6 Ways to Solve Mysteries
Dear Uncle Per,
I wish your Dungeon Master friends would tell us before an adventure starts that it’s going to be a mystery. If I knew that, I’d stay home and wait until they found the bad guy in his lair and go to fight him. When it comes to finding clues, I got nothin’. Perception? Didn’t train it. Arcana? History? Nature? Not a chance. Sometimes I get lucky and get to scare somebody into talkin’, but mostly I sit around.
Well, come to that, we all sit around a lot. Our ranger finds a human footprint in a pool of blood, our rogue spots a recently opened secret door, and the cleric reports the guy was strangled. Then the DM sits back and chuckles into his wispy little beard as he watches us flail about. But how are we supposed to put those three clues together and figure out whodunit?
Looking for advice,
Regdar
Octavus 16
My dear nephew,
You often write to me with misguided complaints and myopic perspectives, but this is not one of those times. If you are bored solving a murder, or you feel a bit dull because you can’t solve the mystery, the crime should be pinned on your DM, not on you, Regdar.
Mysteries are one of the hardest genres of adventure to write successfully, because they depend on a carefully restricted flow of information: if too few clues are given, the mystery cannot be solved, but if too many clues are gathered too quickly, there is no mystery at all. There are a few principles that come to mind regarding mysteries that I want to explain. Mind you, this is not an exhaustive list, and I am sure you will come up with more on your own. First of all:
- If a mystery can be solved with a single skill check, it’s not a mystery. If a party is trying to identify who cast a particularly heinous evil ritual, and the DM requires one Hard DC Arcana check to recognize the perpetrator’s magical signature, then the identity of the evil wizard was never really a mystery, as far as the PCs are concerned. A true mystery requires compiling multiple clues, usually from multiple sources, in order to piece together what really happened or who is responsible.
- Mystery adventures do not have to be related to a crime. Any time hidden information is sought after, you may have a mystery. Deciphering an inscrutable map written in a dead language could be a mystery, as could negotiating a byzantine network of courtiers to learn which minor lady is the object of the bachelor king’s secret affections. Of course, mysteries often ARE crime related: the homicide is the most famous kind of mystery, after all!
- The PCs are supposed to be able to solve the mystery at some point. If this isn’t true, why was it made into an adventure? Let unsolvable questions remain enigmas in the background. For example, I don’t know why that little “Check Horse” light comes on in my carriage even now and then, but I don’t go out and hire adventurers to bring their swords and try and solve it, now do I?
Now, assuming you agree with these tenets (and my unflappable hubris convinces me you do), let us proceed with how to deal with mysteries in the adventures. I have a few simple rules that seem to help me in these situations.
Rule #1: Remember what game you’re playing. Yes, obviously the game is D&D–that’s hardly what I mean. A tabletop roleplaying mystery is easy to imagine as a scene from a Sherlock Holmes novel or an episode of CSI, and it’s tempting to DM it along those lines. It’s also gravely mistaken. Both of those examples have characters written by an omniscient author, who allows his characters to find or discern exactly the right clues to proceed to the next bit of the story. The problem with this scenario in D&D, though, is that the players are “writing” their characters’ actions, and the omniscient author is the DM, who is limiting how much the players can know. Players are a) not physically in the locations their characters are, so they can’t passively notice things the DM doesn’t explicitly tell them, and b) they may not be professional detectives themselves anyway.
So what game are you really playing? Minute mysteries, or lateral thinking puzzles.
You might remember this game from camp or long car trips. It’s the one where a person gives you a few short, ambiguous sentences to outline a mystery scenario (usually involving death), and you have to deduce what happened using only yes/no questions. For example:
Abraxus and Bellisima and Corwyn and Deliah all live in the same cottage. Abraxus and Bellisima go out to buy armor, and when they return, Deliah is lying dead on the floor in a puddle of water and glass. It is obvious that Corwyn killed her, but Corwyn is not prosecuted nor severely punished.
Your PCs are in a similar situation during a mystery. The DM gives them a description of the event/item/scene, and the PCs don’t know what is relevant to the mystery and what is a red herring, or false clue. Is the buying of armor important? Does it matter that they live in a cottage rather than a manor? The players in the game have only two tools to solve the mystery: the players’ wits and their characters’ skill checks. Skill checks tend to be binary: did I make the DC or not? Yes? No. Either I get the clue, or I don’t.
The other problem is that players often do not know the right questions to ask. Have you figured out the solution for our example mystery? Here you go: Deliah is a goldfish, and Corwyn is a cat. Stupidly simple, right? Well, it would be if you were there, but it requires a nonlinear mental leap to start wondering if all four characters in the story are all humanoid…
DMs love to create clever, convoluted mysteries, but are sometimes surprised when players can’t unravel them on the spot, in real time, with limited information! Which brings me to my next rule.
Rule #2: Provide way more clues than you think you will need. If your mystery is about a man slain by a vampire, the victim’s pale complexion and the two punctures on his neck may be enough to clue the PCs in. But if, in your world, vampire saliva heals the fang wounds or something, you might need to add a shattered mirror in the room and a mangled iron holy symbol on the floor and a small empty glass vial with the church’s symbol etched on it. And then be ready for the PCs to use Heal skill to learn the man has very little blood left in his corpse.
It may seem that by leaving so much evidence at the scene of a crime, you’re showing your villain to be the most incompetent servant of evil ever, but it won’t seem that way to the players. Remember, you don’t have to give all the clues all at once, but keep giving them until the players are on the right track. Don’t waste the players’ time by allowing them to explore dead end after dead end. It may be fun once, but if done repeatedly it kills the fun of the game and makes the players frustrated.
Gauge how many clues you need to give by the player discussion and frustration level. Be ready to make up more clues, to add NPCs with relevant information that might be drawn out, etc., etc.
Corollary to Rule #2: False clues are fun, but beware of PC rationalization. Suppose in that last example, the man was slain by a poisonous snake that bit him in the neck as he slept, and you want to make it seem like a vampire got him. Perhaps you describe the neck wounds to the PCs and wait for them to make a Heal check to ask about the victim’s blood level. When they do, you triumphantly announce that the corpse has plenty of blood in it! In your mind, this exonerates all blood-suckers, but suddenly your players start saying things like, “Well, perhaps the vamp only fed a little, enough to kill him but not enough to be really noticeable,” and they continue with the vampire-as-killer line of reasoning.
Are they being obtuse? Did they just miss it? Probably not. It’s likely they are “meta-gaming” perhaps without even realizing it. In plain Common, they recognize that a DM is not, in fact, omniscient and since vampires are fictitious, the physics/biology surrounding them is up for debate. Therefore it’s possible (so their thinking goes) that the DM’s idea of how much blood a vampire takes during a feeding differs from the PCs’ perception, so they are giving the DM the benefit of the doubt and crafting a plausible rationalization to fit what the DM seems to be telling them.
To counter this, overload any one red herring with five or six correct clues. In the snake example, have the room full of mirrors, and the man be wearing a holy symbol around his neck. Have his complexion be a bit bluish around the lips and eyes, and maybe even let the PCs find a bit of dried snakeskin near a two-inch hole in one wall near the floor. Then the PCs may decide to use Heal to learn the cause of death, and figure out he was poisoned, not drained by a vampire.
Rule #3: If you use skill checks to parse out clues, never pre-assign DCs to the information! I know I’m breaking a cardinal DM rule here, but here’s the point: you want the PCs to end up with the information! If they don’t have it, they can’t solve the mystery and the story grinds to a halt. Make the PCs roll, because a) they trained these skills and like to use them, b) we’re all gamers and we like to roll dice, and c) you can divide up the clues unequally, favoring those who rolled best (so it looks like the high rollers beat higher DCs).
Rule #4: Each PC should find a clue or two. This is a basic rule we learned in kindergarten–share the toys with everyone, and everyone has more fun. If you don’t have a clue ready for that barbarian with no non-combat skills, figure out a way to make him feel useful anyway!
Rule #5: Crazy PC ideas should often net results. The PCs whose trained skills aren’t immediately applicable to a mystery will often either devote themselves to some mundane in-character task and let the other PCs take over the mystery, or they will undertake a completely off-the-wall and bizarre action trying to “contribute”. The former choice is a way of giving up and removing their “useless” character from the scene, and the latter behavior is usually an attempt to amuse themselves and the other players with their antics. Improvise a clue to give them in these situations.
Imagine the PCs come upon a cabin in the woods with a dead human inside. A broken sword lies next to him, and there are a lot of small, strange tracks outside. The DM knows this is the result of a kobold attack, and the ranger and the wizard immediately get to work on the mystery. After a couple rounds of Arcana and Nature checks by the other players, the paladin feels a bit useless and says she’s going to get a fire going in the hearth to stave off the chill of the encroaching night. The DM could let the paladin PC effectively remove her character from the scene, but how much more interesting to have her find a dead kobold under the woodpile outside? Especially if the corpse had the other part of the broken sword still in his guts? Now, the paladin has substantially contributed to (if not solved) the mystery, and it happened in a way that made the discovery seem natural and generated by the player, rather than spoon-fed by the DM. And of the course, the ranger will jump in again and roll Nature to determine that kobolds always try to bury the dead, but these must have been moving light and fast and didn’t have time and..and…and…..
Rule #6: Know when to change the story. The wise DM knows how to pick his battles. Imagine a prince, missing from his tower bedroom. You decide he was surprised in his sleep, rolled up in his bedsheet and tied, and carried out the doorway by his kidnappers. You describe the scene of struggle and tell the players that the bedsheet is missing, but a player gets fixated on the idea that the sheet is missing because the prince struggled with his attackers, realized the fight was hopeless, grabbed the sheet and leaped out the tower window, using the sheet as a makeshift parachute!
Well, that image is a very exciting scenario (and, in fact, much cooler than a heroic prince getting rolled up like a cheap carpet), so the other players jump on the bandwagon and connect the other clues to see how this might be plausible. They run outside to the ground below the tower window and search around. Swallow your pride here. Does the means of egress really matter? No, not this time, so: lo and behold! The PCs find the discarded bedsheet and spot barefooted tracks leading towards the woods. However, they also discover four horse tracks converging on the fleeing prince, signs of a scuffle, and then only four horse tracks leading away, with one horse’s prints deeper than they were before…
You see? The prince is still captured, you have an even better story of how it happened, and the players feel clever for figuring it out…because they did. Remember that D&D is a cooperative story, and your players never need know how much of the story was in your notes, and how much they wrote themselves!
So you see, Regdar, even a fighter may have much to contribute to a mystery. Keep your chin up, your head down, and your bowstring dry.
Until next time,
Pernicious DM.
