Investigations in RPGs: "Doing the Legwork"

Occasionally, when playing tabletop RPGs you'll want to run your players through an investigation. Maybe this week you want a little freedom from the usual slog of combat and a good mystery seems like an excellent way to change things up. When I've been a player, I've enjoyed many of the investigation adventures I have played through, though some were more successful than others. So the question stands, how do you run an investigation for your game?

Doing Investigations in a tabletop RPG comes up from time to time in online forums and discords. Often the aspect of mysteries that is brought up the most often concerns how to present clues to the players in a meaningful way. The other aspect that is brought up during these discussions tends to be able the rules of whatever game system is being used and how they tend to fail to present investigations very well mechanically. Does the game present the process of investigation in a way that is diegetic and meaningful to the players without making the whole process too difficult for the players, nor too easy where the GM is just handing all the clues to the players without any game mechanism in play?

Often the question mainly comes down to How hard or difficult is it for the players (PCs) to find clues?

A lot of advice I see online when it comes down to Investigation adventures is, "When the players reach a new location and are looking for Clues - if the clues are important to the adventure then just give them the adventure. No rolls are needed. 

I kind of hate this advice though. It lacks the experience and diegetic feel that players, like myself, are seeking when we play through an investigation adventure. I want to feel like I found the clue through my own abilities (or the character's abilities), not to be handed a clue just for showing up. Not only that but it completely ignores a multitude of information that the detectives discover along the way that is not helpful at all. Red herrings, rumors, and misleading information. A GM could give these all out along with the important clues, but again this goes back to the player and PC just being given things instead of feeling like they achieved any kind of success for finding them.

Most games will have investigation skills or at least use perception skills in place of an investigation skill to handle mysteries. in D&D 5e, they have a skill called Investigation that a player can roll to discover anything from hidden information or items to figure out what kind of weapon caused a wound. In 5e it's a succeed or fail roll. I imagine that most DMs will not tell the player what DC they need to roll for investigation so that the player remains in the dark about whether they succeeded or failed the roll.  Most games are similar to this. You roll and you either succeed and gain information or a clue. or you fail and you get nothing or a red herring. 

Shadowrun: One of the Best Classic Investigation Games

Most of the best investigation missions/modules I have played have been mostly old Shadowrun adventures. Back in the late 80's and into the 90's, in my experience FASA Games figured out how to help a GM run an investigation game in a way that best solves the dilemma of bad rolls vs good diegetic experience. Most games have investigation skills or a few perception skills in place of an investigation skill to handle mysteries. Shadowrun is more like the latter where it doesn't have an "Investigation" skill, but instead, you use Perception and other character skills to gather clues and information.

Shadowrun does investigations a bit differently than most games and I believe that the 2nd and 3rd editions handle it the best. Part of this is because it's not just a skill or even one skill for that matter. In Shadowrun you start out with a number of Contacts; these are NPCs from who you can call up and gain information, a favor, or job offers, etc. When you get a contact, the most important part of them isn't what their name is but what they are, and what kind of profession they fall into. Are they a secretary, a security guard, a pizza delivery boy, etc. Names are all good, but what they do for a living, or on the side, gives you more information on what they can offer your character. Shadowrun uses these contacts for all kinds of things but for the purpose of this discussion, we will be focusing on how they provide information and possible clues.

When you start an Investigation in Shadowrun you are given the basic rundown on the details of the mystery. A kid was abducted from a home, a teenager who ran away from home, a missing celebrity, an employee who was murdered, etc. The players get the basic rundown of the situation and the GM has the backstory and knows what happened. But how the PC's investigated the mystery is left to the players to figure out and often the first step to any investigation was "Legwork". This is where the PCs call up their relevant contacts to gather information. Smart Shadowrunners who want to live a long life does legwork. A smart Shadowrunner knows that clients lie and clients would never tell them everything. So smart Shadowrunners do the legwork to find clues but also uncover information that wasn't told or that event the client may not have access to. Each section of a Shadowrun mission has a legwork sidebar, with suggested contact types that are relevant to the info they are looking for. Some professions might lower or increase the target number to the roll needed to gain info because the profession might be better or worse placed for having come in contact with information relating to the mission. 

When a PC reaches out to a contact, the player makes a roll against the contact's rating. The contact's rating is a measurement of how friendly and close the Shadowrunner is to their contact and how willing they are to share info with the Shadowrunner. The player counts the number of successes and the number of successes are measured against the threshold needed for the quality of information they can gather. Example below, lists three different queries that the PCs want information on. They want information on Monty Boudreaux, the Fixer, Neuanalysis, and Wally Huggins. Any street contact might have info on Monty, Any Corporate Contact might have info on Neuranalysis, and only a Martix search can pull up info on Wally. A Corporate Contact isn't going to have access to the same information and rumor mill as a street contact, and vice-versa. 

A GM could easily convert this over to a game like Call of Cthulhu. The BRP game system, which CoC is based on, has multiple levels of success. In the case of CoC, a player can make a skill test and roll either a Standard Success - less than or equal to the PC's skill, a Hard Success - less than or equal to half of the PC's skill, an Extreme Successes - less than or equal to 1/5th of the PC's skill, or a Failure.

Using the second example, a failure would get the same result as 0 successes.

A Standard Success would obtain the players the same result as 1-2.

A Hard Success would obtain the players the same result was 3-4.

And an Extreme Success would obtain the players the same result as 5+. 

The main idea of this system of handling information is the better the results the better the quality of the information they gather. With even a failed roll you can gain something. Looking over the example you can see the quality of information in action. The better the quality the more detail and exact the information. With Wally Huggins, the quality of the information makes it easier to locate Wally in the Seattle Metro. With Neuranalysis the quality of the info gathered becomes more and more recent and pertinent. 

Another aspect to this that the example doesn't show is how each PCs can gain different information. While one PC might learn about the unpleasant incident that happened at Neuranalysis during the blackout, another PC can learn about Yamatetsu's interest in Neuranalysis. Each player feels like they made a difference.  

If a GM knows the system they are running well enough, I'm sure they can take this approach and work it into that system without any issues.

This is an extremely cool solution to maintain the diegetic experience while also allowing the dice to still serve a function within the game. I hope this can help anyone who is struggling with running an investigation in a role-playing game - who doesn't want to just hand the players clues while not allowing the mystery to get stuck just because of some poor dice rolls. It might be a bit more work for the GM but I think once you get used to these concepts, after a while it will become second nature for a GM to break up clues in this way when they prepare to run a mystery.