Quote:
Originally Posted by Brett
Well, you wouldn't be playing a game that was confined to Homeline, so I suppose that most investigations will take place on various otherworlds. Your investigators are not going to have any genuine enforceable police powers in most of their investigations, they aren't going to be able to get or serve warrants, they aren't going to be able to call in patrol officers or SWAT, issue BOLOs, search databases, or identify fingerprints. They'll find it very difficult to take suspects in and question tem in interview rooms. And they will only be able to conduct routine police investigations (interviewing witnesses, canvassing neighbourhoods, sealing and examining crime scenes etc.) using fraudulent credentials. Which would be risky.
I guess they might be okay on worlds that don't have their own police. And as the examples of Vidocq and Henry Fielding show, a little method goes a long way when criminals aren't prepared for it.
But in most cases, the characters are going to be private non-citizens, with no authority, without even legal residency, nosing around crime-scenes and witnesses with no reasonable account of themselves and no explanation for where they got a stack of sophisticated investigating equipment.
It'll be nothing like NCIS. More like PIs or spies.
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If they were on a world with a powerful White Star trading presence they might be set up with waterproof identities and hired out to Law Enforcement as consultants.
In answer to the OPs question, everyone could be a generalist in terms of surviving on foreign parallels (survival, combat skills, history, languages, etc...) with:
a specialist in Forensics and examining physical evidence,
a Medical Examiner type that may overlap with the forensic specialist and double as the team medic,
a Face man good at manipulating people and unobtrusively interviewing suspects,
an infiltrator who can use stealth to steal evidence from local authorities,
and a researcher who is good at getting information from computers, libraries, newspaper archives, and other public available information sources.
This is a wild example of an effective investigative team, the possible combinations are nearly limitless. I'd just sit the players down and say, let's work together on character creation, everyone should have a unique niche that will be useful in criminal investigations and everyone's niche should be different. See what they come up with and build your mysteries around their strengths. If someone has trouble coming up with something, make a suggestion from the list above.