Why the clues your mystery needs should be found automatically, what the dice are still for, and how to run it at the table.
By Carlo · 3 min read
Learn how to keep a mystery moving when players miss a clue by relocating information, making failures costly, and preparing multiple ways to uncover each secret.
5 min read
Do you make your players roll to find clues? Most GMs do, and I'd like to talk you out of it.
Take the barn in The Dragon of Thornwick, the sample campaign I wrote for Wyrdli. Under a charred beam there's a brass button torn off a coat, and it's the best lead in the barn towards the man paying for the fires. The fighter searches, you ask for Investigation, and the die shows a 4. You can tell her she finds nothing and leave the lead under the beam, or you can hand her the button anyway and pretend the roll meant something (we've all done it, right?). Either way the roll didn't add anything to the game. What's even more worrying is that the more you do it, the less each roll will mean for your players.
Because most of us learned on games where searching is a skill like climbing a wall or picking a lock. When a climb fails, the fighter falls, takes some damage and the game carries on. However, when the search for the clue the case hangs on fails, the game has nowhere to go, and you spend the next forty minutes watching the players question the innkeeper about his cousin.
My rule is simple. If the players need a clue to move forward and they search the right place, they get it. No roll.
GUMSHOE, the investigation system Robin D. Laws designed (it's the engine under Trail of Cthulhu and Night's Black Agents), has worked like this for years. An investigator with the right ability who looks in the right place gets the core clue, ALWAYS. Points pay for extras, like a deeper read of the scene, never for the clue itself.
The usual objection is that the mystery disappears if the players find everything. Well, finding the button doesn't solve anything. They still have to work out whose coat it came from, and whether the baron's court wizard is the kind of man who would frame a dragon. They can get it wrong, too: the chandler's ledger shows he sold the lamp oil, so he makes a very convenient suspect. The only thing they can't do is lose the evening to a 4.
The real deal in investigative campaigns is not finding the clues, but working our the mystery underneath them.
Before the session, go through your clues and mark the ones the case needs. Those never get a roll. When someone searches the right place, just tell them: "Under the charred beam there's a brass button, torn off a coat. Fancy. Nobody in this village dresses like that." Then shut up and let them argue about it.
If they never search the right place at all, that's a different problem, and the answer is giving each secret more than one way in (I wrote about that in My players missed the clue. Now what?).
Wyrdli keeps every clue inside its scene, so when the players walk into the barn, the run screen shows you the button. You read it out instead of flipping through notes while the whole table stares at you. After the session the campaign remembers what they found and what's still buried. Thornwick is open in the demo, no account needed: wyrd.li/demo.
Next time someone searches the barn, leave the dice where they are and give them the button.
