Help Me! Monster Hunters: Review of Play

[mlangsdorf]

3rd session log: http://westmarchsaga.wikia.com/wiki/MH/Log_-_Session_3
4th session log: http://westmarchsaga.wikia.com/wiki/MH/Log_-_Session_4

The group met for the last two weeks; I've just been late in posting about them.

These two sessions covered the initial investigation of the murders mentioned at the end of Session 2. The PCs conducted autopsies, investigated crime scenes, gathered and interrogated witnesses, and did research. Along the way, they found out a bunch of things:

* Someone is killing the guardians of monsters
* Apparently as a favor to the powerful and enigmatic free spirits known as the Bargainers
* Something awful is going to be freed
* Human cultists and some kind of spirit-enhanced spell-caster are involved
* The cultists might be working for some other spirit that is working for the Bargainers
* The plot that they know about doesn't make sense; they're clearly missing details

These two sessions were a bit intimidating for me. I've ran carefully plotted murder mysteries before, and I've run loose, improvisational games before, but I've never an a loose, improvisational murder mystery/investigation. For this game, I know who the Big Bad is, I have a rough timeline of events and a couple of important clues that I wanted to make the PCs picked up, but I also had several important clues that I had no idea how I was going to get to the PCs. When I started these sessions, I apologized in advance to the players that they might be very bored and upset.

As it turned out, everyone had a good time. My plot is sufficiently baroque and complex that I'm pretty sure the players aren't figuring it out on their own, though they have figured out some bits and pieces. The deduction rules help a bit here - I can make a set of rolls and just tell them stuff that their characters have figured out. It's actually pretty elegant: the players figure out some stuff, and I reveal some of the trickier/less obvious bits.

That said, mechanically, the Deduction rolls are a pain. For something like a "What" deduction about a cryptid, I have to roll for each of 6 PCs on 1 of 3 different skills, depending on which one that PC is most skilled at. I have a huge spreadsheet listing each PC's skill at all of Deduction skills, sorted by skill use, and it's still a bother. I like how Deduction rolls work in play, I just wish they were mechanically less awful.**

The rest of the investigation rules have worked pretty well, too. So far the PCs have mostly stuck to Social Engineering and Research, but there's plenty of good guidance in the book for that. Next week, they're going to survey and break into a suspect's house, so it will be interesting to see how that goes.



** Imbuments and Ritual Path Magic both share this flaw of being neat, conceptually elegant subsystems that require too many die rolls in play. Watching a witch roll the dice a dozen times, tallying MoS while accumulating penalties, is a drag. Since we play on a virtual tabletop and Bruno wrote a great macro to resolve all that, it's not as big a deal but it drags out when I'm playing a sage in my F2F game.