out? The cult's influence spreads, now important people are acting differently, NOTICEABLY differently. People mention all the wierd changes. Specifics for rolls, but basics are free. Etc. Etc.

2. Reward everything. Ok, so, the giant knife with slaaneeshi marking on it in the corpse of a deformed and naked hermaphrodite that was once the Governor, which coincidentally, you mentioned ten times as being the personal weapon of Lord whoosit, who's eyeball is still at the scene from the struggle and inches away from a retinal scanner, still hasn't pointed them in the right direction. They KNOW, to their bones, that the local law is them evil bastards. They proceed to mount a 2 session long assault on the precinct house. After they're done butchering the enforcers (or being shot to pieces) let them find files that incriminate Lord Whoosit, and have detailed and coherent history record of all the clues they've missed. Sure, they should feel bad about having just massacred innocent imperial servants, but hey..there's the evidence. And clearly SOMEONE had to be making sure they didn't get it, right? Just make sure they pay for it later.

3. Invisible railroading. Railroading is bad if your players are competent, intelligent, and creative. But sometimes, you know, 2 out of 3 ain't bad. Once your down to 1 out of 3, its time. That's when its time to break out the invisible railroad. Don't smack them with something, but I guarantee they did SOMETHING that can be used to justify a consequence. An honest to god consequence that one might expect from said action without feeling GM'd. So let that consequence happen, and make sure it conveniently plops them back on the plot.

Hi!

My advise: take the group who is already "Game over" and simply ask them why they didn´t tried x, y or z. Perhaps they just need to learn. Or they are all D&D Dungeon Crawlers which are not used to anything different.

Group 1: Sounds like they do not want to blow there cover. Or they are really lost. Or both. At the beginning of the next session, simply hand them a list (paper) of know places and npc. Perhaps they have forgot about the informant. Or simply aren´t familiar enough with the setting to thing about "the archives".

Good luck!