Investigation in games

SYSTEM: ICONS

This is actually specific to ICONS but it could be adapted for any game with a degrees-of-success mechanic.

Investigation is sort of odd in games. For some games (the various GUMSHOE games, for instance), it's their jam. For other games, it's a roll to give people the info so they can get on to the next encounter.

So you can roleplay the investigation, with the players talking to various characters and hours of playtime can go by, and that's great, if everyone's on board with that.

On the other hand, you can reduce it to a roll or a series of rolls and have a handout or handouts for the players, and it's done quickly. "You spend two hours researching shipping companies, and this is what you get."

Sometimes you want one, sometimes you want the other. And if you're writing an adventure to be played by anyone other than the group you know, then you have to take both mindsets into account.

I don't know if anyone else produces adventures with areas where there are investigation or similar tests. What I've noticed that I have started doing is this:

Topic (whatever the test is about
Difficulty	3 or 5 or whatever
Pyramid test?	No or Optional or Required
Time	How long is this test going to take? Sometimes the time is implicit in the task.
Everybody Knows	This is the background information. Bombs are bad, the Noble family has three kids. You barely have to ask this stuff.
Marginal Success	Do they get information on a marginal success?
Moderate Success	Anything for Marginal Success, plus whatever is here.
Major Success	Anything for the previous two successes, plus whatever is here.
Massive Success	Anything for the previous successes, plus whatever is here.
Consequences	This might be obvious. (Boom or no boom, when disarming a bomb.) But that goes back to something else. If there aren't any consequences, why are you making them roll? If you've got the information listed here, it means two things: There's a consequence to not getting some of it You're okay with them having all of it. Sometimes players roll well, and if you don't want the info to change things, don't make it available. Have it show up only after the computer contacts the alien probe or something.

And...here's an important point...where possible, I list the source they find stuff from, so I can improvise a roleplay investigation if the players are into that. So some stuff is just in the records ("Ten minutes of Googling tells you the basic rules of cabotage in Canada"), some could be tied to a person. ("Mrs. Johnson was the one who saw the ghost.")


Also, I've been looking at Encounter Theory and trying to use that to guide some of the adventures I'm writing now. Anybody else heard of it (Plot Points podcast)?