I’ve been looking at Mutant City Blues. I’m very fond of the Gumshoe line of game, but recently I find myself questioning the big idea behind them. As Robin D. Laws sees it investigative games (such as Call of Cthulhu and Nemesis) become derailed when players fail skill rolls and their characters fail to spot vital clues. His resolution to this issue is simple – assume the investigators are competent enough to find the clues and give any character who has even the lowest level in the applicable investigative skill the clue. Then to allow higher ranks in the skill to provide additional flavour text or provide the clue in a less ambiguous format. This in theory shifts the emphasis from finding clues to the interpretation of clues. My concern is that by removing the investigative roll the game is removing some of the suspense from the game.
Continue reading about Gumshoe – Investigative Skill Rolls »
Friday, January 9th, 2009
My long-standing Friday online RPG evening has suffered over the past year from a lack of reliable players. We have literally gone through more than a dozen players with only a single one who shows up reliably. Naturally this has kind of torpedoed each campaign as I’ve set them up for a group and then suddenly find myself with a single character. So we’ve decided to let the player go solo and are building the game around that concept. What I’ve come up with is a mixture of the X-Files, Alias, Hellboy, and The Esoterrorists RPG. However, since what we want is something that’s a little more action oriented we’re going to use the Spirit of the Century rules. Thus we have a supernatural investigative game with the potential for lots of pulpy action as well. However, The Esoterrorists contains a lot of good advice and approaches to investigative roleplaying which I am planning on directly incorporating into our game: For example, finding core clues is a given.
Once the game gets moving I’ll post up some chatlogs of the AP so readers can see how the SotC rules work as well as get an idea of how an investigative RPG (one of the more difficult genres to run IMO) can work.
Continue reading about Using SotC for a lone wolf game »
