Brindlewood Bay musings (XP and RP and what the game is about)

Games Brindlewood Bay
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1

I just wanted to write down what I was meandering around last night. I’m not saying it contradicts anything anyone was suggesting, I do want to write it down to help solidify it in my brain.

This is my approach to the End of Game Questions:

  1. Fulfilling a question needs some intentional or at least focused action around it.
  2. Are we having fun?

Mike is right in saying that there are certain traits that a Maven just has. Fiona (e.g.) is always lending her advice to someone younger; it’s just her nature, and she likely does it a half-dozen times a day if she is in public. Local kids probably scatter when she approaches. Does that mean that she just always gets an XP if she has that box checked?

That doesn’t feel right to me. I think there has to be something that is pointed to where Fiona actually RPs out giving advice to someone younger, and more than “You should be wearing a jacket in this weather.” Something that, if someone were keeping a game log, it would be noted in there.

It’s not fun (IMO) to just automatically rack up XP without the RP effort (to my mind). “I probably said something mentor-like to that nice waitress at the cafe” shouldn’t do it. That becomes a Participation Award, which is not what I think this mechanic was meant to be.

It’s also not fun being too nitpicky about this. I’ve been trying to be conscience of that, too, and if someone can point to something they did and honestly day they think that meets the threshold in their mind, I’m not likely to question it.

Could that be “exploited”? Sure. Margie could (and sort of does) watch for younger people she can advise. That’s actually RPing. If she does that every game and gets an XP from it every session, that’s fine. If she realizes in the second session of a mystery that there are no younger people around and therefore takes a different End of Game Question, that’ also legit to the purposes of that mechanism, which is to guide and reward role-playing.

But, bottom line, it should be fun. If it’s not, let’s see what we can do about it.

On a similar note, since it turned around in my brain last night …

“Doting” is funny. “To give a lot of love or attention.” “To be extremely and uncritically fond of someone; adoring.” That almost gets too vague to define in terms of explicit actions, as some people are just doting by nature, and I’ve said that “by nature” isn’t really enough.

But actions that derive from doting (not to get into a Works vs Faith debate here) can be identifiable. Baking a batch of cookies for a visitor. Bringing a casserole over to a sick friend. Mending a jacket that was left behind. All of it usually unsolicited (or possibly even protested against; doting makes some people uncomfortable). I suppose asking someone if they’d like you to bake cookies for them when they just dropped by for a chat might be doting; going ahead and just doing it is even more so.

Less strenuous actions might apply, too. Unsolicited (and, again, perhaps even unwanted) hugs and kisses on the forehead probably qualify, esp. if explicitly called out and frequent.

Anyway, this has gone on far too long. Just some thoughts.

Oh, and just one more thing (he said, using the Frank Columbo move) …

Columbo theres just one more thing sir

There is, I think, a disconnect between the key mechanisms in the game: RP and Murder Solving.

Part of that gets back to the very clever but arguably meaningless nature of the Murder Solving mechanism. I mean, there’s the Theorizing bit, which can be fun, but the mechanic works in a way that not only means there are no meaningful clues except what seems like an appropriately vague item predefined by the Mystery, but explicitly looking for a specific something as a mundane clue (“Do I see any signs of poison?” “Do I find any fingerprints on the knife?”) does not actually generate something that acts as a Clue for mystery-solving purposes (counting in the Theorize roll). Unless I am seriously misreading the book (which, among other things, note that no Clue can definitively the mystery on its own, which is often not true in the mystery genre, even if it is the last clue found).

I think the answer is that this is not a game about solving mysteries, but a game about being little old ladies who solve mysteries. The RP stuff in the game is all-pervasive. Every “Location” defined for a Mystery, and a number of the Suspects and the like, have questions to extract RPish answers from one or all Mavens. Character advancement does pull in some Mystery-solving, but it’s secondary to the the other options. Everything else about the character sheet is about RPing the character – the Crowns, the Cozy Place items, etc., the Consequences.

Even the Moves are about RP. The Day/Night moves are about what the character fears. The Gold Crown Mystery move is about making stuff up from the genre. Ironically, the Meddling and Theorize moves are the least RPish, except for their consequences (Keeper Reactions) if there is less than total success (the Theorize move, in fact, can and has been with us done almost completely out of character). And, of course, the Maven Moves are all about providing further guidance and focus for RPing.

So in that case, the Clue / Theorize stuff isn’t the actual goal, but a side product to provide narrative results for the role-playing actions of the Mavens. It’s “meaningless” because it isn’t what the game is focused on; it’s a supporting mechanic, not the primary one. One can legitimately argue that D&D’s goal, esp. in earlier editions, is being murderhoboes – rewards and progress are explicitly linked to (usually) killing as many things as you can get within striking range of. The goal of BB, instead, is RPing little old ladies with a somewhat ghoulish pastime (and leading to an even more ghoulish narrative climax in the final Void Mystery). That’s where most of the fun seems to be.

Does that make sense?

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It makes sense, but it feels like we spent 75% of our clock time doing that meaningless support activity.

At first, it felt like we’d enter a scene, then a murder would happen and we’d interview everyone like a point-and-click game, and then we’d theorize, and that’s it. That’s certainly how the game frames itself. I knew who I wanted to play, but what room was there to play that character within that?

I’m not the fan of Murder She Wrote that you folks clearly are, but from what I remember from similar series, there’s a key thing that happens in those shows: life wants to keep moving, like a river flowing around this sudden stone of murder that’s dropped into the water and disrupted everything. That means the lives of the people around the murder victim, but it must also mean the detective’s life.

What does the game do to facilitate that part of “life goes on”, except the odd moment where one of us narrates a cozy moment that amounts to nothing except a bracket that separates investigative scenes?

So this is probably another aspect of my frustration with Brindlewood Bay as a game system: it wants to be peanut butter and chocolate, this interesting mix of two distinct things, and it keeps coming off to me as oil and water. Mysteries invite solutions by their nature - they are mysteries - and solutions have to make sense, or else they’re just explanations. I don’t feel satisfied by a mystery that’s solved by pareidolia. I could get the same experience by alternating between rounds of “Clue” and “Arkham Horror”, where it doesn’t matter why Colonel Mustard did it in the study with the candlestick because he then got devoured by a shoggoth.

So I’m very glad if we’re doing more with the characters and their lives, I just fear that the game will not support that experience very well. We will see, and I’m glad you are putting in the effort, and I don’t want you to feel discouraged just because I’m not enjoying this one particular part.

3

And I appreciate your candor, and understand and even appreciate a lot of what you’re saying.

Part of what I exploring above (particularly in the last section) is that idea of where the focus should be. You’re absolutely right – the Clue-gathering and -using part of the game is very point-and-click (your use of “pareidolia” is quite fitting). Anyone could do it. And short of having the Mavens actually theorize in character (which doesn’t actually sound fun), there’s not much more than can be done there.

My job, then, as Keeper (and, to an extent, you folk as the Players) is to find the focus of RP in the game, which is something I think it supports to at least some degree, arguably more forcefully (if less cleverly) than murder mysteries. That’s where I should be putting more emphasis into, fleshing out the people you interact with, rather than worrying about the specifics of Clues. The Clues, like the murder, are just there to give the characters something to do with each other and with other people rather than just watch television. They create a reason for interaction and role-playing that otherwise would be “We meet at the book shop, discuss what it says on the Internet about the next Gold Key Mystery, then go home.”

I will say that my intent at this point is to try and finish up the campaign and call it done, for my frustrations as much as anyone else.

I actually had a lot of fun with the episode last night, because it had a setting I know and can enjoy. More generic pseudo-closed-room mysteries I’m okay with, but I find myself more worried about plugging all the narrative holes that the mystery authors left in (why, again, are these three little old ladies being asked, let alone forced, to solve a gruesome murder? Why don’t they just go home and let the stunningly lax sheriff and his deputies take care of law enforcement? And can nobody actually reach the sheriff without hiking for a few hours and finding a phone that works?").

Other scenarios are even more troublesome for me. There’s one focused on professional wrestling that I feel like I couldn’t do justice to.

And the Dark Conspiracy and final Void Mystery stuff is outlined broadly but getting it to actually fit into the BB narrative framework without the tape and baling wire showing is … a bit more difficult than it sounds. (I have read about more than one table that dropped that whole underlying narrative and just did the mystery-of-the-week, of which there are a plenitude published. Tempting, except that I feel there needs to be something more tying things together than just the Murder of the Week,)

We’ll persevere. :slight_smile: And I’ll try to make sure we have more of the character stuff to balance the pachinko balls of clue generation.

4

So having thought about it more, my suggestion for integrating these things is:

Don’t treat clues like they’re things on the scene that have to be located and itemized.

Instead, look at how each of the characters around the victims is moving on. Let us interact with them more, and let us find clues there - not scattered in space around the victim, but scattered across time after the murder.

Here’s an example of what I mean.

An immediate clue, the sort we’ve already been finding, is “a modified will”. It might be hanging up on the walls, we might locate it in the victim’s office, whatever, but it was found within minutes of the murder.

The kind of clue I’m suggesting isn’t a will as such, but something like “a day after the murder, NPC #12 said they were going to go home, but we saw them going to the offices of the victim’s lawyer”. What could that mean? Well that’s what makes it a Clue - and something to be wound into the eventual solution.

Along the way, we have more interactions with these people that feel more natural, and not just “the little old ladies are at the crime scene, time for them to interview everyone”.

Does that make sense? Does it sound helpful?