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December 16, 2006
Detective Game Sketch
Inspired by a post of Plume's over on rpg.net, I wrote down a game sketch for detective roleplaying I've been thinking about for a while. It's a sketch, because it's not finished, but I think most of the essential features are clear (at least to me). So I figured I might as well post it.
For me, the difference between a detective story and a mystery story is that in the first the detective doesn't have to solve the mystery. A detective is about a person, who has the obligation to render justice when in a situation where they will have no ultimate access to the "real" truth. They have to do their human best, with fallible perceptions and limited powers.
So the idea is to build the game around a single detective player, and have several NPC/GM players. The GMs work out a messy crime, figuring out who perpetrated it, who the victims were, who benefits from silence, who doesn't, who hates and who loves who, and giving each of the characters both reasons to use the detective and reasons to conceal (part of?) the truth from him or her. Then, in play, the detective gets called in, and has to a) figure out what's going on, and b) figure out who to punish and who to protect. Each of the main NPCs gets a different player, and in any given scene some subset of the NPCs will be there and everyone will be at cross-purposes to each other.
Most of play is just questioning, along with offered bribes, threats, seductions, and all the usual noir stuff. That's all pure roleplay. Violence is handled along the model of a first-person detective story -- the rules ensure that whenever it breaks out, the detective will never be killed, even though none of the characters should act like they know that. Non interpersonal investigation stuff is handled basically by just telling the detective player what he or she learns, with mechanics (maybe just a skill roll) determining only a) how long it takes, and b) whether any of the NPCs learns of the detective's curiousity.
Finally, the last rule is that the NPC players can never tell the PC's player if he or she was right, or what the real backstory was. This way you get an ending, but no definite closure.
