red-headed android

this is part 1 of my RPG mechanics hall of fame. mechanics are good and important and these are my favourite ones.

so you’re playing Dungeons and Dragons or whatever and you come to this door in a dungeon and you ask if there are traps. and the DM, they say, oh, you don’t see any traps. and then you open the door and naturally the door is a mimic and you get grappled and take 2d6+1 acid damage.

isn’t that kind of bullshit?

and it’s not really a problem with D&D. the game encourages you to roll, like, Perception here, but there are no rules codifying what the result of this should be because the designers deliberately made skills more lightweight in 5th edition. mid mechanics, sure, but not problematic ones. it’s not even a problem with the DM necessarily. maybe they didn’t think you wanted to know if there was a mimic, only traps specifically. maybe they thought you were looking for traps in the room and not on the door. dumb mistakes sure, but honest ones.

but it’s still kind of bullshit, right?

and it feels kind of bullshit, even if you can logic your way into a position where it wasn’t anyone’s fault, because in tabletop roleplaying games, the other players and especially the GM are your only source of information about the world. this is not Baldur’s Gate III where if you miss something obvious you feel stupid. this is a communication problem. it’s a real life conversation where if you miss something that’s meant to be obvious, it’s often genuinely somebody else’s fault.

and that’s REALLY bad! that’s a terrible situation to be in! old-school style gaming has entire codes of etiquette and GM guides on how to describe stuff floating around online for this reason. traditions passed down from GMs of the past, all for avoiding miscommunication. this is why battle maps exist. this is why roll20 exists. we spend a LOT of time making sure that we are communicating properly what we’re doing, what the world is like, and our and others’ places in it–because if we don’t communicate exactly right, misunderstandings can break immersion, breed resentment, and result in a table of people all having different ideas of what’s going on.

but there is a hero to save us. a hard-boiled noir hero who smells like whiskey and is probably called something like ‘Malone’. that’s right it’s GUMSHOE.

if you haven’t heard of GUMSHOE, it’s a family of roleplaying games about doing investigations and solving mysteries. as you might imagine, this is the kind of genre where it’s very, very important that the mystery solvers are ultra-clear on what the clues are and how they fit together. information is more important in these games than in almost any other RPG ever published.

if the GM miscommunicates or players misinterpret, the internal logic of the game breaks, or people make decisions based on wrong assumptions. this is a problem. GUMSHOE in particular needs to solve it real bad.

and it solves it with a hall of fame worthy mechanic called investigative skills.

basically, when you enter a scene or a segment of the investigation, the GM has a clue you’re supposed to find there. your character has a bunch of investigative skills–Forensics, Occultism, Mail Tampering, whatever. if you describe how you use one of these investigative skills in a way that could get the clue, the GM must give you the clue, which is always relevant to the broader mystery. then, if you use a particularly well-suited skill or spend a resource (‘points’ in those skills) to dig deeper in a scene, you’re rewarded with additional clues that are less important, but feel good to find–and which, again, must contain useful information, or else the GM is cheating.

see what’s important here? it’s not that the skills have points, or that investigative skills are a different category from normal skills. those are both clever ideas, but the part that’s really amazing is that there’s a mechanic for asking the GM something, seeking something from them about the world that is well beyond the ability of an average human being to discover, and the GM must give you a true answer. the game guarantees a true answer.

every RPG should have a mechanic like this. all of them, and i’m not joking. make the player spend a resource, tell them they can only do it sometimes, whatever–the point is that players having a reliable way to ask questions about the world and get true, direct, pointed answers about EXACTLY what they wanted to know is absolutely essential.

you might say that the GM can just… be honest, right? why do we need a mechanic? like, why would the GM not tell the player the answer?

assuming the GM isn’t being a dick on purpose, and isn’t married to some super special mystery they want to preserve as long as possible (if you are a GM, do not do this), there are a lot of reasons a GM might not give the answer the player is looking for. here are some.

sometimes, players don’t ask the question they want the answer to. they ask a sneaky oblique question instead, because they want to surprise the GM somehow and they’re worried that if they ask the real question the GM will punish them for it, or catch on to what they’re doing and stop them. the rules forcing the GM to answer honestly, and emphasizing that the information received will be in-world and impartial, goes a long way towards dispelling that anxiety.

sometimes, the GM thinks the player is asking a different question. ‘how many orcs are there’, they say, and the GM goes ‘too many for Sleep to hit at once’. that’s not an answer! what if the player wanted to know how many orcs there were so they knew how much food they had to prepare? a rule that encourages the player to ask for exactly what they want also encourages the GM to respond with exactly the answer to that question. ritualizing questions and the search for information makes people stop, and that makes them think and consider their words. this makes the resulting information exchange clearer.

sometimes, the GM gives an answer that is kind of bad, and the system provides no real recourse for the player. maybe the player asks for how high the castle wall is and the GM is like, oh, it’s too high for you to see up. or maybe they say oh, it’s way taller than you. these are non-answers. the player can ask ‘please use units of measurement’, but not every player will do that. some are anxious, and some will make assumptions based on the bad answer and decide they don’t need to ask again. if the rules prime the GM to consider player questions Very Important, they will give fewer answers that are kind of bad.

so that’s why GUMSHOE’s investigative skills, and the answers they allow you to get with certainty, are good. but we can do better. we can do way better and go way deeper. there’s a whole world out there.

in the teen superhero game Masks, for instance, there’s a move called Pierce the Mask. when you use it, you get to ask questions about a character–from a short list, each with explicit instructions on how to answer them–and whoever controls that character has to give those answers fully and honestly. there’s a massive amount of structure and certainty to these question rules, and that’s because Masks cares a lot that your characters should be able to get accurate information about people’s motivations, thoughts, plans and feelings. because it’s a game about people and relationships, and also about foiling villainous plots. this is an all-star mechanic in terms of reinforcing the themes of the game.

do you want to know information about how the economy works in a world with supers? screw you, the GM doesn’t have to tell you that, focus on your homework & fighting Dr. Destructo. but, do you want to know information about Dr. Destructo’s evil plan and tragic-yet-exploitable backstory? we will literally strap the GM to a chair and not let them get up until they’ve answered that question to your heart’s content.

clear, effective communication is the most important skill that a GM can have. it’s also extremely important for players. work on it. develop it. spend effort on trying to be as clear as possible. listen well. be honest, and never lie. much of the improvement you’ll see will come from you. but remember that when you play a game, even one made out of words, the rules of the game matter. consider trying out a game that uses a structured exchange of information, one that forces the GM to confer information in a particular way, that assures you the answers to your questions are the infallible truth of the world you’re envisioning with your friends. it takes a weight off.

in the game i’m developing right now, BLOODY CAPES, one of the core moves that all characters have access to is very simple. you ask the GM a question, describe how you’re finding the answer, and the GM will either tell you the answer, tell you you’ll need to try another way and suggest one, or force you to spend a point from a resource of yours in exchange for the answer. because the answers to questions feel so valuable–they’re worth a point, damn it, that’s something real–the rules put careful emphasis on making sure the player and GM are asking and answering the right question before anything gets spent.

i don’t consider this a revolutionary version of this mechanic by any means, but it is one that’s thematically relevant to the game’s genre, which is, broadly, ‘gritty superhero media/battle anime’. learning information about your opponent to outwit and defeat them is half the damn fight in a show or comic like that. it also lets the game completely circumvent boring investigative sequences and get straight to the problem-solving and super-action. and, by spending relationship points, you can further character-driven drama by asking hard questions about people’s psyches and feelings.

what makes question rituals a hall of fame mechanic is that every time i’ve seen them used, they’ve made the game easier and smoother to play and run, they’ve reinforced theme, and they’ve justified the space they take up in the book and the player’s mind three times over.

they are not the only mechanic in the hall of fame. stay tuned.