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Old 04-20-2013, 08:25 PM   #1
Agemegos
 
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Default Gumshoe, its genus of RPGs, and distancing mechanics

For some reason I had fallen a couple of months behind in listening to Ken Hite's and Robin Laws' podcast Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff, so yesterday I took a few hours to catch up on my podlistening. Hite's and Laws' articulateness, erudition, and thoughtful comments seduced me into considering their Gumshoe genus of games. I broke out my copy of Trail of Cthulhu with a view to starting up some 1920s horror adventures. I mentioned this to a potential player who has been known to GM The Dying Earth and Trail of Cthulhu himself in his spare time. He sent me links to bits and pieces of material on the web that he thought I might find useful. I read the first in his list and remembered why I decided not to run Trail of Cthulhu back when I first bought it.

In Gumshoe and the genus of games related to it characters have ratings in skills and abilities in just the sort of way you expect. The thing you don't expect is that your character's rating in a skill is not a bonus to all attempts to use the skill. The characteristic mechanic of the Gumshoe genus is that a character's rating in a skill forms a pool of points that the player can spend on attempts to use that skill. The pools do refresh from time to time, but within the interval between refreshes the player has to husband those points, spending them where he or she reckons they will be decisive and accepting at all other times mediocre and chancy performance at things the character is supposedly good at.

This seems very strange to me. I can't figure out what it is supposed to represent when, for example, a character with a high score in Guns shoots inaccurately to conserve points for later. And I can't figure out what it represents when a character with high Guns has used all the points in his or her Guns pool and is now unable to shoot better than a tiro until the next adventure. What's happening in the game world?

There is of course a possibility that this game mechanic is not supposed to represent anything at all, that it is supposed to force some outcome such as each adventure having only one gunfight, only one fistfight, only one chase scene, one infiltration scene etc. If so, ugh! I hate it when a story depends on characters making choices that are unjustifiable in their supposed circumstances, and I very much dislike it when game mechanics force me to make a significant choice that does not correspond to a choice that my character makes: that forces me out of identification with the character, suspension of disbelief, and immersion in the story—and it usually does it at exactly the point where the adventure is most exciting and enthralling. What's more is that most of my players seem to feel the same, and that is what ended our flirtation with FATE.

I'm reluctant to conclude that Robin Laws and Kenneth Hite have blundered. Perhaps I'm missing something, or perhaps they were aiming at and hit a target other than the one I expect. So I think I will still give Trail of Cthulhu a bit of a go and see how it actually plays. If anyone has advice or pointers, or if anyone can point me towards Robin Laws' exegesis of the ability pool mechanic, what it is supposed to achieve and how to drive it, that would be very handy.
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Last edited by Agemegos; 04-20-2013 at 09:11 PM.
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Old 04-20-2013, 09:00 PM   #2
whswhs
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
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Default Re: Gumshoe, its genus of RPGs, and distancing mechanics

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Originally Posted by Brett View Post
I'm reluctant to conclude that Robin Laws and Kenneth Hite have blundered. Perhaps I'm missing something, or perhaps they were aiming at and hit a target other than the one I expect. So I think I will still give Trail of Cthulhu a bit of a go and see how it actually plays. If anyone has advice or pointers, or if anyone can point me towards Robin Laws' exegesis of the ability pool mechanic, what it is supposed to achieve and how to drive it, that would be very handy.
Can't help you, I'm afraid. I've read more than one game that Laws was heavily involved in—Dying Earth, Feng Shui, and Hero Wars—and I've totally bounced off of them. Sometimes it's the mechanics; sometimes it's the world modeling—or the lack of world modeling, in FS, which seems to be intentionally designed to look like a series of sound stages. I want to suppose that Laws must be doing something intelligible, but I can't process it, if so.

Bill Stoddard
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Old 04-21-2013, 03:45 AM   #3
martinl
 
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Default Re: Gumshoe, its genus of RPGs, and distancing mechanics

I suspect the idea is to model the source material in some way, since IME lots of Robin's stuff is attempting to emulate an artistic story medium rather than reality.

On reflection, it might be trying to duplicate the cinematic convention that the solutions the heroes are awesome at are the last, not the first, resort. (Edit: On further reflection, I like Roger's explanation better. (*%*&^#$_* Cross posting...)

In any case, I hope you asked them - the Gaming Hut is not as good as Ken's Time Machine, but it is still one of my favourites.
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Old 04-21-2013, 04:29 AM   #4
RogerBW
 
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Default Re: Gumshoe, its genus of RPGs, and distancing mechanics

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On reflection, it might be trying to duplicate the cinematic convention that the solutions the heroes are awesome at are the last, not the first, resort. (Edit: On further reflection, I like Roger's explanation better.
I didn't think of that one, but I suspect that's also something Robin's aiming to emulate. It's not such a good system for that, though: if you need to save points but don't know for how long you'll need to save them, the result is usually that they get under-spent. A better mechanic for that sort of thing would be to build up a positive modifier as you conduct the investigation, so that your early answers are likely to be misleading or wrong and your later ones will put you on the right track.
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Old 04-21-2013, 09:12 AM   #5
Anaraxes
 
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Default Re: Gumshoe, its genus of RPGs, and distancing mechanics

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A better mechanic for that sort of thing would be to build up a positive modifier as you conduct the investigation, so that your early answers are likely to be misleading or wrong and your later ones will put you on the right track.
I like it. Certainly fits the TV genre convention. And it gives you an incentive to interview many people, to build up a higher modifier.

Since the bad guy is traditionally someone you interviewed earlier, only to think they were innocent, how about a rule that if you take a negative modifier against a subject, you can (later) take that, or double that, as a positive modifer against that same subject once, later. This should incentivize players to interview the likely candidates early, before they have the modifer actually to nail them, chase some red herrings and run down intermediate leads to build up their positive modifer, and then come back with that plus their one-time bonus to nail the real killer.
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Old 04-23-2013, 11:49 AM   #6
Tuk the Weekah
 
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Default Re: Gumshoe, its genus of RPGs, and distancing mechanics

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Originally Posted by Anaraxes View Post
I like it. Certainly fits the TV genre convention. And it gives you an incentive to interview many people, to build up a higher modifier.

Since the bad guy is traditionally someone you interviewed earlier, only to think they were innocent, how about a rule that if you take a negative modifier against a subject, you can (later) take that, or double that, as a positive modifer against that same subject once, later. This should incentivize players to interview the likely candidates early, before they have the modifer actually to nail them, chase some red herrings and run down intermediate leads to build up their positive modifer, and then come back with that plus their one-time bonus to nail the real killer.
This is brilliant.
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Old 04-21-2013, 03:31 AM   #7
RogerBW
 
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Default Re: Gumshoe, its genus of RPGs, and distancing mechanics

My position: I'm not a huge fan of the GUMSHOE system, but I think there are things I get about it that possibly you don't yet. So take this as coming from a sceptical explorer rather than a committed enthusiast or naysayer.

The thing that made pools and expenditure make sense for me was narrativism, specifically the idea that everyone should get his turn in the spotlight. In a typical RPG, the guy who's specialised in forensic pathology will end up dominating a pathology-filled adventure and taking a back seat at other times, and one hopes that it balances out over the campaign; in a GUMSHOE game, that balance is meant to happen per adventure, so he'll always get his pathology moment and someone else will always get her legal-expert moment.

Normally the only abilities that have pools are the investigative abilities, and this raises another point: having the ability at all is enough to let you find the clue. The pool spend is to learn something extra, something that lets your character look good and move the adventure forward, but it should never be an essential thing. Not all GUMSHOE GMs seem to keep to this; I've certainly played in games where spending pool points was essential to achieve anything. But as far as I can see it's the way the game is intended to be run.

The problem I have with Robin's approach to narrativism is that he spends a lot of effort designing RPGs to produce the sort of narrative found in other media: books, film, TV. That's not necessarily a bad idea in itself, but what gets lost by playing such a game is the sort of narrative that's native to RPGs - much as the sort of narrative that arises in film didn't show up until people started writing original material for film, rather than converting books and stage plays. I am not a fan of films-of-the-book, and similarly I'd rather play a conventional RPG and let the emergent narrative form on its own than have it pushed on me by structural rules that insist on up and down beats, a climactic scene, and so on.

(As usual, I should say that this is what's true for me - some people love these games, and good for them.)
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