GUMSHOE Tips for Players

As regular readers will know, Robin Laws' and Pelgrane Press' GUMSHOE game system has become by far my favorite roleplaying system over the past year. Much as I like it, its focus on character and narrative instead of the more traditional event-driven stories can make for a tricky adaptation for both players and GMs. There is a lot of advice and material out there for GMs, but not so much for players. So, here are are some strategies that I've picked up from playing and running games.

• Look at your Drive. Understand it. If it’s not completely clear to you, ask your GM. Never mind your background, character flavor, or skills, your Drive is your single most important roleplaying tool. If you're ever in doubt about what direction your character should be going, consult your Drive. Nobody will ever fault you for honestly pushing your Drive, and your GM will likely thank you.
• Don't concern yourself with equipment. Rely on your Preparedness skill instead. The GUMSHOE character sheets have no inventory lists – there is a reason for that. The GM is not out to screw you because you forgot a 10' pole. It's just not that sort of game. Let go. Pick a weapon, if appropriate, and leave the rest to Preparedness.
• For your first few games, don't worry about investigative spends. They make sense, but only once players are comfortable with the system and its goals. One good, simple way to think about them is this: if you monopolize the GM’s time for a little while, that's a spend. If you find that a skill use you've called for has ended up highlighting your character for a non-trivial sequence, dock yourself a point or two based on your sense of how much screen time you sucked down. Once you have no points left in a skill, be careful about calling for actions using that skill that place demands on the GMs time to the exclusion of other players.
• Think about what information you need, then look at your investigative skills to figure out how your character might go about it if you need help. Remember, GUMSHOE characters are generally highly competent, and as such their skills define them more strongly than in other games. Other systems can develop a pattern of "here's what I want to do, what skill should I roll against?", but this can cause problems for GUMSHOE because of the auto-succeed nature of investigative skills. So know what skill you’re using. The skill list has been carefully chosen to reflect the genre and style. When in doubt, you can look at your skill list and try to figure out how those skills might be useful and interesting in this scene.
• This is tricky, but try to let scenes develop while also knowing when to end them. GUMSHOE is a character-driven game. If the GM sets a scene or introduces a character, it's something for your character to explore, have some fun with, and see where it goes. Once you've developed something a bit, try to recognize when it’s played out. The GM will try to help you here – pay attention if she is trying to shut the scene down. This is easier said than done, but scenes usually follow a logical narrative flow which you can try to grasp.
• Recognize each player's character's strengths, as represented by their skill ratings, and let them take care of stuff in their specialties. If you have Library Use 1, that's great, but let the player with Library Use 4 take charge in an appropriate scene. GUMSHOE parties are built as teams, almost to a greater degree even than D&D parties. Let each team member shine at what they do well.
• Recognize dead ends. If you call for a skill use and the GM doesn't give you anything interesting, there is nothing there. If you've called for Reassurance to calm down an NPC and get information out of him, and he's not forthcoming, there is no key reassuring phrase you can utter in-character that will change this. This is the magic of investigative skills ... you never have to worry about looking for something and missing it. If you use your skills, and don't get results, you can still play out the scene for dramatic purposes if there is something interesting there – but you’ve got all the information you’re going to get. It's tempting to think that anything significant the GM introduces at any point is immediately important, but that's not always true. Sometimes it's laying pipe, sometimes it's just flavor, sometimes it's a background detail. Don't beat your head against things. In an event-driven story, you can never go back. In GUMSHOE, you can.
• Be very careful about splitting the party. This is of course a truism in D&D, where there are endless jokes about it. GUMSHOE may be a totally different game from D&D, but there remains relentless logic behind sticking together. If half the party investigates one avenue while the other half minds the store, the GM can't run a big scene without idling half the players for a significant amount of time and running the risk that skills key to resolving it are absent. If you lose the argument about what to do next, suck it up.
• Apropos the last point, another trope of classic RPGs is to strictly cordon off player knowledge from character knowledge. Don't do this. Or at least don’t go crazy. For example, if you do split the party for legitimate reasons, don't duplicate what the other half of the group has already done because that's what your character would do and he hasn’t got that information yet. Remember, your remit as a player is to move the narrative forward and be interesting. What your character does still has to make sense of course, but don't do boring or redundant things because that's what your character would do when you as a player know better.
• GUMSHOE is about information: getting it, understanding it, making decisions based on it. The emotional tenor of the game will be based on what kind of information we're talking about and how it's revealed, but pieces of information are the corridors, doors, and treasure of GUMSHOE. Have a plan to get the information. Follow the information where it leads. Stay focussed. Let your plans play out.

The most important overarching thing to remember goes back to where I started: unlike most RPGs, GUMSHOE is primarily character-driven, not event-driven. Don't concern yourself at all with what the GM is trying to do to your character. Ask yourself what you are doing to interestingly drive the narrative forward. The GM is not going to hose you, at least not in uninteresting ways. In fact, the only way you will end up getting hosed is if the GM is forced to hose you because you are being boring. Players have a lot of the responsibility for making a GUMSHOE story interesting, and the GM is at your mercy here. Consult your Drive and your skills to figure out ways to move the narrative forward. Most of the time you can go with just doing something obvious, because what is obvious to you in the context of your character, your drive, and your skills will usually be interesting to everyone else, including the GM. There is still plenty of room for dramatic, character-building scenes, but GUMSHOE is an investigative system which requires the players to get the information they need. Figure out what you need to know, what questions you need answered, and get those answers. Answers, not questions, move the narrative forward. Ask yourself, is what I'm doing interesting? Is it trying to answer questions based on what we've seen, what we know, or what my drive is? If it's not, come up with something different.

Intermezzo: RPGs in 2011

This review of my role-playing experiences in 2011 will necessarily be of a different character than my boardgame wrapup, since my time for RPGs is so much smaller and I make no attempt, generally, to be on the cutting edge.


I got back into role-playing about 10 years ago with D&D 3.0, which quickly became 3.5, which became 4.0. The arc of my story is one of mounting frustration with D&D specifically and d20 more generally. The question I always had was, what exactly is this game doing for me?


D&D, as a game, emphasizes resource management, which boardgames do much better. And tactical combat, which again, boardgames do much better. And power-combo-seeking, ditto. What’s left? Narrative? Boardgames like Beowulf, Tigris & Euphrates and Lord of the Rings do this rather well too, in most cases far better than a run-of-the-mill D&D adventure does. We’re left not with anything concrete, only with this elusive idea of roleplaying, of immersing oneself in an alternate world and trying to vicariously experience it.


So I spent many years trying to figure this whole roleplaying thing out, what it was and how it was different, how it was supposed to be fun, and how you actually did it. The various treatises on the subject are surprisingly unhelpful, as are all the boilerplate “what is roleplaying” bits you routinely find at the beginning of sourcebooks. It seems that your GM (or Keeper, or DM, or whatever) has come up with a story, and you need to find some way to play your character in the story in a way that meshes with the GMs vision, without actually knowing what that vision is or where the story is going. You need to come up with motivations for your character that will feed the directions your GM expects you to take, without knowing what those are.


If you take the whole roleplaying thing seriously, it can be a bit frustrating.


This year, I finally got it. From where I stand, this entire genre is misleadingly named. It should not be called “roleplaying”. It should be called “collaborative storytelling”. Obviously we can’t change it now, after 30 years, that would be confusing, but I found that when I just flipped that switch in my brain and viewed the whole exercise from a slightly different perspective, everything about why this genre is different, fun, and worthwhile clicked. Roleplaying can obviously be a large and fun part of collaborative storytelling, but it’s not primarily why we’re here and – interestingly – you don’t actually have to do any roleplaying at all for the whole genre of “roleplaying games” to work and be fun. You do need to do collaborative storytelling, however.


As always, the light came on only by running and playing in actual games. In this case the system was Kenneth Hite’s Trail of Cthulhu, built on Robin Laws’ GUMSHOE engine, and the adventures were from the excellent collections Out of Time and Stunning Eldritch Tales. The transition was rocky and I’m not sure if I’ve brought most of my fellow-players along, but for the first time in my many years of playing these games I feel like I’ve found a good spot and understand what’s going on and why the experience is interesting and different and worth playing in addition to my primary interest in boardgames.


GUMSHOE is confusing for many people I think because it is simultaneously very different from and very close to traditional RPGs. On the one hand, you can argue that systematically, the only difference between GUMSHOE and traditional RPGs like d20 or GURPS is a single die roll. In scenes where characters are pursuing the core activity of the system – solving mysteries – skill checks are automatically successful. That’s it. It’s a complete game-changer in practice though, because it makes the default expectation for core activities success rather than failure. Instead of thinking “I wonder what the difficulty level of that task should be”, the GM instead has to think “what information can I give them as a result of this course of action, and what are the consequences”. Instead of our first thought being about how the players’ ideas might be negated, we’re instead forced to think about how to move the narrative forward in a collaborative way. This is huge.


This of course opens up a whole set of ancillary questions for gamemasters: how to we encourage good, story-building ideas in our players? How do we set expectations, set tone, set parameters? These questions are not always easy to answer, but they are much more interesting, tractable, and amenable to reason than the frustratingly open-ended “how do I tell a good story in an RPG?”.


This brings me to my second discovery of the year, which is Graham Walmsley’s Play Unsafe, the best and most useful practical guide to good roleplaying (for both players and GMs) that I’ve come across. It’s a fast read – I finished the whole thing in a couple hours – and provides concrete and useful tips that anyone can pick up and put to use right away. The key insight here is that the techniques we should be drawing on for inspiration in our roleplaying are not from acting or narrative writing but are the skills and ideas of improv theatre. Once it’s properly explained it’s so obvious that one wonders how the hobby got this far without figuring this out and using it as the foundation for everything we do. The old and often-repeated conceit that the characters play in a world created and described by the GM is seductive but, I’ve come to understand, fundamentally misleading. In actual practice, the GM brings his or her idea of the story to the table, and perhaps it is the dominant one, but unless your GM is master-level everyone present is going to have in their minds a different idea of what the world is like, different ideas of the flavor of the story and how it will proceed. A good roleplaying experience will take these different ideas, weave together the good bits, and tell an interesting story. The best, perhaps only, way to do this is via the techniques of improv.


Bring these ideas together, and you’ve got an understandable, practical, working structure for how to really make RPGs fly. Two more pieces would help fill in the details and round out 2011 for me.


The first was Robin Laws’ book Hamlet’s Hit Points, which I wrote about at some length in August. I won’t say much more about it here – you can go back and read the piece, if you want – except to mention how clearly things clicked into place as I read it. Because of my background in music and music theory, I recognized immediately and correlated the technique of cycles of hope and fear, or tension and resolution. It was also clear how these same techniques were used in boardgames. Again, the default literary tendencies of my RPG creations were running up against the collaborative reality of how RPGs actually work, producing bad results. I needed to be much more adaptable and sensitive to story beats. Actually integrating the lessons of Hamlet’s Hit Points into my RPGs is what I’ll generously call a work-in-progress, but it was clear this was something to aspire to as part of a good roleplaying experience. It was also clear that the ethos of collaborative creation was the only practical way to accommodate it, and so GUMSHOE provided the structure in a way that traditional techniques did not.


The last thing I’ll mention from 2011 was Ashen Stars, the big new addition to the GUMSHOE family. The reason I am so excited about Ashen Stars is how it brings all this collective thought together and trains it on a game. We have the core GUMSHOE system, which is systematically based on this idea of collaboration which I have come to believe is absolutely core to fun roleplaying. The many useful, practical tips the book provides for players and GMs emphasize this. We have a backstory of a Star Trek-like universe fallen on hard times which is not only broadly accessible and incredibly creative, featuring fascinating species and a great mix of the familiar and unusual, but is also highly sensitive to the very specific needs of gaming. This is not just a cool or imaginative setting; this is a setting that is designed from the ground up to actually be gamed in. I love how the game prioritizes the practical details of interesting collaborative storytelling. The core activities are well-specified, with the tenor and tone of the game set within reasonable constraints the GM and players can work with. The character creation process has at its core a feedback loop which allows players and GM to negotiate the flavor of the game and how they will explore the world; this is key not just because it kicks off the process in a productive way, it also gives the players the important message that “hey, your ideas are important and you have a stake in the creation of this story”. I love the section on GM advice which gives specific, practical, actionable ideas that will easily have you up and writing good stories (and as an aside, these tips are extremely helpful for writing adventures of any kind – Kim and I have been using them for an Arcana Evolved adventure she’s working on and found them very useful). This whole thing is a terrific package which begs to be gamed, which hopefully I’ll have a chance to do in 2012.


So that’s the story of my total conversion to GUMSHOE as the most sensible solution to the practical problems of roleplaying, one that keeps the flavor of the stories we’ve come to love but allows you to actually game them. If, like me, you come from a long background of D&D, GURPS, Traveller, or even Call of Cthulhu, the conversion process may involve pain. Trust me, it’s worth it.

Trail of Cthulhu: Playing Not So Quiet

Pelgrane Press publishes quite a few very high-quality modules for Trail of Cthulhu, several of which are in the recent compilation Out of Time. The Black Drop is definitely the best Cthulhu adventure I've ever played in any system. But running these as one-offs presents certain difficulties, as does getting players up to speed with the style of Gumshoe. This piece is about my experience running one of the modules in Out of Time, Not So Quiet, both for my local players and at a local game convention. It's got my tips for running it and Trail of Cthulhu in general.


Needless to say, there are massive spoilers ahead for the module.


Here is the brief teaser for the module, copied from Pelgrane Press website: Bullet-ridden, bruised and bloody, the Investigators, soldiers and nurses in the Great War, are brought from the frontline to Military Hospital Number Five. Once the haze of morphine clears, they sense a brooding malevolence and they will soon realise there are worse things in this life than a bullet wound.


One of the biggest problems with running Cthulhu adventures is getting everyone on the same page with respect to style. People's RPG experience with the Cthulhu mythos runs a very wide range, from action-adventure thrillers to stark psychological nihilism. With one-shot modules, if players don't know what to expect, it's hard for them to know how to respond. It's terrific that Trail of Cthulhu supports a wide range of play styles, and has put some effort into defining "pulp" and "purist" both stylistically and mechanically. But players often need more. Not So Quiet is not really purist in the strict sense of the style, but is constrained (with only one real location, Military Hospital Number 5), psychological, and fairly dark. I would say it tends strongly towards purist. But when you tell a group of random convention players that a module is "purist" or "very pulpy", what some seem to hear is that it's "a little bit more purist/pulpy than what I'm used to", or "hmm, I wonder what purist means? Maybe I should ask? Nah, I guess I'll find out". The standard experience of Call of Cthulhu seems, in practice, to be well into Trail of Cthulhu's definition of Pulp, with boardgames like Arkham Horror or Mansions of Madness going further that way still. The more purist – and in my opinion much more authentic – Trail of Cthulhu modules are a rather different experience. Not So Quiet has very little action – it's easy to play through it without any action scenes at all – and the players are going to have to do some scary stuff and get hip-deep into the cult to succeed. I still haven't figured out a good way to strongly telegraph the style of the module without spoiling too much of it. I'm open to suggestions. Robin Laws recently wrote about the many disadvantages of premise concealment, so it may just be a matter of getting up in front of the players and saying "this module is darkly purist, has no built-in action scenes, and is going to require heavy use of your interpersonal skills". For one of these one-off modules, the messaging here is really important and I'm still figuring it out.


Along these same lines, supplied pre-generated characters with detailed backgrounds are often tricky. Both The Black Drop and Not So Quiet use them. In The Black Drop, the characters' backgrounds directly influence the story, which seems to be the default expectation of players. Chekov's Gun and all that: if my background says I want to visit Betsy Cove to make some astronomical observations, then trying to do that should drive the story forward. But Not So Quiet doesn't work this way. The players all have backstories that set them up to be in an emotional place to sympathize with the cult in the module. But none of the apparent plot devices are actual plot devices. This has really tripped up players I've played with. The Paul Remi player has inevitably spent a bunch of energy trying to track down his friend Paul LaFarge who went missing at the hospital, but there just isn't anything there in the module as written. And Hauptmann Ranaulf Keppel has always presented major problems. He's a downed German airman behind enemy lines trying to pass off as Canadian, and his player has always embraced this, spending time trying to keep a low profile, hoard supplies, or plot an escape – all of which can easily be counter-productive in terms of keeping the module moving in the right direction. His enemy-combatant status is entirely irrelevant to the story. Nobody is looking for him, and there is no chance he'll be found out unless he jumps up and down screaming "Ich bin Deutscher!". His background was really problematic even when I very explicitly told players up-front that they should let their backgrounds inform their characters' states of mind, but were flavor and not plot points in any way. If you have fewer than 6 players, I definitely recommend ditching Keppel. Otherwise, keep his game stats, drive (Ennui), and flavor but change his background. As written it's a completely irresistible time-sink. Paul Remi's background could also usefully be generalized to make his player less likely to get sidetracked.


The last big-picture issue I need to mention is the balance between gathering information via forensic investigation (looking for footprints, searching archives, testing chemical samples), and using your interpersonal skills to interview people of interest. The player advice section of the Trail of Cthulhu rulebook (largely common to all the Gumshoe games) mentions that many players prefer forensic investigations, and that you neglect personal interviews at your peril. That's great, but in one-shot modules or more casual play where people probably haven't read that, it's not much help. Plus, of course, groups have a preference to do what they find fun which may or may not necessarily be the easy or obvious way. In theory, Gumshoe as a system handles this by having a systemic bias for giving the players information if they have a plausible plan of action. It seems to me that Gumshoe modules should, as a matter of general principle, support multiple paths to important information so clues can come out either through library research or through talking to witnesses (say). Unfortunately this is not the case in Not So Quiet, and forensic investigation is going to dead-end very quickly. This is not to say that there aren't good reasons for this in this particular story; there are. But still. A lot of information exists only in the skulls of NPCs. If the players are to succeed, there simply is no option but to get out there and talk to people, figure out their background and motivations, and infiltrate the cult. So groups who haven't read the player tips section of the rulebook, aren't good at this stuff, or have a serious bias for forensic evidence are going to get quickly stymied. You can actually get something of a read on this pretty early. If the players strike up a conversation with, get some information out of, or show concern for "Cheery" Patterson in the very first scene for posted characters, that may be a good indicator that they'll "get" the module. If they ignore her or don't think she's important, get prepared to be much more aggressive about having your NPCs initiate the interactions with the players, and get ready to pull the trigger on some hard drivers. Don't overreact right away to one scene, of course – just start to prepare yourself.


Here are a few more tips to specific scenes in this module that I've picked up from running it a couple times:


The PCs are divided into two groups, posted and injured, and introduced in two separate scenes, one called Hate for the posted and a player-constructed flashback called The Last Thing You Remember for the injured. Hate is a good and purposeful scene, but the injured characters' introduction isn't providing an opportunity for the characters to bond. I'd suggest that instead of simply asking the players how they got injured, go with "how you got injured and ended up in the same ambulance with the other PCs" to let the injured characters both figure out their introductions and also come up with basic relationships. The module's splitting of the party into two groups at the outset is one of the more interesting elements of the module actually. I've told my players up-front that it's fine if the two player groups only come together late in the game. If that's the way they want to go though, they can't cordon off character knowledge from player knowledge as is the tradition to try to do in many RPGs. Don't duplicate the other half of the players' work because "that's what my character would do", or "my character doesn't know that yet"; use your player knowledge to choose something that both makes sense for your character and is interesting and supportive and moves the story forward. If the players are struggling with this somewhat unusual mode of play, don't mess around, throw the group together quickly.


The characters will almost certainly discover the outlines of the cult and the identities of several cult members basically right away, maybe 30-60 minutes into the game, in the Night Time Perambulations scene. This can be good or bad.  If they use this as a stepping-off point to start talking to those people or otherwise figuring them out, that's great and the module will work the way it's intended. If they draw on their pulp experience to think of cultists as brainwashed zombies and immediately back off and start relying heavily on forensics, that's trouble. If so, you need to start throwing the interesting NPCs at them. Have them strike up casual conversations, be bunked next to them, whatever. Save one of the interesting and sympathetic NPC for the players to get to know before they find out he's a cultist. This may be hard; aggressive players willing pull rank may make take systematic and plausible methods to identify and quarantine all the current cultists, so you may have to go with a new recruit or someone just initiated who hasn't attended the ceremony yet. Almost anyone in the hospital could turn out to be a cultist retroactively. The PCs simply must find their way into the cult. That may require extreme measures, like introducing an NPC with a ret-conned backstory who knows one of PCs who tries to recruit him or her into the cult without any prompting. You need to be really adaptable here and prepared to wing it. It's very easy for the players to go off the grid, and keeping the story's flow going is much more challenging than usual because so much key information only exists inside various NPC's heads, and no amount of Chemistry, Art History, Forensic Accounting, or Library Use is really going to help.


In the Where is Pombal? scene, the Evidence Collection core clue should include some blood. This really bugged one of my players, that Pombal had his throat slit in his tent without there being any blood left behind. He had a point I felt.


In His Enthusiasm is Commendable, Dr. Watts is written as the red herring. I'd be flexible with this. As written he lacks the psychological profile of a cultist, but he's also been the one NPC my players have consistently found interesting enough to engage with, perhaps because he seems intriguingly crazy but obviously not a cultist. But he too could have a dark secret of some kind, perhaps a family member who is insane which drives his research, which might make him an additional access point to the cult if the players go that way. As an aside, there is a natural affinity between Watts and Keppel – Keppel has decent Electrical and Mechanical Repair to latch on to Watts or his equipment as a way to resolve his problems. This has some potential; I didn't figure out that was what the Keppel player was doing in one game until it was too late to work with it. But while it can be a fun roleplaying moment if it doesn't take too much time, and if Keppel (or another character) and Watts bond I think you could improvise a route into the cult there, ultimately this whole thing is a red herring as scripted so either activate it and hook it back into the mainline of the story, or don't let it get bogged down.


Throughout this, keep the player's drives at the ready. Another possible issue with the module is that since many of the characters are clearly and explicitly part of a military hierarchy, there is an obvious and entirely plausible option for them to try to get someone else to resolve their problems for them: report it to their superiors and get them to deal with it, or call in the military police. In the early stages, it's easy to rebuff this. It's a supernatural cult, after all, so you can go to the standard bored/uninterested authority figure. But as dead bodies pile up and military regulations are flagrantly broken, it gets harder and harder to keep things on track if the characters are insistent on following this honestly quite plausible path. Either you reflow the entire module, or the players are doomed to fail. As written it's possible to temporarily suppress the cult's activities by resorting to extreme measures via the chain of command. But this is not how these stories work, and from a practical story-telling point of view it's just not an interesting way to go. For the players to succeed, the cult needs to be stamped out, the only really good way to do that is through infiltration, and only the PCs are in a position to do that. As a consequence of all this, I really think you need to head anything off early, before the option even becomes established. If characters are faltering in their commitment to the cause, call hard drivers until they get the point: Ennui, Curiosity, Arrogance, and In The Blood on the pre-gens are all easy to work with. While ideally of course you'd prefer to not have to invoke the game mechanics associated with drives (other than to hand out stability points when players do the right thing and get into trouble on their own), you'll be far better off if you bring the hammer down earlier, at the first sign of issues, rather than waiting until after things have gotten well and truly derailed. If you're not sure how your players will react to the events, it'll pay to spend a little bit of effort ahead of time thinking about how you'll use the drives if players are not actively deputizing themselves to deal with the problem.


Despite the impression all this may give, I actually think Not So Quiet is a very interesting module. I like that it's dark and constrained, and the idea – that the cultists are just normal people who have suffered as a result of the war, just like everyone else, except that they truly think they've found a good way out – is great, and it both twists around the traditional narratives and gives the players difficult questions to wrestle with. It's a compact module that does what it sets out to do, and gives the GM lots of levers to control pacing. But it's also a difficult module to set expectations for, to get the players into the right frame of mind, and it's very easy for them to flail. None of the times I've run it has it proceeded anything like the way it's laid out in the book. The GM has only a few limited ways to plausibly move around the trail of clues, so the bottom line is you have to be flexible and potentially aggressive in how you use your NPCs. At the end of the day, this adventure is all about the NPCs, their losses and sacrifices. In your gamemastering, focus in on them as your primary tools and the key to telling the story.

Trail of Cthulhu, games as stories, Tales of the Arabian Nights, and why Mansions of Madness doesn’t really work

I’ve finally had a chance to play the Trail of Cthulhu role-playing game, which uses Pelegrane Press’ GUMSHOE game system. The GUMSHOE system is very interesting, for both boardgamers and role-players. To explain why, I need to back up a bit and lay some groundwork.

What differentiates the sorts of games we like, be it RPGs or boardgames, from other sorts of games is that they tell stories. They may be boring, short, or thin stories, or the story may not be the most important element of the game, but if stories weren’t important, we wouldn’t get pasted-on themes, nice art, or miniatures. The story can be something that is more abstract and visceral, as in Knizia games like Ra, Through the Desert, or Ingenious, but these games still have a narrative arc of buildup, tension, and release that is the stuff of storytelling. Plus of course, there is a large segment of the hobby – which Fantasy Flight is trying to corner – for which the story the game tells is the key thing.

The Cthulhu Mythos is well-travelled thematic ground, with many board and role-playing games trying to capture the flavor of Lovecraft’s popular creations. As always, trying to take a literary story and re-tell it in game format is not an easy proposition, and failures vastly outnumber successes. To see why it’s hard, let’s look at one particular game system that, while popular, is to my mind clearly not a success: the RPG Call of Cthulhu.

Call of Cthulhu is, at a system level, a very traditional roleplaying game. Ever since D&D, the core of role-playing games has been a task resolution system. While the details may differ – the game may use a d20, 3d6, d100, or a pool of d6 or fudge dice – the vast majority of popular RPGs are set up such that whenever players interact with the world of the game, it’s a conflict or a task at which they succeed or fail with measurable probability. When a character wants to accomplish something, we pick a character trait to use, figure out a difficulty number, and roll some dice. The variance between the systems is in the choice of what skills to define and what kinds of probability curves to use.

This is great, but this core system of task resolution simply can’t tell a wide range of stories that people who play RPGs happen to like and desperately want to game. The most obvious are, unfortunately, mysteries, horror, and epics (I use the term “epic” as Stephen R Donaldson lays it out in his monograph Epic Fantasy in the Modern World).

The problems with telling mystery stories are straightforward, and fairly obvious if you’ve ever tried to run a mystery in Call of Cthulhu. The narrative structure of a mystery story is that there is a trail of clues that the characters must gather and piece together to figure out what’s going on. That trail of clues drives the narrative arc. The characters start out with a hint, follow the leads, and over time the truth is revealed. There are all sorts of conventions to the mystery genre which allow readers or viewers to engage with them, but this is the core. This is an incredibly common narrative format, used by H. P. Lovecraft, Stephen R. Donaldson, the X-Files, and Law & Order as well as many – probably the majority – of the episodes of Star Trek or Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. Even the Harry Potter novels are, from the point of view of narrative format, actually mysteries.

The problem of course is what happens when acquiring a clue requires success at a task which the players repeatedly fail? What if there is a witness holding out on them and the players can’t make their Intimidation check to save their lives? Or if there are documents hidden in a room and the players can’t pass a search check? The GM then has to resort to ever-more-improbable ways to get the players the information they need to follow the trail of clues. OK, you blew your search, maybe the contents of the documents was known by an NPC and you can try diplomacy. Blew that too? OK, maybe the documents were in another location. Still not making that search roll? Eventually the documents end up lying in the middle of the road where the PCs trip over them. This is immensely unsatisfying because a) why are we rolling all these dice and jumping through all these hoops when the conventions of the genre of story we’re trying to tell requires us to get this clue?, and b) in the system we’re using, which is all about tasks and succeeding and failing at them, why are we not being punished for all these failures? Because the players are failing all these checks, they can clearly see the hand of the GM coming in and granting them the information they require. To look at it form a narrative point of view, you never have a scene in Law & Order where the detectives execute a search warrant and no information comes out of it. Searching the apartment was a scene in a sequence, and the narratively interesting thing is not whether or not the detectives’ skills were up to the task of finding anything, but what they found, how they went about finding it, how illuminating the information was in light of other clues already gathered, and what they do with the information to move the narrative forward.

This is not to say that good mystery stories have not been told by many talented GMs using the Call of Cthulhu game system. But their success in doing this is in spite of the system, not because of it.

To divert briefly into epic tales, you don’t have to go very far into Tolkien to find story elements that stymie RPG-standard tools of skill checks and difficulty levels (or traditional boardgame tools of resource management, risk, and positional tactics). The epic confrontation between Eowyn, Merry, and the Witch-King cannot be gamed using any sort of task-based system. Tolkien has just spent the last three books building up the Witch-King and the Nazgul as terrifying and powerful, so in gamer-land no rational player who can look at their character sheet and know their odds of succeeding at various tasks is going to resort to direct conflict to take him down. And if they do, and win, does it feel like a victory, or like the GM resorted to fiddling the dice or making stuff up to let them do it, a far less satisfying outcome given the entire structure of the game is based around tasks with predictable odds? There is something else going on here. This is an epic scene where characters go beyond themselves, tying in with previous plot hints, and as such is hard to imagine how it could satisfactorily be done in a games which are driven by probabilities and specific knowledge of capabilities.

To get back to the main topic of mysteries, the GUMSHOE system sets out specifically to tell mystery stories. It recognizes that to do this, a systemically different way to define characters and drive narrative is required. So it defines characters partially in a traditional conflict-based way (because mysteries have fight scenes), but simultaneously in a more narrative-focussed way. Your skill with firearms will be familiar, but your rating as a forensic accountant is different. If you have skill in accounting, the system says that you are sufficiently skilled that no narratively critical clue that can be unearthed using accounting will elude you. Your rating in these skills are not skill points, but narrative points, and reflects the importance of that skill to your character’s narrative. If you have some rating points to spend in accounting, your character can move the narrative a bit if the player can come up with a way of weaving the skill into the story. If so, the character can unearth clues which, while not the core clues that allow the players to solve the mystery in a baseline sort of way, will expand the character’s understanding of what’s going on and perhaps make piecing together other clues easier. It’s important to mention that the GUMSHOE system is not a collaborative storytelling system like Fiasco or Polaris; 3 points in accounting doesn’t give you narrative prerogative to skip the suspect interview and hit the books. But it does allow you to weave the storyline if the GM can figure out how to get you interesting information from your proposed course of action, the more detailed and persuasive the better (perhaps you could use Legal to get a search warrant for a suspect’s banking records, then Accounting to track down information that the GM had originally intended to come out via Intimidate or Reassurance in an interview).

Because it’s such a different way of looking at characters, and because task-based systems are so ubiquitous, this definitely takes some getting used to. A 3 rating in Evidence Collection is not more capable than a 1 rating in Evidence Collection. Instead, the character with a 3 rating has a little more latitude to expand the narrative – the rules refer to it as “spotlight time” – than the player with a 1 rating, if he can effectively weave it into the story. Either character will discover the clue that will get the group to the next scene, but the player with the 3 rating can spend some points to try to direct the narrative a little bit and gain information that, while not critical, will be helpful later or give more detail to the grand picture. So, for example, Evidence Collection may turn up three shell casings, some fingerprints, and a bloodstain, but a 1-point spend might additionally tell you (with some narrative associated) that that the shell casings have been sitting there for four days, even though the crime scene is only a day old. In both cases the players get the two critical plot hooks, leading them to identify the fingerprints or take the shell casings to the lab, but the player who had the spend has some information which may make the picture make more sense as it develops and will make the scene more narratively satisfying. So, we have a systemic way to develop the story in interesting ways that relies on player ingenuity in the application of their skills, but not on crude skill checks. This means that GUMSHOE is very good at the specific types of stories it is trying to tell. It focusses on information, how (and not whether) it is obtained, and what the players do with it, which is the stuff of mystery stories.

Boardgamers actually have had something analogous to this for some time: Tales of the Arabian Nights. In this game, the players choose what skills and traits their characters have – Appearance, Weapons Use, Magic, Piety – and then how to respond to encounters, whether by Negotiation, Robbing, Courting, and so on. Then through the magic of a lot of cross-referencing and a book with 2500-odd paragraphs in it, the narrative of the encounter emerges. Instead of choosing how to use your resources and abilities to navigate an existing narrative successfully, your choices (along with a dose of luck) define the narrative which allows it to be, at times, epic in nature. Like in Trail of Cthulhu, Seafaring is not going to get you out of an encounter with an angry Djinn if there is no water in sight, but your skills and your choices nonetheless help shape the story. This is what makes Tales of the Arabian Nights narratively satisfying, while Betrayal at House on the Hill just feels like a fire-hose of disjointed random events.

This brings us, finally, to Fantasy Flight’s most recent weighty box of plastic and cardboard, Mansions of Madness. I’ve only played it once, so I’m not going to judge too harshly. But, like Call of Cthulhu, Mansions of Madness is trying to tell stories that are narratively mysteries while using the standard boardgame tools of conflict, risk, and resource management. In my opinion, this is a case of “when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. The common core mechanics we have in boardgames (and RPGs) are simply not amenable to mystery stories, and Mansions of Madness ends up being a nail, in this case a glorified dungeon crawl. Which is fine, but all the trappings of mystery – the extensive intro text, the flavor of a path of clues – are squandered and can actually detract from the gaming experience, since they may misdirect you into thinking the story is something it isn't.

If we want to tell different kinds of stories, we need to expand our toolbox. Arkham Horror is not a tale of mystery or horror, it’s a tactical game of resource management with the narrative structure (to the extent it has any, which is not great) of an action-adventure with characters being led through set-pieces over which they have no control. By contrast, Castle Ravenloft – which is fundamentally the same game as Mansions of Madness – may not be a classic game, but it’s more narratively satisfying because the tools it uses are appropriate to the story it’s trying to tell and it gets the critical structural bits (pacing and tension management primarily) pretty much right.

Worlds like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and H. P. Lovecraft’s mythos are notoriously hard gaming problems, done badly so many times, and these are the reasons why. The very few great games we have work because they’ve limited themselves to portions of the story that can be told with the mechanics available. The brilliant bit of the classic CCG Middle-Earth: The Wizards was to focus on the years between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, when stories could be adventures of risk and reward and not epics. Knizia’s Lord of the Rings works in part because it focuses in tightly on the hobbits, who are modern characters who become immersed in an epic world which is not their own, and also of course because Knizia is a design genius who is keenly aware of how tension management and tight pacing can produce strong narrative structures in games. What success Lovecraftian boardgames have had, they have when they focus on the pulpier, action-oriented face of the mythos at the expense of the core stories that the readers love (it’s interesting to contemplate how much of the veering of Lovecraftian material into pulp is a direct result of a gaming fandom which lacked the conventions to tell the real stories). Clearly there is room for innovative new systems and mechanics that will help us tell these other kinds of stories in enjoyable and satisfying ways. RPGs are leading the way with serious, envelope-pushing titles like Trail of Cthulhu, Polaris, and Fiasco, all designed to tell specific types of stories that would be extremely challenging (at best) to do using more traditional systems. There is no reason these trains of thought can’t be extended into boardgames where the differences between the two blur.