Supernatural Man of Mystery
Sometimes, there’s a tension between the rules of the game and the story you want to tell. Nowhere is that tension more palpable than speak with dead. The spell does precisely what it says on the tin, allowing the caster to ask questions of a dead body. Especially if you happen to find yourself operating within the context of a murder mystery, it’s hard to imagine a bigger obstacle for a would-be mystery writer. After all, it’s not going to be much of a mystery if the body can sit up, point a decaying finger, and croak, “J’accuse!” at its murderer. And so, even though the spell has built-in workarounds (the magic might fail if the creature’s alignment is different from the caster’s; answers are always cryptic; etc.), GMs are obliged to build murders around the spell.
In the Pathfinder novel Death’s Heretic, for example, James Sutter’s protagonist-investigator Salim Ghadafar encounters some familiar obstacles between speak with dead and an easy solution to his whodunit:
Salim ran his fingers up the man’s neck and beneath his chin, feeling the ragged line there. “Removed?” he asked.
“The whole jaw,” Khoyar confirmed. “Servants found it in a trash heap several estates to the west. My priests reattached it just enough to be functional.”
Salim nodded. Without a jaw, the magic wouldn’t work, and any serious assassin or career criminal understood the value of a corpse that stayed mute.
Once the questioning begins, it turns out the corpse was facing away from his murderer, further frustrating the investigation. Unable to see its killer in life, the victim could offer no help in death.
In everyone’s favorite Pathfinder module, Rise of the Runelords, a different set of murderers have also taken the same precautionary step of removing their victims’ jawbones. And in book one of the Giant Slayer AP, the author instructs game masters that the local priest, “Refuses to cast speak with dead on the body, in accordance with [the wishes of the victim’s family]. Even if the PCs have access to such magic, they learn very little, as [the victim] was unconscious when he died, though the corpse can confirm that he did not commit suicide.”
To my way of thinking, this sort of blocking maneuver represents a game master struggling against the world established by the game rules, a world which makes it trivially easy for players to solve a murder mystery. The same holds true of spells like zone of truth, locate object, and (most generally) detect magic. There’s a balance to be found between clever antagonists who know to cover their tracks, and “irritating GMs who never let my freaking spells do what they’re supposed to do.” As a GM, I find that it’s best to vary it up, and to add in ‘blocking maneuvers’ about half the time. YMMV, and that of course leads us to our question of the day!
Have you ever struggled against “easy magical solutions” as a GM? What spell or ability was trivializing your encounters, and how did you deal with it? Should you deal with it? Or is it better practice to not plan around player abilities? Let’s hear the eerie, whispered tales from all those missing jaw bones down in the comments!
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Part of the solution to this is for your setting to be consistent on the availability, rarity and expense of magic. If you know how many casters of what level and class are in a particular settlement, then it’s easy to know whether a particular magical solution to a problem is available. This is also highly relevant for knowing whether a particular NPC can easily be cured of a disease or curse, or raised from the dead.
When it comes to detective-style mysteries in particular, it’s really no different from a modern crime story. The detective PC has ranks in Find Fingerprints and Perform DNA Analysis, but that won’t help if the murderer wore gloves and a hairnet. It’s entirely reasonable for high-level criminals, performing high-stakes crimes with time to prepare, to take precautions to counteract the most obvious known investigative techniques. Of course, lower-level criminals, or people performing spontaneous, unplanned crimes, shouldn’t do this, and should be caught much more easily.
The 3.0E Epic Level Handbook had some good advice for how to write plots that couldn’t be solved instantly with magic, while also not nerfing the PCs’ abilities. Basically, don’t write a murder mystery that can be solved by Speak With Dead, and don’t write a murder mystery that forbids Speak With Dead, but write a murder mystery that can’t be solved without Speak With Dead. The city watch are scratching their heads, completely at a loss for who would have a motive to murder Mr Corpsington, when the party comes along and casts Speak With Dead. The corpse doesn’t recognize the guy who killed him, but he saw the murder weapon, and that’s a vital clue that leads to yada yada yada.
Well that’s an excellent recommendation. I might have to head to the archives and give that one a read. Cheers!
You’re welcome! It’s a surprisingly insightful book, even if it’s utterly ridiculous in places. Other advice for challenging high-level parties includes “don’t be afraid to assume they have access to a specific spell, even if you know for a fact that they don’t”, and “don’t be afraid to use an obstacle that you think is literally impossible to overcome”.
On the subject of 3E book recommendations, though, I’m actually really fond of Heroes of Horror. It has some in-depth analysis of what the horror genre actually is and how to apply that in a gaming context. Honestly, it’s a lot more mature, practical and down-to-earth than anything I’ve read in a White Wolf book.
I’m beginning to worry that I’m repeating myself a bit in recent blogs, so a trip down editions-past-lane might be in order in general. A lot of that how-to-run-a-game content is evergreen.
Wait, couldn’t you just wire any old jaw back into place?
“Well he doesn’t have a jaw…Someone get the court standard jaw!”
As for the question…well that’s the cost of doing business in a magical world
You really can’t have a murder mystery if the local cleric of wizard can string enough divination spells to boost a investigation.
“I know he wears this, this and I know who made this knife in the victims chest! Let’s go interrogate the **** out of him!!!”
Sometimes you stop it from playing, sometimes you don’t like you said 50/50 =v=
At some point when you have murder mystery with magic, you gotta use magic to stop magic from solving the case. Hell at a high enough level you could just bring the dead guy back to life, depending on how it when he died.
As for the jaw thing, I assume you can’t just use any old jaw for the same reason you can’t just Frankenstein a corpse together and use Raise Dead on it. That court standard jaw doesn’t belong to the body, even if it fits, and it certainly wasn’t there when the corpse died. Speak with dead provides just barely enough of a jump to allow a corpse to speak a few basic answers with its own body, trying to get answers from a mouthless corpse using someone else’s jaw is just making things harder if not impossible within the limitations of the spell.
“Court Standard Jaw” sounds like the title of some absurdist short story. I’m picturing a magical realism courtroom drama where we begin to suspect that the magic talking jaw bone has its own agenda.
Common counters to mystery relies on how common the knowledge of said counters are. I once remembered a GM who chastised me for suggesting a “speak with dead” spell from my Fighter I fer the base assumption that my character wouldn’t even know what spell can do that. He was a fool of course, this was Pathfinder and I’m party of the Society, that sort of skullduggery is common in our line of work. Still, whether the knowledge of magic is common or not highly depends how useful it is.
A skilled professional assassin, as you said, would take necessary precautions to ensure a dead body can’t simply communicate it’s miller. Those in the know may try to remove the jaw bone, skilled or rich enough assassins may even attempt to commune with the dead themselves, since the spell specifically calls out that it fails if used on a corpse who has already been communed with within ten days of the spell being used in it. And of course mundane methods such as simply not killing the victim in a way that makes you identifiable, such as a backstab or poison, or even just getting rid of the body altogether.
Just as well, keep in mind that sometimes a corpse knows may not be true. The last thing they may have seen was an orc chopping their head off, but it’s not like the victim can roll an intelligence or perception check to realize that might’ve just been an orc mask. Not to mention I feel that the enemy going out of their way to prevent the dead from speaking should be considered a practice for the skilled and professionals, to give the players the idea that this was no random murder. If every thug and con removed jaws from people they killed, it can get pretty ridiculous. But that also goes back to my first paragraph: how common is magic in your world that this sort of knowledge is common? Any career criminal would want to know how to keep a corpse silent as much as they want to know where to sell stolen loot, since they’ll be dealing with both a lot. And last thing they want is their pass business biting them in the butt because they couldnt cover their trail well enough.
You know, mentioning that the victim might not know the truth so close to other methods of burying your tracks leads me to believe the more magically inclined and clever assassin could implant memories into their target before execution in order to frame other people.
Why wouldn’t the victim be able to roll an intelligence/perception check to figure out that it’s a disguise? those represent the sort of passive senses that happen automatically during the actual murder to me.
It also seems like something that might be an interesting clue for an adventure, some folks got murdered by “orcs”, but one of them noticed that said orc was a guy with green paint on his skin and false tusks.
Meta speaking, if the disguise is decent enough you may need to spend an action to actually do an insight/investigation/perception to realize the mask might be fake, which is obviously something you might not have time to do if they’re in the process of murdering you. And I mostly mean the victim can’t just roll to find out after they died; the speak with dead spells often mention that the spirit will only tell you what it knows (if it tells you anything at all), and there isn’t enough of an actual conscious for the spirit to speculate or make up new information.
Basically if the victim thinks the killer was an orc that’s what they’ll tell you. At best they might say something like “the person who killed me was a strange looking orc” or something, but unless they already figured out their killer was in disguise before hand, they can’t really give you insight if the possibility once they’re dead. That speculation will be entirely on thenokayers part.
They don’t really need a disguise per se, they just need to wear a mask like the killer in “Scream”. The point is more to hide who they are than to look like someone else
The bugger is that “how common is magic in your world” is going to vary from person to person. That foolish GM of yours had ideas about the way the world worked. That was his attempt at a blocking maneuver, preserving his murder mystery against abilities that exist in-game. Getting everyone on the same conceptual page is all manner of tricky.
Indeed. But I think it’s fair to say that if your world is classed as “high fantasy”, even a fully martial inclined warrior would have some passing knowledge of spells and some of their more common uses. Fireball, magic missile, shield, charm person, disguise Self, speak with dead/animals/plants, these aren’t exactly secret spells protected by an order of mages who go out of their way to silence anyone who learns about them.
Frankly the prevalence of magic knowledge is one of those things that can drastically change the world, the same way higher education for a general populace or technological innovations can change a world. And it’s hard to keep magic a secret if it’s also the main source of development in most fantasy verses.
I rather like the way 2e Pathfinder has built rarity of spells, items etc. into the game core mechanics, it helps manage player expectations, guide GMs on how accessible something should be and (might help to get everyone on the same page). More importantly, getting access to the spell, ritual or item that would solve a situation can become part of the adventure.
As a rule of thumb I’d probably go with magic users know of the uncommon spells of their tradition but rare spells would probably require a skill check. Non-magic users would probably have to make a skill check regardless of rarity unless there’s something about their character that makes them an exception e.g. an orphan ranger bought up by druids would know a bit more about primal magic.
I learned this the hard way due to a AD&D Psionicist.
He had an ability that allowed him to read an item and get a clear image of its last (I think) 5 bearers. This ability rarely came up, until the day I ran a murder mystery and the party found the murder weapon. One spell cast later, and whodunnit was firmly out the window. I salvaged the situation as the murderer was a Lycanthrope (a werefox) who had both stolen the dagger and committed the murder in hybrid form, so I avoided giving the whole thing away, whilst still letting the player get something from his ability (by seeing the killers were-form), but I still felt a little dirty about it.
Since then I have kept an eye out for these sorts of magic loopholes, but rather than trying to plug them, structured the mystery on the assumption the party will have access to these tricks, and making the complications less “who is the murderer?” and more “sure, you know who did it, but how you going to prove it?”. Between distrust of magic users, and uncertainty amoungst non-users of exactly what spell is what (Was that a Zone of Truth, or a Domination spell that caused him to confess? Did that caster just really cast Speak to Dead, or did he just cast an illusion?).
If you place a party in a situation where they need more than just their own certainty before dropping the hammer on the guilty, then it doesn’t matter if they have short-circuitted their way into them knowing who the guilty party is.
That’s actually a really neat solution. And it’s part of a great tradition of detective shows where the protagonist knows exactly who the murderer is and spends most of the episode trying to trick them into revealing themselves (I’m thinking Columbo and Diagnosis Murder for starters).
Of course you also need to set up a reason for the PCs to capture the criminal and follow due process, rather than just slaughtering them outright.
Solid technique! It pays to prep.
And if you’re surprised by an unexpected technique, it pays to know how to tap dance.
as someone whos char can Coup de Grasse with the spell Produce Flame, I can relate to thwarting Speak With Dead: they don’t see me comming and then the head explodes, leaving nothing to speak with anyways.
In Kingmaker I dimensionally locked Armags Toomb, the Sorcerer was seriously going to do one room per day with teleport.
And as a general rule all fortresses in my settings have iron rods inbetween the rocks to block passwall and other „I don’t care about rock“ magic.
Another solution for pass wall is to build long tunnels. Just vary up the shape of your dungeon and make it a sprawling complex.
I find that in a lot of fantasy games magic kinda takes the place of forensic science in more modern games. You can’t find fingerprint, have an DNA analysis done or look through security footage, but instead you can speak with the dead, look for astral signatures or locate object on the victims missing signet ring.
Personally i find it best to err on the side of letting the players ability work, often I’ll also only prepare for whatever abilities are “common”, rather than strictly what my players have.
This has the dual benefits of making the world seem more “real” and at the same time it saves me the mental effort of keeping track of everything the players can do.
It also produces some cool moments when the players pull out some obscure ability and unexpectedly solve their problems, both for them and for me.
It helps making the moment more satisfying if I reinforce/call out that this is a special thing they can do when they do it.
Any examples from your own games?
Why can’t the local constabulary pull the same trick?
For the local constabulary that’s part of the reason why I only prepare for abilities that are “common”, because those are more likely to be expected to come up against.
At that point the answer is the same as for why the local constables aren’t handling the nearby orc warcamp, or for that matter why Scotland Yard don’t do the things Sherlock Holmes do.
They lack the ability/resources/interests, which is of course a lot easier to justify if the PCs are somehow exceptional than if they are just dime-a-dozen completely ordinary people.
As for examples, did you know that Detect Desires is a cleric spell that exists? I sure didn’t until one of the players in my Kingmaker game cast it during negotiation with a centaur tribe to figure out what they wanted, both the leader and their prime rival in there.
Similarly I also didn’t know that Absolution was a spell until he used it to free a charmed Frog priest who could then inform them about the evil plot of the villain that charmed him.
(The player likes to spend a few spell slots each day on spells he has never seen cast and then being on the lookout for opportunities to use them, so it happens every handful of sessions that he has one I haven’t seen before which fits some obstacle).
For a non-investigation example, I didn’t know that one of the players in my Exalted 2e game could reach a Feat of Strength of 48 if he pulled out all the stops, until he tried using it to smash open a magic vault, instead of trying to track down the 4 keys for it. I am very convinced that letting that work made for a much better game than the alternative would have.
(The table of examples in the core book only goes to 20 for those unfamiliar with the system, and that’s already pretty far into the realm of superhuman strength.)
I might have to adopt that strategy. Seems like a safer bet than my plan of rolling randomly for spells known as a sorcerer.
At the moment in the game I run I’m trying to get my head around the Circle of the Shepherd Druid. Shepherd gives the druid 24/7 speak with animals.
I’m currently running them through an adventure called Madness of the Rat King which – spoilers – has a lot of rats, giant rats, spider-rats, laser-rats, rat-bear-pigs… It’s pretty rat heavy. I took the decision to make all of the hybrid rats monstrosities instead of beasts, so that druid can’t speak to every damn thing in the dungeon. The rats and giant rats are still beasts though, so hopefully that’ll give her some use of the ability still.
Perfect example! Trying to plan around this sort of thing is tough. Once you become aware of it, you start second-guessing yourself. “Is this unfair to the player? Will it ruin the adventure if I don’t change it?”
I think you made a fair call for what it’s worth.
I caught my DM a little off-guard last session by being the first player he has ever met that took Speak to Plants (nothing else at that level appealed to my Bard, and with upcasting being a thing in 5th ed, it wasn’t wasting my slots to take flavour spells at that level as I had healing and damage spells I could upcast using the slots).
In my defence, I have had the spell unused on my sheet for some months now, and I didn’t know this session (and likely the next 3-4) were going to occur in a jungle, but my DM still gave me the stink eye when I started talking our way through what was meant to be a pretty desperate and confusing “lost in the wilderness” segment!
That’s cool, it’s really nice when a weird spell choice pays off.
Also, I’ve just read the spell description for Speak with Plants for the first time; that’s actually a really good spell. It’s situational, but I love the thought of asking plants to slow down your pursuers during a chase scene.
We found a wand of it once upon a time. Great investigation item. The limitations of a plant’s knowledge give GMs A LOT of leeway when choosing what info to impart, but it’s always a blast talking to simple-minded grass in terms of RP.
This all comes back to the basic idea: what game does everyone want to play? You raised this way back when talking about how some abilities might just take all the fun out of the game (I think it was Teleport and a Silk Road travel adventure) so you need to acknowledge that and ask that players please not do so.
If the players want to try a Sherlock Holmes or Poirot adventure in their fantasy world, figure out what it is that they want from this kind of adventure. Be upfront about the various problems that might occur in transplanting the mystery, and discuss how they see these things. Players are usually great at coming up with broad strokes ideas of how the world should work, and then the DM just has to figure out how to integrate those ideas with the ruleset.
Sometimes, it is the strange ways in which the fantasy setting affects the core concept that make an adventure fun and memorable. For a great example of this, look at the Red Dwarf episode “Justice”. This shows how guilt-determining powers can lead to the wrong conclusions, and how a magic area effect can lead to hilarity.
Talking to the players works great for a DM, but as a fiction guy and a module-writing guy, I don’t have that luxury sometimes. In that sense, it sounds to me like your Red Dwarf example is on-point. You’ve established magic powers, and now you have to think your way around them to tell the story you want to tell.
I’m honestly not familiar with the ep though. Care to spoil it for educational purposes?
Yes, as a fiction writer the struggles are different. I module writing is the hardest, because there you have to premptively consider how different players and groups will react. When writing fiction, there’s more scope to justify “that’s just how it works here”, especially in an original universe.
Red Dwarf spoilers below
The episode has two wonderful devices: an AI that can see guilt; and a “justice field” that literally doesn’t permit any unjust act (like assault) to take place, by warping reality so the perpetrator will receive their own blow while the victim is unharmed.
Our heroes end up in this place, pursued by a rogue simulant who wants to kill them. Each one is scanned upon arriving, and Rimmer is declared guilty of the deaths of the Red Dwarf’s crew.
Kryten insists on a trial and plays lawyer, proving that Rimmer may carry the guilt, but that he was not responsible because he is not competent to hold a position of responsibility. Rimmer inadvertently helps this argument by objecting to everything Kryten says.
At this point the simulant finds Lister and attacks him, only to have every injury inflicted on himself instead. Although Lister seems to understand this, he still tries to hit the simulant with a spade once he’s collapsed.
Notable quotes, as I remember them, include:
“You’re going to try to prove that I was innocent of negligence on the grounds that I’m a half-witted incompetent?”
“A man of such awsome stupidity, he even objects to his own defence counsel. An over-zealous, trumped up little squirt!”
“Who would put this man, who couldn’t outwit a used tea bag, in a position of authority? Only a yoghurt. This man is not guilty of
manslaughter. He’s only guilty of being Rimmer. That is his crime. It is also his punishment.”
The Justice Computer probes the team’s minds for guilt over any undischarge crimes and then it arrests Rimmer for killing the entire crew of Red Dwarf through his “willful negligence”.
Kryten then mounted a successful defence of Rimmer, arguing that Rimmer may feel responsible for it but wasn’t actually to blame for it. Specically, Rimmer was never competent enough to be given a vital task but his ego would never allow him to admit that.
And the facility is surrounded by a “Justice Field” which causes the consequences of your actions to rebound onto you. In the climax of the episode, a Rogue Simulant escapes and tries to go on a rampage but when it attacks Lister it only injures itself. Lister figures this out first and starts gleefully handing it weapons to use against him…
Aw… I’m too slow.
Thanks Fish. I rewatched the episode earlier and it’s actually Cat who whacks the simulant at the end.
Time for Fighter #43.
#42 met his end here: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/dodgy
Unless this fantasy court system has a 5th amendment equivalent, Necromancy Wizard is still susceptible to Zone of Truth.
I know you like to bulldog your way through social encounters with ZoT. How would you respond as a GM?
I like to bulldog my way through literally everything. The shortest distance between any two points is a straight line.
As a DM, it depends entirely on the context. I would have a lot of people simply refuse to cooperate. DM: “You have offended your noble by asking if they could do such a thing.” At that point it’d take some Persuasion checks to get the guards and other members of the court to understand that nobody is above the law and that everyone should be able to say “I have not committed any smite-worthy offenses (Smite-worthy offenses include but are not limited to murder, torture, slavery, sex-crimes, consorting with fiends/undead, and crimes against Moradin) in a Zone of Truth.
Can’t Zone of Truth be resisted? Necromancer seems like she has pretty good Charisma.
I mean, I guess Cleric could just keep recasting the spell all day until she fails the save, but that’s just wasting a bunch of spell slots and everyone’s time.
And then there’s that thing where you can still finagle your way around telling lies if you’re clever enough… Kinda makes me think that D&D courtrooms often avoid using Zone of Truth just because it’s more of a headache than a help.
ZoT is save each turn until you fail, the once you fail you’re under the effect until you leave. The caster is aware of whether you’ve failed.
You just have to have strict criteria for the answers such as restating the question in your answer. If I ask “Did you murder Fighter #42, and if not do you have any information on who did?” You will answer to the effect of “I did not murder Fighter #42, nor do I have any information on who did”. At the end of the questioning you throw in “Is there any pertinent information that you did not share?”
Not quite related to your question, but the topic gave me an idea to throw a wrench into the whole “speak with dead on the dead guy to instantly solve the murder”, though it only works in high magic settings.
The party comes across a murder. A rich noble. Either they have Speak with Dead themselves, or there’s an NPC who has it. They ask the dead guy who killed him, and the dead guy unambiguously describe one of his rivals. These two notoriously hated each others and were competing for power.
Problem is, this being a high magic setting, and this being a rich guy, his family has access to resurrection magic. And thus the suspect’s defense is that the dead guy orchestrated his own murder with the goal of framing him when interrogated via Speak With Dead, knowing he would be resurrected some time later.
It might not be easy to pull off, but I’m sure it could be a pretty good headscratcher, regardless of who is actually telling the truth.
Heh. Who’s going to sense motive a corpse? Nice!
That does run into the problem that the soul would need to make a will save in order to be able to deceive you and it only get to try that if you have a different alignment at that (through the latter half could easily be set up to be true by the GM). That could be gotten around by raising the possibility of the noble using memory magic to alter his own memories prior to death.
That is of course only a problem if you are running under the kind of social contracts where the GM blatantly ignoring the dice to get the result they want.
So this actually touches upon an issue I have with pathfinder 2, they made spells that would “hurt plot” uncommon spells that you need to have the dm sign off on. They also removed paladin’s ability to detect evil which makes their life significantly harder.
But the books provide tons of ways around this, there’s a poison that rots the tongue and vocal cords removing any means to understand the corpse, there’s a magical needle you place in the heart so should they be revived the needle will kill them again, also a good rogue could kill and go unseen and thus speak with dead has no use. As for things like detect evil, there’s a simple magic spell that makes it so they don’t show up alignment wise. This may raise more suspicion but it doesn’t confirm anything.
In the campaign I’m running I had a villainous cult leader who plotted to get the party to kill his foes by making them think they’re the cult members. He had a necklace of non-detection, a high charisma and bluff and finally a lantern that upon the party grabbing it would make his foes look more evil due to an illusion it would cast. I also had an aura spell that changed it from illusion to divination should they cast detect magic on it. I was prepared. I was not prepared for the party trusting him at face value and believing everything he said without checking.
I dunno. I like the idea of making the paladin investigate the hard way before turning on kill-it-with-holy-fire: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/detect-insult
The problem with these spells is that anyone too dumb to take precautions against the spells won’t be a challenge for a party high enough to be able to use these spells.
I guess it’s useful as a non-challenge setup though. Maybe a person suffering from a dominate effect committed the murder. You can find them, but that doesn’t solve the mystery. Stuff like that.
But that is very, very close to “The victim didn’t see their murderer, only their weapon.”
Is that bad? The underlying purpose here is to lead your band of sleuths a merry chase from clue to clue.
Just had a similar event happen in my current campaign. Part of the game’s setup is that oni are similar to rakshasas, effectively immortal unless their essences are captured in special artifacts and slowly siphoned of their power over time. Our party’s monk has an oni as his rival, and has recently acquired an object that could serve to imprison the oni, but when he sought knowledge of the oni’s history to reinforce the object, he has hit mostly dead ends.
What the party doesn’t know yet is that the oni was once the half-mortal son of a powerful celestial in a taboo affair. The babe was left for dead, but the tragedy and hypocracy of the celestial gave the babe enough negative energy to transform into an oni. Now aware that his son survives, the celestial has used his influence to keep the origins of the oni a secret, and to protect him from the worst punishments.
The party will have to persue what obscure clues they have about the oni’s origins before they can find the truth, and then they will have to contend with both a brutish oni and a magical kami before they can end this plot thread.
That plot kicks ass. Well done.
If you face a problem and blow it up, good for you, if you do that with each and every problem, where the fun is? D&D, Pathfinder and that are games. The objective of a game is to be played and provide fun for the players. We need things to defeat, be either a monster, a social situation or something else. How you manage to defeat is what is important, not that you win but how. As for norm almost all games expect that you win, therefor the games are build to be challenging but winnable. Even if you lose, depending on how you lose, you can win still. So why to blow up each mystery when you can enjoy it? The thrill of the clues, the pleasure of uncertainty. Carpe Mysterium everybody 🙂
Also have someone else read this? :
https://rtalsoriangames.com/2019/10/04/witchers-journaling-investigation-syste/
I don’t know how that will feel and work on the table but maybe it could be interesting. Any opinion on the matter? 🙂
Remember how I was complaining about “nested subsystems” the other day? This is one of those.
I just used the very-similar Research system in Pathfinder 1e:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/intrigue/#Research
I had to resort to letting NPCs roll for the thing because my players didn’t want to break out of adventuring mode and try the investigation rules.
I like that these Witcher folks seem aware of the design problems: “The Investigation System isn’t intended to replace plot development and roleplaying or to turn research and investigation into a soulless minigame of nothing but rolling dice and doing math.” I’d be curious to see one of the designers run it thought. When you trot out unconventional systems like this, it’s awfully tough to keep the flow.
My two cents anyway. If you’ve got the right table, I bet you could make it sing.
Investigation can be tricky and doing it well can be hard. Just rolling dice takes away the interactivity, not using the dice left it on a void compared to the rest of the game. How the investigation happens and advance is the most delicate part of the system. In Assassin’s Creed II you investigate by elimination, pun intended. Ezio goes after and kill the people who wronged his family and is trying to take over Italy. In that search he finds the people he needs to kill and the accomplices that run away and are left for later. Each time he kills a person another one appears. This way he get to do things, have an objective to pursue and then goes after another and another until the end of the game.
On the other hand i remember a game i like, Prototype. In that game you can kill people and take their memories. That unlocks briefs flashbacks of what that person knew, info about the virus, Blackwatch, Hope and that. Most of it is flavor text at best, some of the memories you get through the main missions are more important giving the player a better understanding of what is happening. Thing is, you get this memories by consuming people, for example when you need to infiltrate a military base or when Alex, the protagonist, is going by the city and one person who knows something just appears and you need to catch him to eat him.
The worst thing that can happens to investigators is to get stuck. Players can loose an important piece by a bad roll or not be able to connect all the dots to the point of having their DM screaming in their faces that the Baron Drak Von Murder is in fact the murderer. Doing something automatically can deprive you of understanding what you just did. Roll a dice, get a clue, forget it because you have to roll again or because they don’t know how it fit in the big picture. So a DM needs to have the players engaged to the investigation, something difficult. More than once in my group we get some piece of info and we want to get more to resolve the mystery, only to have our DM to say to us: “Sorry guy that is all what i got for now, i didn’t prepared anything else on the investigation because i want to left it for later”. By things like that is that many of our investigations are pretty strightforward 🙁
The one time I gm’ed. It was for a star wars saga edition game. The pc’s were trying to find an npc who saved them, and curiously so, had more than a few ways to go about it.
And they thought about asking the underworld, or to search for signs of lightsaber damage.
Until one player recalled it was a dart that took them out. And went to the automated clinic on the place.
Curious, since this was a pretty criminal place, i let them, no reason not to. And they went and asked about the records of the purchase, since they figured it was a high powered poison that ko’d the jedi.
I liked that well, they went well out of the way to figure a solution, but a plausable one, that I had them roll for the pc records check, and they got it easy, that someone had bought it, and it was then more finding that person.
A clever solution, should be rewarded, even if its a harder path for you. Because it offers players to try being creative.
This is good advice in a general sense: if the players are smarter than your plot, change the plot. That’s the advantage the human has over the computer: this shit isn’t written in stone (silicon specifically).
Others have already provided some good answers, so I’ll just toss in some random observations and ideas.
1) An assassin who removed the jawbone of the victim is obviously a crappy assassin, because it implies that the victim saw enough that he could actually give a useful answer when being interrogated. A good assassin would never have been seen or identifiable in the first place. (EG: a crossbow from an apartment across the street; poison in the wine; getting knifed when someone bumps into him in the street; a sufficiently useful/trusted disguise, such as a guard or a maid; pushed off the balcony; etc.) A random thug wouldn’t know to try such a trick. So finding a removed jawbone actually narrows down the suspects considerably.
2) Misdirection is a thing. Excellent real-world magicians can pull off seemingly impossible tricks. Even without disguises, it should be possible to get the victim to be absolutely convinced of the truth of a falsehood.
3) Misdirection on the part of the GM is also a thing. Let the players easily solve the murder with Speak With Dead. The problem is (for example), the murder victim was actually the witness to something far more sinister, and his death was merely to silence him. Except the players don’t find this out til after they use Speak With Dead, which means they can’t use the spell on the corpse again for another 10 days (during which Stuff starts happening). Thus they’re stuck regretting being too hasty in picking the easy solution.
4) The victim seeks the player’s help before her death because she thinks someone is trying to kill her. There was an entire gaslighting campaign being used against her, and when she does turn up dead, there’s layers and layers of doubt and uncertainty about anything believed to be true.
In the reddit version of this thread, there’s a dude complaining that his GM argued his non-arcane PC wouldn’t know to suggest a speak with dead spell. It’s always tough trying to figure out exactly how common magical lore really is in a given setting. Is it mysterious and esoteric, and has everyone heard of a ‘common knowledge’ type spells?
Other good references are the old 3.5 Eberron Campaign Setting books. Eberron was designed to be both Pulpy and have a high magical presence even if the amount of powerful magic was supposed to be lowered. There is a guild of Assassins there that have a dagger that steals the soul of the person killed with it, so that they cannot be Resurrected without hunting down and breaking the Kyber shard that holds that soul. They charge extra for this service, of course. ~.^
Of course, also keep in mind that the corpse tells you what they believe happened. Misdirection on the part of the Assassin just becomes more important. Also remember that the corpse may not exactly understand what he saw. He may assume he was “killed by a ghost” when in reality he was killed by an Ethereal Assassin with a Ghost Touch Dagger or a Phantasmal Killer Spell. Disguise Self and Alter Self can lead to wildly different descriptions of the perp,
Finally, remember that the same world that includes Speak with Dead includes Dominate Person, Magic Jar, and Possession. Senator Watson may be the hand holding the knife, but who says he was the mind that planned the murder? A Silent Suggestion spell can turn a pleasant night into a crime of passion if performed correctly. And of course, victims of my favorite Pathfinder Spell “Curse of Burning Sleep” can tell you nothing significant past “i burst into flames in my sleep.”
How would they know? They were asleep at the time of the murder!
I was a player, but that above-mentioned Rise of the Runelords murder mystery is, as it turns out, pretty easily solved by a mere 0th level spell on the psychic list, which lets you get flashes of history from an item that has had emotional significance. The stuff in the murder mystery section? It’s pretty emotionally-fuelled.
My GM for that one rushed us through that section much faster than it would normally go, and then got us back up to the normal level with a bit of custom-made stuff he added in.
I almost thwarted the Mystery in Runelords by playing a Cat-folk with Scent. Luckily, the guy that was originally running it fell through and I ended up running it, so i switched the race on the Rogue that could accompany the party to a Kitsune to solve that problem. I made sure the Wizard option had a Thrush instead of a cat. You can bust that on accident so many different ways.
My occultist got a lot of use out of “object reading.” I always liked that one singe it gives the GM a lot of leeway in deciding exactly what info gets imparted.
I think the ideal way to deal with it is a two-pronged approach.
Prong 1: Yes absolutely make the spells work as intended enough of the time to be noticeable They spent the resources on/had the foresight to have the right spell for the job. It doesn’t need to be a specific percentage, like half the time. It just needs to work fully often enough that it does not make the players feel like they wasted their energy and resources (in and out of game) taking it. To increase perceived value, make it work better than default expectations sometimes.
#Prong 2: Rarely have it completely blocked/ineffectual. The result of having/thinking to use that ability should still be in some way better than not doing so at all. Have it provide useful clues on the subject matter or something else they’re interested or just interesting but not particularly relevant information or just result in some scene that’s not negative in nature.
Even if this means you have to fudge the rules of what the spell technically says it does to achieve something other than 100% or 0%, that’s fine. Any setting or module pretty much does that with some other magic anyway as there’s all sorts of effects NPCs or the world itself can produce that PCs have absolutely no way to do (including often enough using the same/similar abilities PCs have in ways they just can’t use them).
So even if a jaw-less murder victim didn’t see who killed them, maybe consider letting them draw an arrow towards the area of town they were before their body was moved or have someone in zone of truth fumble for a half-truth badly enough they blurt out a different truth they wouldn’t have wanted to reveal either or secretly roll an arcana check to see if their detect magic at least picks up the spell that blocks magic detection so they don’t walk right into a trap/potentially cursed item they did their best to be cautious of.
So to summarize: give them something for trying. Rarely block 100%, because you want to reward the players for being active and trying stuff. Seems reasonable to me!
Most competent fantasy-setting engineers will build a thin layer of lead into their walls to foil detect spells. Ditto for desks, safes, and other such hidey-spots.
Tangential to the speak with dead issue, a good assassin should always disfigure the corpse sufficiently that raise dead won’t work on it. Taking the head with you, or at least smashing the skull, should usually do.
I wonder if there’s design space for a “cleaner” type archetype / feat / etc.?
When I briefly tried GMing I ran into the opposite problem, I knew my players had spells and abilities that could solve a scenario but the players themselves were oblivious. As a player I had a GM block my use of speak with dead on a npc who we helplessly watched get cut-scene by declaring that my character suddenly recalled that he noticed the victim’s soul being sucked out by the dagger used to kill them.
And I’m betting that felt shitty. How would you rather that GM have gone about “protecting” his murder mystery? What would you have done in his place?
This is from my perspective as a player, and also it was High Fantasy Society (a LARP).
I was a healer and had access to Speak to Dead. You get one question per casting and the person it was cast on could Evil Genie it if they wanted to. This means you need a super to-the-point question with as little wiggle room for them as possible.
We attacked the bandits, killed em all, I cast my heals on the party, and we got a body (was one of the bandits who should know the whereabouts of the magical mcguffin we were after).
We got our question straight as we could and I cast the spell. It was just shy of the mark and the dead man smiled as he gave his round about answer. “Aw’s” were had all around as he gave his generic “its in a safe place”-like answer.
“Wait! I can cast it again.” I say with a grin.
“Do you have it prepared twice?” Asks the dead man (he was also a GM for this session. Lot of bad guys are)
“Yes.” I say holding out my spell list.
The look of ‘damn it’ on his face, now I knew his word game was priceless.
Question reworded, and this time answered to our satisfaction, we moved on unhindered to save the day!
It wasn’t much bragging rights for winning the mind game, but it was mine. 🙂
Heh. I like that this story features a triumph over the situation and over the GM. That double-victory makes it more fun than having the spell “just work.”
To mine, it represents a murderer struggling against the forensics technology available which would make it trivially easy for the authorities to discover their guilt. You know, like how criminals in our world wear gloves to foil fingerprinting.
My personal take on Speak with Dead is to essentially follow “Pushing Daisies” rules. The person “reanimates” to a limited extent, and only has so much time to answer the questions, and you must convince them within that time to accept their own death (or keep them from noticing it) and then persuade them to actually be honest with you about the answers.
As comes up quite often in that TV series, just because someone was there during their own murder doesn’t mean that actually SAW or RECOGNIZED the source of their death.
One interesting idea this sort of arc allows is sort of the “revealing cover-up” angle. So suppose that there’s been a murder, and the party cleric casts Speak With Dead. It doesn’t work, because someone has used magic to shred the victim’s soul, preventing Raises and Speak With Dead. So immediately you know that there is more to this guy’s murder than it at first appears, because that kind of magic is rare and powerful. So somebody with access to serious magical mojo wanted this person silenced. Now you a) have to dig into his past the mundane way, and b) know that there’s something interesting there to dig for.
That messed happened once upon a time with my behir cohort. We tried to resurrect him, but the spell failed. He’d already been true-resurrected by the BBEG, who was now holding him hostage.