Monster Hunter and the Research Minigame

[JigokuBosatsu]

Is "Black man" St. George's character class?

[radthemad4]

If they actually had someone on the show who had middle-school-level awareness of mythologies, there'd be no show...

Monsters work differently in different franchises, so the common weaknesses you find in the ur texts may or may not apply.

I think the only way research can be difficult is if there's a ton of filler in the library or online or whatever that doesn't apply, and you have to verify which version (if any) of the monster actually applies while fighting the monster, or using clues left by the monster.

[Username17]

I stopped watching Grimm when everyone put on the idiot hat for the end of the first season. The amount of bullshit and idiocy required to keep the wife out of the loop was just too much. I couldn't handle the show anymore.

That being said, you have to accept a certain amount of apparent idiocy in people in order to give other characters the opportunity to drop infodumps on the audience. I mean, you never have Captain Picard cut off engineering by saying "I know what a transverse warp bubble is, I'm the captain of a galaxy class starship. Do you think I'm some sort of caveman out here? Just fucking do it!" because the audience needs to know roughly what the hell is going on, which means that somebody in-world has to tell somebody else in-world.

This is why having actual naive characters on hand is such a good dramatic device. Having children or foreigners asking what exactly the fucking fuck is happening is a pretty good excuse for characters in the show to talk down to the point that they are actually addressing the audience (who genuinely doesn't live in the imaginary world and thus has no idea what you use to fight vampires, stop FTL travel, or track invisible monsters or whatever). Because in the absence of that device, you have to have particle physicists ask why neutrinos are important or trained monster hunters get told in all seriousness that werewolves don't like silver. Because somebody still has to get told this shit in character or the audience won't hear it.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

Is "Black man" St. George's character class?

Yes

Naw, it's a classless system. I wanted to see if people were going to comment on the playable dog or playable Black man first.

[Prak]

I was more amused that St. George's primary defining characteristic seemed to be that he was black and had a gun. The playable dog is notable because it's not generally assumed that a player could play a dog if they wanted (even in werewolf, the wolf you play is actually a hybrid of wolf and sapient).

My main issue with Grimm is their seemingly inconsistent magic system. The creatures obviously physically change (as opposed to dropping a glamour) but it's possible to permanently damage a creature's monster form, which, if they physically change each time, would essentially be regrown every time they change. Apparently it's supposed to be more like a quantum entangled form or something where two bodies occupy the same space, and share a mind. I think. So when they change they're shifting which body is presented. Which would make permanent damage of the monstrous form possible, but it should also not have a transition, they should just flicker. Also they can partially change (like a blutbaden [wolf-creature] changing just his hands) which again shouldn't really be possible under this model.

This is all not mentioning that their should be some physical way for creatures to be detected even in guise or death. A blutbaden should be able to say "hey, that guy smells like baurschwein (pig-creature)" and an autopsy should reveal some strange organ or tissue or something that looks "unusual, but not alarmingly so" to human medical physicians and clearly marks the dead as a creature to creature medical physicians.

[Kaelik]

This is all not mentioning that their should be some physical way for creatures to be detected even in guise or death. A blutbaden should be able to say "hey, that guy smells like baurschwein (pig-creature)" and an autopsy should reveal some strange organ or tissue or something that looks "unusual, but not alarmingly so" to human medical physicians and clearly marks the dead as a creature to creature medical physicians.

1) Yeah the whole "and then he talks to someone and causes them to panic a a bit so that they volgue and he knows what they are" thing is really fucking tired. I mean, does literally every vessen go around volgueing every time they get even minorly upset by a conversation? Can't they ever have a bad guy who isn't a Royal but who can not volgue if they don't want to.

2) Well remember, they all have two DNA strands superimposed, or whatever, that I think one of the Coroners specifically talked about when they had a vessen corpse. So... wtf. If literally the coroners can see this shit why isn't it one of the most well known weird things in the world, because literally every vessen corpse shows up as specially not human on autopsy. (And frankly, the test would work on living ones just as well, since the test is "look at their DNA under a microscope").

[silva]

But I agree that it doesn't make much sense to have a research minigame where there's a chance of failure if that never happens in the underlying setting.

Isnt this the point of Trail of Cthulhu ? Guaranteeing the characters will always find the clues required for going forward ?

[Grek]

It seems like the ideal way to do this is:

1. Every player gets +X to Research and +Y to Error, where X and Y are numbers between 0 and 6.
2. Once the bad guy is first introduced, the players can start suggesting hypotheses about the baddie. Each player gets to make 3 of them.
3. The GM notes down all of the hypotheses and marks them as either true or false.
4. Whenever the players have a research phase, each player rolls their Research number as a dicepool, while the GM rolls the sum of everyone's Error numbers as a second dicepool.
5. Each player can spend 1 success to ask the GM for a true negative result or 3 successes for a true positive result. These are drawn from the hypothesis pool first and from the GM's imagination if that runs out. They can also spend 2 successes to ask about a specific hypothesis.
6. The GM can spend 3 successes out of the Error pool to give a false negative in place of a true negative, 2 successes to give a false positive in place of a true negative. Any unspent error points are carried over to the next Research test.
7. If a character tests a monster directly instead of going off of indirect clues, they always get a true result. This requires they be near the monster however.
8. If a player discovers that none of their hypotheses were true, they get an Edge point.

Step 3 mostly just needs a brief reminder to the GM that this is a cooperative storytelling game, and therefore they shouldn't veto every single player hypothesis.
Step 2 needs both an explanation to the players as to why they would ever want to suggest a strength for the monster instead of a weakness and a reminder that constantly suggesting the same power over and over is dumb as hell and you shouldn't do it.
Steps 1, 6 and 7 will probably require the most rules text, as you will definitely want to have various player abilities that modify the basic rules. As an example: It would be interesting to have a Naive trait that it cost make 1 less error point for the GM to lie to you, but lets you ask for true positives for 2 points instead of 3. Or a Skeptic trait that prevents you from asking for true positives and prevents you from getting false positives.