@Murder Mystery RtD
The most important thing to consider here is the mystery aspect. At a basic level, this means that someone knows something that someone else doesn't. In a murder mystery, people are being killed and everyone is trying to figure out whodunnit. This means we need a jury that the potential murderers are trying to convince of their innocence. We could make the jury a set of NPCs and have a quantifiable set of rules governing their suspicion of each player, but that really takes the fun out of the finger-pointing. We need a jury of real people, and that could easily be made the audience's role.
I like the idea of the audience having a limited view of everything going on, while the players see everything from their perspective and submit actions through PM. But we still have the problem of the audience already being pretty damn sure that ALL of the players are murderers. It's not a question of whodunnit anymore. There has to be another layer of motives. Maybe not all the players are murderers? Maybe there are also players that are there to steal a certain item, or some other strange goal?
Any idea how we can justify the audience jury and give the players something to shift blame for?
Right now, I'm thinking CSI- basically, you have an array of suspects, most of whom are guilty of
something, whether it is infidelity or larceny or extortion or what have you. The thing is, only one is guilty of murder, and that's the only one the audience/jury is terribly concerned with. Thus, the goal of the game for the players is not to be blameless, but to escape with as little blame as possible. For bonus points, different motives could lead to different victory conditions- Alice is the murderer and only wants to avoid murder, but Bob would rather do time for murder than have the jury find out that he was cheating on his wife, and Charlie didn't actually do anything and considers any arrest a loss. The goal for the audience is to catch the murderer, and the rest is just bonus points.
Further thought- how is the audience determining guilt? Are they going solely on witness testimony (the admittedly biased opinions of the players?) Do they have that limited window of "certain knowledge" to act on? Is there an investigator that uncovers evidence?
Oooh, actually, expanding on that investigator bit- every player has done something bad, and there is evidence of that wrongdoing somewhere in the museum. The players
are the investigators as well, searching for evidence related to their crimes as well as evidence related to others- they have the option to hide evidence they find, reveal it to everyone, or try to alter it. This covers people trying to create an alibi by planting evidence supporting it and removing evidence that contradicts it- for example, the Murderer finds evidence related to the Theft crime, and alters it to make it appear the Murderer was responsible instead of the actual thief. Or the Murderer straight removes evidence of the murder and creates proof he was smoking in the Lounge that night. I'm thinking a certain number of players (at least one) ARE innocent, just wrong place wrong time, and play the role of investigator straight to clear themselves.
Figuring out how much (and what kind) of evidence gets left behind could be tricky, perhaps tied to how well players roll during the Murder stage. If it's directly 1-1 for wherever the players roll poorly, they'll know where to look for evidence. I think were I to do it I'd keep a running log of all the 1's and/or 2's throughout the phase, and then in the early morning right before the Accusation stage generate evidence correlating to their number of failures and give the player a Reflection check to see how much evidence they KNOW they left behind.
Well! I ran on a bit there, didn't I?
Author
Topic: Roller's Block (RTD Brainstorming Thread) (HAPPY LATE BIRTHDAY) (Derm is 5k) (Read 742979 times)