Murder Most Foul: Premeditation

The murder mystery is a firmly-established sub-genre, so much so that it’s commonly crossed over.  In addition to detective stories, there are murder mysteries set in the Middle Ages, in ancient Rome, in feudal Japan, in historical China.  There are fantasy murder mysteries, science fiction murder mysteries, cookbook murder mysteries.  (No, really.  I’m not kidding.  There are.)  A murder mystery clearly grips the imaginations of a lot of people.

It’s also among the more difficult game scenarios to run.

This series of articles is going to deal with running a murder mystery.  Before I discuss the plot, though, there’s something more immediate to take a look at:  the game itself.

If you’re planning on running a murder mystery plot, you’ll need to evaluate your game system and the characters’ capabilities within that system.  A mystery can be run in any game system with enough effort on the gamemaster’s part, I’m sure — but some are better than others.

First of all, take a look at the skills list.  Is there a detective skill?  More than one?  What sorts of conversation skills are available?  What about other social skills?  The mystery is by its nature a very social plot, so you need to know what tools your characters have available.  In fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons, for instance, Insight is the only thing resembling a detective skill, while Bluff, Diplomacy, and Intimidate are the social skills, and Streetwise might be useful.  Meanwhile, in a HERO game, the skill options include Acting, Bribery, Bureaucratics, Conversation, Criminology, Deduction, Forensic Medicine, High Society, Interrogation, Persuasion, Seduction, and Streetwise — and perhaps related Knowledge, Professional, and Science skills.

So clearly HERO is better for running a mystery, right?  Well… not necessarily.  One of the things you’ll need to do as GM is to dissuade the players from trying to reduce the mystery to just a series of die rolls.  Sure, it could be handled that way, if the mystery were a minor subplot — but if you want to run a mystery, then you probably want the characters’ minds engaged, not just their dice.  It’s much easier to fall into the dice-rolling trap when the characters have a larger number of skills to choose from.

That’s not to say dice have no part in a murder mystery plot.  You just don’t want the dice to overshadow the plot.  I’ll revisit this in a later post, since it’s a little tangential to today’s topic.  For now, the important thing is to be aware of the in-game skills the players bring to the table, so that you can plan accordingly.  Also be sure to consider the skills of any trusted, uninvolved contacts the party might ask for assistance.

After considering the skills, you then need to think about what powers, if any, are available to the characters.  Whether magic spells, psychic powers, high technology, or superpowers, certain powers have the ability to derail or circumvent most murder mysteries.  In particular, look for the following:

Postcognition. The ability to view events that happened in the past could make it fairly trivial to find out who the murderer was.  Divinations that reveal the past might stop your plot before it begins.  Even more limited forms of postcognition, such as psychomancy (“object reading”) can reveal clues the characters would otherwise be hard-pressed to find… or even incapable of finding.

Precognition. The ability to look into the future isn’t quite as threatening to a mystery, but a clever player can find uses for it.  I once had a player declare that his character was using precognition to try to see the case at trial in the future, and thereby learn who the defendant was.  Fortunately, such powers are often unreliable by nature — or you could play along.  I gave my player a face and name, but it ultimately turned out that the suspect in question was proven innocent.  The arrest was part of the actual murderer’s plot — he framed a scapegoat, and it was the players who proved the suspect innocent, neatly fulfilling the prediction.

Clairvoyance or X-Ray Vision. While these powers are unlikely to directly unravel a mystery, they do make clues easier to find.  A secret hiding place is no longer so secret, the murder weapon is harder to conceal, and so forth.  If the characters have such capabilities, and the murderer doesn’t know it, they could serendipitously solve the crime by noticing that the murderer is carrying a concealed weapon, vial of poison, or the like.  Fortunately, this is relatively easy to avoid, so long as the murderer knows of the characters’ ability and has had at least a little bit of time.

Phasing. This power is very unlikely to have much impact.  It does make locks irrelevant, though, and it might make secret passages easier to discover.  On the other hand, if the villain has this capability, he can pull off a “locked room” murder that will puzzle normal authorities.  This can make a good hook for bringing the party into the investigation.

Lie Detection. This is a boon to the characters when questioning suspects, but it could easily be your bane.  In order to combat reliable lie detection such as third edition D&D’s zone of truth spell, it may be necessary to use counterspells to some extent — and also to have the suspects give answers that are technically true but misleading, or that are true but don’t volunteer useful information the characters neglected to ask about.  (Or that they did ask about, if the suspect thinks they won’t notice the omission.)

Mind Control. Like lie detection, only more so — it makes the subjects want to tell the characters what they know.  Unlike lie detection, the subject probably won’t want to conceal or misdirect the characters, so it’s more difficult to handle in a misleading fashion, and therefore more likely to circumvent the mystery.  Charm person is the prototypical D&D example, available right from level 1.

Contact with Spirits. The ability to speak to the victim via effects like D&D’s speak with dead can short-circuit plots.  Resurrection effects like raise dead fit in here also.  To combat these effects, it’s necessary that the victim not know who his killer was — either because he didn’t see them, because they were disguised, because he mistook them for someone he was expecting, or because he was killed through some indirect method while the murderer possibly wasn’t even present (like a slow-acting poison in the victim’s wine).

Telepathy. This is perhaps the single most dangerous ability, depending on how it’s defined.  It often serves as a lie-detector power, and it may grant a form of postcognition (via memory-searching) as well.  The telepath will probably be able to share information with his teammates without needing to speak aloud, perhaps at a great distance — meaning more efficient investigation.  A telepath might even simply be able to sift through minds in the local area and search for someone whose memories betray the murder.  Finally, some telepaths have mind-control powers “built in.”  A powerful telepath is hard to stymie without resorting to outright blocking or disruption of the power.

If your characters have access to any of these powers, you’ll need to take them into account in your planning.  If the villain knows of them, he may be able to render them ineffective or unhelpful.  Unless he has some reason to suspect the party will be investigating, though, he likely won’t take any specific countermeasures.  Depending on the world, he might take general ones — if lie-detection is common, for instance, his alibi will probably be composed of misleading technical truths.  If telepathy is common, he might hunt down a mind shield, or get a friendly telepathic villain to shield or wipe his memories of the crime, perhaps replacing them with false memories.

Having this in mind will help you plan the mystery.

Related posts:

1. Murder Most Foul: The Deed Itself
2. Murder Most Foul: The Usual Suspects