Police Procedurals

[virgil]

What needs to be kept in mind when making a game/campaign where the players are cops? It doesn't matter whether you're angel cops in Finality, Men in Black in alien-infested NYC, or even Shadowrunners with a badge in Seattle.

In any mystery-based game, you can't assume a party of Sherlock, and instead permit the players to keep gathering clues until they finally accrue enough to solve the case; no mission failure because you didn't think to check the heel of the left shoe. The worst your players should suffer when they're being thick (or more likely, you're being obstuse) is in-game delay in solving the case or even an escalation of the stakes.

[name_here]

Well, when in doubt, you can resolve a clue shortage by having another corpse turn up.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Basic principles?

The PCs are part of a hierarchy, which can affect social dynamics significantly.

Don't be surprised if they expect other police to pull their own weight.

The players have been put in a position of authority, and they may try using it to their advantage.

[hogarth]

How do you make a mystery interesting in an RPG? Beats me. In my experience, having the GM lead me by the nose through a mystery is about as interesting as listening to someone describe the dream they had last night. I.e., not very. Mystery games are mostly GM masturbation.

[Lago PARANOIA]

You should always have multiple paths to victory. This is true for any game, but it's especially important for police procedurals because otherwise you'll have players butting against the wall repeatedly and then stalling out.

For example, if clue-hunting is going poorly then you should encourage them to go hunt for witnesses. If hunting for witnesses is going poorly, you should have them interrogate suspects. If that's going poorly, you should have them do indirect investigations (like reading the newspaper) until you can drop a new avenue of investigation.

Secondly, you shouldn't force players to solve mysteries in one straight shot. If the trail is cold then you can and should have the players work on a new mystery. Not just to keep the game going but ask because new mysteries are a great way to re-open old cases. For this reason, I strongly suspect that you do the Ace Attorney Investigations/Shield/The Wire route of having an overarching metaplot so that A.) players have yet another route to victory even if the leads peter out and B.) so that things don't seem quite so contrived when you use the resolution of other cases to aid in others. It'll break people's suspension of disbelief if solving an unrelated bank robbery helps them find the Zodiac Killer, but not if arresting a bookie helps them find Bugsy Siegel.

Thirdly, you'll need to decide right away on how much you're willing to let players get away with being antiheroes. If malfeasant police officers can pretty much get away with anything as long as they do minimal ass-covering like in The Shield then you need to let players know. Similarly, if in your game doing that is the equivalent of fiddling with a Deck of Many Things like in Law and Order then you also need to make that clear. Furthermore, everyone needs to be on the same page as far as doing shady shit is allowed.

Fourthly, like most police procedurals you're going to have to lift job segregation in order to aid the story. Lab technicians should be allowed to help question witnesses, prosecutors should be allowed in the crime lab, and police officers should be assisting hackers. You don't (and shouldn't) have omnidisciplinary police officers but you can't have jobs function as an in-game bottleneck. In real life or television it's acceptable to have the police officer protagonists choke their chicken while they wait for results back from the coroner protagonists, but you can't do that in a game.

[hyzmarca]

Or you can do the Columbo/Criminal Intent thing. The PCs know who the killer is from the very beginning, they just have to prove it.

[Maj]

I don't run many games, but the ones I have run were mysteries. I did it map-style and placed clues in various locations on the map. It ran a lot like a scavenger hunt - collect these puzzle pieces (clues) and when you have enough of them, you'll be able to see what the picture is supposed to be (but you don't need them all to get the idea). The clues also usually pointed to another place on the map where a clue could be found.

Now that I think about it, I probably subconsciously based the method on the Clue board game. But I didn't see that at the time.

[codeGlaze]

Pretty sure the Alexandrian's entire 'node based' game design was based around police procedural as the example. And it was pretty good.

[Neon Sequitur]

What needs to be kept in mind when making a game/campaign where the players are cops? It doesn't matter whether you're angel cops in Finality, Men in Black in alien-infested NYC, or even Shadowrunners with a badge in Seattle.

In any mystery-based game, you can't assume a party of Sherlock, and instead permit the players to keep gathering clues until they finally accrue enough to solve the case; no mission failure because you didn't think to check the heel of the left shoe. The worst your players should suffer when they're being thick (or more likely, you're being obstuse) is in-game delay in solving the case or even an escalation of the stakes.

I've found one of the most important things to keep in mind when running mysteries is the difference between genres. A case that would completely stump a group of modern-day investigators might be trivial for a group of future cops with high tech crime fighting gear, or a fantasy group with magi, alchemists and psychics. A criminal in each of those milieu is more than likely aware of the PCs' capabilities, and will plan accordingly, to the extent possible.

[phlapjackage]

Pretty sure the Alexandrian's entire 'node based' game design was based around police procedural as the example. And it was pretty good.

That's exactly the first thing I thought of, too.

The three-clue rule

Node-based scenarios

[Blade]

One thing I like to do in mysteries and investigations adventures is to always have a backup solution, that comes with a cost.
An attack on the PC will give new clues, but at the cost of some wounds.

Also, as Raymond Chandler said: "When in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns"

[Ancient History]

Also works with an orc with a crossbow, a Yithian with a ray-gun, etc.

[Username17]

An important thing about mysteries is to be adaptable. The players don't know what the story is, so they'll be throwing wild ass guesses out all the time. Some of their ideas will be way better than your ideas, and you should just change things so that they are right. They'll feel clever and the adventure will be more satisfying.

-Username17

[mlangsdorf]

SJGames has two good books on investigations and mysteries: GURPS Mysteries and Monster Hunters: the Mission.

Mysteries covers a lot of the above ideas in the detail, such as having multiple paths and making sure that the players always find at least one clue in each scene - but letting them skip scenes if they find enough extra clues/make the right intuitive leaps.

MH: the Mission has an interesting system for resolving investigations mechanically. PCs use their various skills and abilities to find Clues, and then they use other abilities and skills to analyze those Clues to answer the Who, What, Why, When of the mystery. Analysis rolls are made at huge penalties, offset by having Clues. When the PCs succeed in their analysis rolls, the GM tells them the answer.

In play, the system works really well. The players are free to theorize and guess, and can even jump the gun ("we know it's a vampire at 1202 Rose Lane, let's get him") but if they're stumped but keep plugging away, eventually the GM gives them the answer. My players seemed to really appreciate that eventually their theories were confirmed or denied, and for the most part they had solved the mystery before they had completed the analysis. Though there were a couple of points where I had to say "look, your 3 characters are super-geniuses, they sherlock'd this through some connections that neither you nor I are smart enough to see." Which was also fine, because their characters were smarter than the players.

[name_here]

MH:M sounds like a pretty neat system, although it'd probably be disappointing if you were all fired up for a clever mystery and then as soon as you see a bloodstain you roll stupidly well and declare that it is the werewolf at Crescent Lane because someone destroyed the magical circle that restrained him every full moon. Though I assume the penalties are large enough you need to get at least a couple clues before you can pull that off, especially if it uses a system with a good curve.

I guess what I'd suggest is setting things up so that they'll get new clues automatically if in-game time passes but suffer some form of penalty in the process. Say, if they let a murder case run for a few days, someone comes forward to say one of their friends had mentioned seeing something that might be helpful and now they've gone missing. Or someone else finds a clue checking over the crime scene... and it's their dastardly arch-rival who is trying to score a promotion to Internal Affairs by showing them up. That way the players are never stuck but have an incentive to try to do as much as possible themselves. In a more modern setting, you can delegate adding clues to "the lab"; wait long enough and the science team will tell you what the murder weapon was but not who used it, or decisively rule out a suspect once you've compiled a list.

[Chamomile]

The best advice I ever heard for setting up mysteries is the rule of three: You can rely on the PCs to discover and notice the importance of one clue if you have at least three at the scene. So you can either have three different clues that will lead them each in different but equally fruitful directions, or you can have three clues that will all lead them the same way, or whatever.

[sabs]

I want to reiterate what Frank said.
Sometimes your PC's will come up with a theory that is just more fun than what you had planned. So change your plan, and let their theory work out to be right. Also, never have stupid puzzles or mind games they need to solve. If the players need to know how you think to solve the mystery.. you're doing it wrong. But you also need a solid skill system with multiple avenues for finding clues and directions.