Stop Rolling to Find the Clue

Here’s a mystery-solving rule I wish more RPGs would adopt: stop rolling to find the damn clues. If there's a bloody footprint on the floor, the players should be able to see the bloody footprint. If there's a letter in the dead man's desk, they should be able to find the letter. If there's something unusual about the murder scene, don’t make the players roll a Perception check (or whatever) to determine whether their characters notice. You built the mystery around that information. So give it to ‘em. 

I’m thinking about this a lot because I'm working on an RPG called Roosevelt’s Detectives, about a special squad of detectives working for Theodore Roosevelt in 1890s New York. I've been trying to figure out the best way to model mysteries in an RPG, and I keep coming back to the same idea: the mystery should be solved by the players, not by their dice. If the players search the victim’s room and roll badly, what exactly has been accomplished? I haven’t made the mystery itself more challenging. I’ve simply hidden the adventure from the people who are supposed to be playing it.

That doesn’t mean I want a game with no dice rolls. Quite the opposite. There are plenty of things a detective might attempt where failure is interesting. Can you get a nervous witness to talk? Can you identify an exotic poison? Can you convince somebody to let you examine the body? Can you establish that two pieces of evidence are connected? Those are great things to use dice for because the outcome could significantly change the story. But finding the evidence shouldn’t normally be one of them. Without the evidence, there is no story. Give the players the facts. Let them make the connections. Let them come up with the wrong theory. Let them accuse the wrong guy. That's where the actual detective work (and fun) happens.

So I think RPG mysteries work better when we stop treating information like a reward that has to be unlocked with a successful skill test of some sort. The players aren't watching a detective on TV. They are the detectives. If they search the desk, tell them what's in the desk. If they examine the body, tell them what they can see. Then get out of their way and see what they do with that evidence. Maybe they'll figure out who the murderer is. Maybe they'll completely mess it up. Either way, at least they solved--or failed to solve--the mystery. The dice shouldn’t do that for them.