Brindlewood Bay and Clues

Games Brindlewood Bay
1

Thought I'd collect the verbose conversation that was started on Discord (I've left off some stray comments)

DAVE: Riffing off something either Mike or Bill said (or maybe both), I think a problem I am having is that I want things (Clues, Void Clues) to make sense, so it takes me some time to consider it. But they really don’t need to other than fitting into the setting / sitch where they are found. So … I’ll work on that. Also good comments on more friction / difficulty, esp. with people.

BILL: The game might be a lot more cutthroat if the Theorize roll was based not on number of clues found, but number of clues you actually managed to cram into your theory

MIKE:
What was the clue?
Bag of flour.
Why was that there? What does that even mean?
You tell me, Mavens.

DAVEI have some thoughts on this and running PBTA in general that I’ll type up later when I have a keyboard. (to Bill): That is actually the mechanic – if you don’t include a clue explicitly in your theory (which can include “that’s a red herring / not pertinent”), it doesn’t count in the Theorize roll. You guys are just good about figuring out how the clues fit.

BILL: From the mystery stories I’ve watched or read, I feel like the best clues are…

  • ordinary. Handkerchiefs, mugs, or books, not shell casings from the murder gun or something
  • out of place. What attracts us to the clue is that it doesn’t belong

DAVE: Point. The clues offered up in the BB mysteries tend to be a little quirky, but most notable for that second point (being out of place), but also capable of meaning in interesting ways. Drops of blood in an unexpected place. A broken egg nog mug clumsily hidden. An extravagant gift for Chestnut IV. Those could be completely mundane, but are highlighted as clues to guide, inspire, or complicate the theorizing.

JAMES: I always remember one of the Columbo case solving clues. A famous pianist drove home in the middle of a televised show, killed his wife, then drove back to finish the show. The clue that got him caught was that he had a boutonniere that fell off when he killed his wife, that he then put back on after he came home and “found” his wife dead. That little thing being off/out of place

DAVE: So BB would probably not allow as explicit and dispositive a clue as that; a clue cannot solve the murder. But there can be boutonnieres found as Clues, and video of concerts posited where he wasn’t wearing it as part of the Theorizing (to some subjective degree you can make some shit up in Theorizing to fill in gaps).

(On that note: if the theory had been that Thomas got scratched by Amelia and that’s where the drops of blood Clue came from, it could be posited in the Theorizing session that, hey, yeah, Thomas has a bandage on his hand. It doesn’t affect the roll, but it helps slot in the Clue.)

Or maybe there is video of the concert that shows the missing boutonniere as a Clue; there should be some leeway where he can say, “It fell off in my dressing room and I only realized when I went back to get my car keys” or something. (I’m sure there’s a reason that excuse didn’t work in the Columbo episode)

BILL: A Charlie Chan film had a flower left at the crime scene not to solve the murder, but introduce a new suspect

BILL: 1. Like I think that this game is trying hard to walk a line. Mysteries kind of have to make sense. These things happened and therefore this is who did it. But you need a certain amount of coherent planning to achieve a coherent outcome. And this system is basically saying “don’t do that, just say shit and let people play free association”

Humans are great at pattern recognition so you can sort of get away with it sometimes

But it’s also very arbitrary. It’s a capital C Clue if we made a die roll to harvest it, anything else just doesn’t enter into the odds of successfully solving the mystery

DAVE: You’re not wrong. It’s a brilliant way of not having to craft actual mysteries (and then railroad the players into their solution), but also a bit arbitrary from what gets counted as a Clue. E.g., the cliffhanger of finding the named suspect with a knife in their back … isn’t actually a Clue. Something a character says isn’t a Clue, unless you roll the Meddling Move before they say it. Of course, those things can inform the Theory being made, but they don’t increase the chance of the Theory being correct. Which doesn’t encourage a lot of active role-playing (even with the Suspects), at least from a mechanical standpoint.

That said, “coherent planning to achieve a coherent outcome,” I was kind of amazed (both times so far) at the way you folk Theorized and made something coherent out of it. It feels like a weird cheat, from a detective/mystery standpoint, though it actually rings true to how actual police work works: the answer can’t be known (until the trial is concluded), but we need a theory of the case with good enough supporting evidence to get the DA to file charges.

MIKE: I have some thoughts on this and running PBTA in general that I’ll type up later when I have a keyboard.

2 Likes
2

So one of the things I think often comes up with PbtA is the idea that it is rules lite. However, just because the game has very simple rules doesn’t mean that it’s rules lite. In fact, I would rather postulate that when you ignore rules in PbtA the game breaks down far quicker than something like a D&D (which in fact has the opposite issue where if you don’t handwave the rules enough, they bog down the game).

Add on to that is the fact that PbtA games lean onto the improv nature of RPGs much harder than some other games, but in a way that sometimes causes friction to what is sometimes called Character or Actor Stance play* leads to moments of hesitation, worry, and doubt. And the only way I think you get over that in Brindlewood Bay is getting comfortable with the fact that a lot of stuff is only going to make sense in hindsight.

Just like Theorize only gives context to the Clues in hindsight, sometimes Meddling is going to mean giving Clue status to things that are clue-shaped in hindsight.

See a dead body? That’s certainly a red flag and you know they were stabbed in the back, but all that tells you the how. The why may only be gathered by examining the body and triggering the Meddling Move. (Or looking around to determine what happened moments before the fight, or seeing how everyone else reacted to the revelation.)

And to call back to something Dave said…

Only kind of sort of. If Ruby’s in a conversation with someone and they say something clue-shaped, I might stop the in-character conversation and say “Wait, that sounded important. Can I roll a Meddling to see if Ruby can contextualize that into something actionable?” Made the roll? Yep, that’s a Clue in hindsight. Fail the roll? The importance went over Ruby’s head (but when she recounts the conversation to Constance, she may pick up on details that Ruby didn’t).

Is this easy? No. I’ve played D&D off and on for 20 years and I still think I’m horrible at running that game, even though I think the moment to moment running of the game is much easier than most PbtA games (the pregame prep, however, is orders of magnitude more than what PbtA asks of you). I’ve been playing Brindlewood Bay for like a couple weeks, so I’m sure there will be pain points as my notions of what playing and running a game run up against what it’s asking. But that also happens in almost every new game I try, so I think it is not “damn why is this hard?” but instead “damn, why do we keep trying to learn new games every couple of months?**” :laughing:

*Inhabiting the character, different than Narrator Stance where you’re more broadly describing the character’s actions and Gamer or Director Stance where you control the character merely as a game piece and their actions are extensions of your drive to complete objectives in the game. These are broad concepts and no one is ever truly in a single stance. Personally I am most comfortable switching between Narrator and Director Stances, only occasionally dipping into Actor Stance.

**I believe the answer to this one is that we are masochists.

3

My only concern here is the “clue economy,” if you will. No, that’s not an issue if you are still requiring a Meddling Move to actually discern Clues.

On the other hand, why actor kid mentioning that he’s filthy rich not a Clue, but finding his checkbook showing a huge positive balance might be?

From a narrative standpoint, the Mavens should be pursuing particular clues or chains of interesting information, rather than depending on random shit to just turn up after successful Maven moves. That’s in there, in good part, to let the GM not worry about coming up with sensical Clues (letting the players make sense of them later), but it also robs the Mavens of some of their motivation in any given scene. So if the Mavens (or, rather, the players) come up with something that would be a good Clue – why not let them try to discern it?

1 Like
4

At least for me, they are different things. Kid mentioning he’s filthy rich? Okay. He’s rich.

A Clue of their checkbook showing a huge positive balance? Well, there might be something in that checkbook that’s damning. You said you were in Hollywood on the 9th… so why did you write a check for the local dinner on that day? Won’t know until we get to the Theorizing.