Investigate a Mystery – Revisited v0.3
Again, thanks for your interest – I really appreciate the feedback and discussion!
Now that I’ve figured out what kept getting it deleted from reddit, you can follow the discussion there in /r/monsteroftheweek as well if you like.
I’m just keeping everything current by noting that v0.3 is up now:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_qXPHlR8MfWUZ7MPVQVY2qmcVe989P16_0cZb0erJDs/edit?usp=sharing
If anyone has a chance to put this on the table, I’d be very glad to hear how it goes!
I’ll be plopping this down later this evening, with the players’ agreement.
I’ll do my best to run as-written and not put any of my personal spin on it.
I have a separate younger table tomorrow too, and probably see if this will work there too, tonight permitting.
Lil Johnny Halfbreed thanks a million!
Jason Kottler
Hey friend! Bad news… It didn’t really pan out as planned.
* Stat choices sounded good on paper, but in practice, kept falling apart. Not from a metagame aspect, but just an extra level of complication/execution that required a whole lot of “wait no, lemme rewind”.
* PbtA games seemingly thrive on failure. I didn’t think it was a big deal until seeing it in action. Either the ‘tell them everything they could find out’ went awry, or the players stopped getting excited about getting to roll. One player remarked ‘its just not as dramatic if we always win’
* The roll results were too clunky/kludgy, and not intuitive in a ‘pbta’ way. Nobody ever saw a real reason to do anything but stack up holds, as holds then meant they could ‘rig’ rolls later to pretty much handle anything. It was “free luck with extra steps” even with the ‘step limiter’. I felt almost forced to trigger the ‘neg moves’ about attention to ‘trick’ them into not banking holds.
* Hold economy/logging, with that many holds, was superduper painful for tracking. It became pretty gameable but having to record was more stress/effort for me, because basically it was a lil mini-argument of sorts whenever they cashed in holds. They weren’t trying to be confrontational, just trying to shore up fails, which then required a chat about ‘is this hold relevant to the current fiction’.
My table was made up of 3 players all around 38-40, with another member who was there to hang out and watch. They’re all old tabletop gamers and GMs in their own right, and they were interested in trying a new Investigate move that seems kinda kludgy/line-crossing in current context.
Everyone liked the move on paper, but after actually using it for a one-shot, it was found lacking.
Verdict: not a good option as-is. Currently makes reduces a lot of the challenge/drama (from no fails/misses) and introduces a lot more complications than current IaM. The table would prefer to use the move currently as written instead of the new move.
Lemme know if that makes sense. I tried to take good notes, but we all got a bit buzzed during the “after action review” session.
Lil Johnny Halfbreed thanks for the report – this may be the wrong answer but I know for certain I’ve got to try something because the RAW move really doesn’t work for me at all
I think my problem is that it’s just a nasty snag for newer keepers trying to juggle expectations, plus that risk of “crossing the line” of authorship.
All you need is one person taking notes on ‘clues’ and suddenly any mistake or misremembering on the part of the Keeper, and folks get nervous.
My first reaction after reading the move was: it is too complicated. Imho, there is way too much information for the players to digest, especially for a basic move which should be quite generic.
The information move with directed questions is quite common in pbta. What exactly are the things you are uncomfortable with ?
The move being restricted to only one carac ? The list of questions ?
You might render it more open-ended by using the 12+ result as the norm. On 7-9, the Keeper says something honestly, on 10+ the hunter gets to say something honestly ? – a little like the meditate move from Legend of the Elements where the players are asked to directly tell something to be true in the fiction.
Or perhaps just state what are the things you don’t like about the move, and what are the things you would like to see, and people here could help you think about it ? 🙂
If you take a look at Epyllion’s basic moves, you will see that most moves (Moon Magic in particular) are extremely concise, I think that is a big part of what makes them so good.