RPGaDay 2021 - Day Seventeen

 

CRIME + FOUND

I don’t know how many times an adventure involving the investigation of a CRIME (or similar) has come to a grinding halt because the pivotal club - whether an physical object or vital piece of information simply cannot be FOUND by the characters!? Reading through or planning out the adventure I’ll be so excited, thinking “Oooh, this is brilliant, for sure  they’ll find this clue here and move on to the next stage!” But when it comes to playing… If the clue is in a desk drawer, the Characters either completely ignore the office or study altogether - maybe they painstakingly explored all the empty rooms on every level of the building and got bored and decided to skip the last few because “nothin here…” or when they do get to room and I describe the room and the desk, no one suggests looking in the desk (which, if they did, I’d just say YOU FIND THE THING!) so I let them all make a search or notice or whatever appropriate skill roll there is in the given system… and the ALL FAIL!? So they leave the room without that key to the whole conspiracy or whatever. What do you do then!? 

I mean, you CAN just relocated it into the next room that they DO go into, but then the same thing happens all over again - no one looks in… the closet, or whatever place it could possibly go in the room… and the all fail their search checks again… because no ono put point into search skill despite you telling them at the outset of the campaign that it THIS WILL BE AN INVESTIGATIVE CAMPAIGN… it all gets very frustrating for both players and GMs, very quickly.

Now with “Fail Forward” introduced into so many games, you can just say, “Well, [despite FAILING YOUR SEARCH CHECK] you find the thing in the drawer… YAY! BUT, you trip an alarm or made so much noise breaking the locked drawer open that you alert the lurking minions/cultists to your presence or a nearby passerby hears you and call the police or whatever, to introduce a bit of static and a new problem to deal with… 

The one problem I’ve found with “Fail Forward” is if they FAIL everything - a) it feels like you’re just GIVING them everything, and  b) it generates SO MUCH static and new problems to deal with, it makes it impossible to move forward and complete the investigation/adventure in a reasonable amount of time… what should have been an evening’s adventuring drags on for four more sessions just dealing with all the problems they generated by not being able to do the thing… which gets tiresome, really fast! 

Maybe with some groups you just need to stick to classic dungeon bashes - kick in the next door, murder all the monsters, loot their bodies and repeat…