On Finding Clues

WARNING: extreme ramblosity ahead. 

The burning question of our time: what is the point of a Spot Hidden roll? 

When it succeeds, the player learns something. When it fails, they learn that they… didn’t learn something. 

If the Hidden thing being Spotted is trivial, fine, I suppose. Although if it’s trivial why not just tell the player about it? Or why bring it up at all? 

And if it’s something the player “ought” to discover, whether because the GM wants it known or because the character is carefully spending time exhaustively searching a room to the extent that they certainly will find whatever is hidden there… why introduce the chance of failure? You might say it takes a long time, or it’s tiring work, but if it ought to be found then it ought to be found.

GUMSHOE Rules

To begin with, the rule for finding clues in GUMSHOE is not "you get all the clues" (even though some writers have taken something approximating this approach) but "you need to have the right skill and say that you are using it in the right place". It's not even enough to have the skill and be at the scene. You have to actively and correctly apply it.

And just because their skills never fail, it doesn’t mean the characters will never fail. 

For example, let's say there's a hidden room in a house. The player whose PC has Architecture says "I'm going to check out the house - anything odd?" Which is the kind of thing an architect would do, in my experience. And then tell you about it. 

In this case, I'd tell them that there's some space unaccounted for in the interior rooms compared to the outside. But if no one had that skill, I wouldn't have them learn this unless they specifically said "I think there might be a hidden room - I'm going to look for it". Without the skill that might take hours or days, but spend enough time with a tape measure and anyone could do it. 

The advantage for the PC with Architecture is that they learn about the room early on. Others might have to wait for someone to tell them there's a secret room somewhere in the house before they know to look for it. 

Similarly, to give a real-world example, I can read Latin. It's a little rusty these days, but give me a Roman inscription and a Latin dictionary and I will eventually tell you what it says. The significance might be unclear, and in many genres an important word might turn out to be missing, but sooner or later I'll get there. In GUMSHOE that would be a 0-point Languages: Latin use, or you could spend 1 point just to translate it off the cuff. Compare that to rolling 90 on your Other Language: Latin 80% in CoC. Now you don't know what it says, and that's that. Vaguely ridiculous and it doesn't add anything to the game -- a Roman inscription that's so obscure you can't read it even with your best efforts? Interesting, and with GUMSHOE you can be certain it's a difficult text - a clue in itself. But with a failed roll you can’t be sure about that. You don’t know why you don’t know.

Call of Cthulhu does sometimes allow a take-your-time approach, with scenarios where you get a Library Use roll for every 2 hours you spend searching the archives, and it's up to you how long you'll spend on it. But that's not a standard rule, or at least it wasn't in the editions I have.

So the rule is not "as a default players will gain every clue necessary to solve a case". It's that if they look in the right place and their character has the right skill, they won't miss the clue. This is an important distinction.

Into the Clue Dungeon

Core clues are the door to the next dungeon room. You can't miss them. They're the dead body in the hallway, the green sedan peeling away at speed. Everything else can be hit or missed. If you don't follow the leads, you'll never get anywhere. 

However, some people infer that this means "the players will always solve the mystery". That's not necessarily boring, but it does create a lack of (for want of a better word) jeopardy.  

There's a school of thought in GUMSHOE scenario design that says there's a beginning and end of the mystery and the players should get from one to the other no matter what happens -- only *how* they get there will be changed by their actions. That can be enjoyable enough, but if you invite me to participate as a player in a mystery game, that's not what I want to do. 

It's odd that Call/Trail of Cthulhu has spawned so much of this kind of scenario design, given that its source material is one in which not finding out what is going on is very much par for the course. The ToC Purist adventures are an example of this approach working well, because they’re more of an exploration than an investigation, if that’s not splitting hairs too much: there’s a thing that has happened, and you go and look at the different parts of it, and then at the end you realise the universe is terrible. There’s no question of succeeding or failing as such. 

In scenarios where “solving the mystery” is a goal, the key is that both success and failure need to be “interesting”. The core mechanic of GUMSHOE is based on the observation that failing a Spot Hidden roll doesn't produce an interesting result. But some GUMSHOE materials go too far and presume that the answer is to always succeed. Some even go so far as to say it doesn't matter what skills PCs use, just give them the clues. For me this takes away player agency too much, including at character creation. If I choose not to take Physics, don't give me Physics clues via another means. Just let me miss that clue, at least for now. If it’s important I can get someone to help me. 

For example: There’s a message inscribed on the wall of an Egyptian tomb but none of us can read hieroglyphics. If the clue isn’t important, then it doesn’t matter that we don’t learn it. If it is important, we’ll find that out soon enough and we can get someone to translate it for us. 

Effectively, Interpersonal Abilities can be used as proxies for Technical or Academic ones, as you persuade people to help you out. Similarly, I would accept a point-spend for using not quite the right skill. E.g. a 0-spend Archaeology clue about an Egyptian tomb might become a 1-point Architecture spend. But the players have to suggest them.

A side-note on ability spends

In general, I prefer players to initiate spends. They’re the ones who know what is valuable to them, and the GM or scenario writer will be hard-press to predict it. Having pre-written 1- or (!) 2-point clues that give “bonus information” don’t sit well with me. “Would you like to spend a point of Art History?” is a meaningless question. I don’t know, would I? How helpful is it going to be? Even if you tell me it’s to know who painted the picture I’m looking at, if I don’t know it matters yet it’s a shot in the dark, essentially no decision at all. Let me decide later as a player that I need to know who painted the picture and say “hey, can I spend an Art History point on that?”

Stakes

A key issue is setting stakes. Let’s take a detour into the Highlander TV series of the 1990s. This was a programme that had a few very good episodes. They were never the episodes where the climactic scene hinged on the question “Will MacLeod beat this other guy in a sword fight?” The show is called Highlander – of course he’s going to win. Despite the fact that immortals duelling with swords was the key draw of the series, the best episodes were not the ones that asked “Who is the best sword-immortal?” but the ones where the question was something else. Will MacLeod kill this person even though he doesn’t want to? Will he be able to rescue the innocent NPC the baddie has taken prisoner? That kind of thing. Strangely the producers never seemed to work this out, and most of the episodes were about the who-is-the-best-at-swords thing, but there you go. 

If your only options in a scenario are “the players do/don’t solve the mystery”, and the mystery is the only thing happening, you have a problem. 

If the solution is “you’ll solve the mystery no matter what” and the players know it, there’s little sense of accomplishment in getting to the end. Character drama – the journey above the destination – can compensate for the lack of jeopardy, but there are other options. 

1)   Time running out

Good for a Sherlock Holmes-style game where failure could undermine the central conceit of your PCs. You’ll work it out – but will the villain have escaped by the time you do? Conan Doyle used this a few times. 

A variation is what you might call the Usual Suspects template. The secret agent is on the train, and you’ll get a photograph of him or her when you arrive in Istanbul. But if it takes you that long to work out who it is, chances are they’ll escape or pass on the secret plans to their associates before you can catch them. 

2)      The villain out of reach

The Columbo method. You know who did it, because you watched the pre-credits sequence, or because you’re a great detective, or because the bad guy said something like “So, I killed my wife, did I? Well, I’d like to see you prove it! Good day, detectives. I said good day!”
So in one sense the mystery is solved. But how did they do it, and how can you prove it?

You don’t have to make the culprit known from the start – solving the whodunit part about 2/3^rds of the way through works, and then the ending either sees the culprit proven guilty or left as an ongoing nemesis. 

Slightly different, and common in film noir and hardboiled fiction, is the scenario where it’s relatively simple to get the person who pulled the trigger, but the detective may or may not get to the bottom of who ordered the hit.

3)      Something else going on

Perhaps the easiest way to make both success and failure in solving the mystery “acceptable” is to make sure the PCs have more than just that going on. For example, police detectives will usually have more than one case active, and some of them might never be solved. Or, in a scenario for OSS agents behind enemy lines in World War II, the mystery may be “who killed Agent Donovan?” At the same time, the agents will have missions to undertake that involve spying, sabotage or training resistance fighters. If things go wrong on absolutely all fronts, their new objective will be to get home safely: whatever happens, you’ve got an adventure.