No investigations?
contracycle:
I find myself really puzzled by a statement Ron makes in the Air Patrol Ronnies thread:
Quote
Let's talk about investigations as game processes. More blunt facts: players don't investigate anything, or rather, not when "anything" means a fictional situation. They never do; it's not possible. Investigations may be venues for something else interesting, in which case the "something else" needs to be understood as the point of play. Or they may not, and if not, they're merely transitions and Color in terms of what really matters, which in many cases is what is discovered (and hence guaranteed to be discovered).
I... have to disagree. I would claim that I have experience investigations both as a player and as a GM. We've discussed trails and all that stuff before, so perhaps that doesn't need to be reprised, but I am thinking of a prticular moment of play that, it seems to me, does demonstrate real investigation in action.
It's the kind of thing where you have players riffing off each other, where player 1 raises factoid A, and player 2, raises factoid B, which they have learned through play, and they go back and forth a bit and come up with a hypothesis, which they can go out and test. And that is what they then do, and the GM feeds the back results, and that serves to confirm or refute the hypothesis, and therefore they either have a new direction of travel, or go back to speculating about other possible solutions.
I've seen this and done this a lot. Furthermore, I would claim that the players find it engaging; I know I certainly do when I am on of them. More specifically, I mean that to my eyes as the GM I see players interested, engaged, animated, excited. I say they like putting together the pieces. I don't really know if this is or isn't what Ron referred to.
I played in along running Mage game that was heavily investigative. It was a classic mysterious-murders-in-the-city plotline, and we did all sorts of investigative stuff. We correlated the victims by income and job and gender and even eye colour. We plotted their locations against a map, and against time, and against astrological symbols. We interviewed their friends and families; we broke into evidence lockups to perform our own analyses. We extended the search back beyond a human lifetime, this being WoD. And all of this was player-initiated.
I'm well aware that investigative type scenarios have weaknesses, and that they can often collapse into the GM leading players by the nose. I'm not disputing the dangers of the form. But to say it never happens, that it's impossible? That seems a bit strong. I would come back to this weekly game with new ideas, having spent a lot of thought in the mean while as to how we might progress the case. I thoroughly enjoyed this as a process, as an experience. How is this not "really investigating"?
David Berg:
Gareth,
The coolest part of your Mage game was the data synthesis and analysis, right? The data collection process was just as Ron said: (a) a means to an end, and (b) opportunities for cool color.
It sounds to me like you and Ron are simply using the word "investigation" differently. He's using it for data collection, and you're using it for the whole process of collection-synthesis-analysis. (Just like when two roleplayers argue about "discovery", and one means "the GM tells me what I see next", while the other means "I analyzed the data and found a pattern!")
Or maybe not. I can't make heads or tails of "it's not possible to investigate a fictional situation". I've had Call of Cthulhu scenes that exactly reproduced the process and experience of actual data collection. Which is boring as fuck.
contracycle:
Maybe? I don't know. I mean, do you consider breaking into a cop shop to lift the physical evidence "data collection" or "the point of play"? I'm not really seeing a hard line between the two.
The view that this sort of action is the point of play makes a certain sense, but it was to contrast with that position that I wanted to show that we enjoyed the other bit, the analysis, as well. Even though we weren't rolling dice, it was not excluded from being engaging and interesting in it's own right.
David Berg:
Hmm. How about this:Breaking into the cop shot could be a viable point of play.Seeing the physical evidence could be a viable point of play.Poking around inside the cop shop to potentially find the physical evidence or not find it could not be a viable point of play.
By "data collection" I meant the task of finding data, not observing or physically taking found data. Perhaps I should have said "data mining".
stefoid:
"It's the kind of thing where you have players riffing off each other, where player 1 raises factoid A, and player 2, raises factoid B, which they have learned through play, and they go back and forth a bit and come up with a hypothesis, which they can go out and test. And that is what they then do, and the GM feeds the back results, and that serves to confirm or refute the hypothesis, and therefore they either have a new direction of travel, or go back to speculating about other possible solutions."
Personally, this is a style of play that I dont like. Its basically the players guessing what the GM wants. Its kind of like a more involved version of 'guess the number Im thinking' Is it 4? no. Is it 17? no, but Ill give you a hint, its less than 15 and more than 2. Is it 9? no.
Yes, it isnt as random and arbitrary as that, but its still a bunch of players (not characters) trying to guess/deduce what the GM thinks the clues should mean.
No, I dont know the solution to that if someone does , please tell me. Even in games that arent supposed to be investigation games, there are often periods of play where the characters are trying to work out what is going on or why something is happening, so I think the situation is broadly relevant.
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