As a GM, we want you to uncover the story. We planned it that way, we spend time making the story, and not telling it to you means we wasted our time.
I'm running a group playing a mystery-based campaign, with private eyes and scholars in the group. Unfortunately, we're all new to FATE, and the players' experience with mysteries appears to be limited to the DF books. (No CSI fans here, evidently).
So I thought it might be cool to make a resource thread on what you, as a player, can do if you are stuck in a mystery.
In this first post, I'll give some typical mysteries, dead ends, and so on, and then some basic ways to solve them. If other people want to add some, please do!
For mysteries, just make them as typical as possible, and describe the dead end where players might get stumped. For solutions, please give us useful spells (rough descriptions are fine, tell us if someone had just channeling or ritual what type of magic they might use there). For skills, give us questions to assess scene aspects with that skill, or types of declarations that could be made. it would also be cool to get how you might approach a problem as a pure mortal, a werewolf, ect rather than just using magic.
Typical mysteries.
-Someone or something is missing. You try a basic tracking spell, but the connection is quickly severed, indicating that another magic user on the other end.
-Someone is dead. Your trail to the murderer leads to a dead murderer.
Typical skills to find solutions
Contacts, followed by social skills
investigation
scholarship
example of type of solution:
If the people that hired you or you have interviewed know nothing about a possible reason that the missing person or thing might go missing, you can try rolling Contacts.
With a successful contacts roll, you could declare that you happened to have a link with the police, someone in the person's organization or who might otherwise know the reputation of the missing person, or a mutual friend. For an item, this could include knowing a scholar who might be able to give more information on the item's history, or knowing someone in import/exports, an auctioneer, an insurance agent, or the like who can shed light on the situation. A good roll like this, with a good declaration, can convince the GM to make an additional source of information (because we probably already have one planned, but aren't sure how to get you to them) available to you.
You could also assess with contacts, and this is basically saying "well I want to ask around and see who this guy knew, or who was interested in this item". A successful roll here should probably be enough to get you to what the GM has planned.
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You can, of course, roll investigation. A successful roll here on an assessment should reveal whatever clues the GM has planned. But honestly, a lot of times the dead ends get hit because someone, well, botches that investigation roll. This means that BEFORE you roll investigation, it's a good time to make some maneuvers with other skills to bump up your investigations roll. Here's some examples:
use resources to put a maneuver of "Understanding of the wealth of the missing person" or "value of other items in the area".
use scholarship to put a maneuver of "using my superior intellect to look for deeper meaning/information in available clues"
use lore to put a maneuver of "looking for anything magical"
use alertness to put a maneuver of "focused senses towards investigating"
use discipline to put a maneuver of "blocking out all other distractions"
a couple of these should bump your investigation roll up enough that when you roll it, you have a pretty good chance of getting some good details, and leads you to the movie scene of "You notice that Miss Price was well-dressed for the evening; better than she normally dressed. See, here, the tag in her trashcan for her new blouse from Saks. Compare that to this Target blouse in her laundry. This perfume is also new; you can tell by the way the scent hasn't started to decompose yet. Nothing seems out of the ordinary magically. You suspect that she has come into some new source of money, and you should investigate that."
Compare that to "Bwah? you rolled a negative one? You find crap, holmes."
Investigation declarations let you just, really, place clues, with GM approval. Even if you try something like "Oooh I rolled a 5, can I say that her kidnapper smoked a cigarette and left the butt in her ashtray, but I can tell the difference from the rest of her cigarette butts?"... and the GM thinks, no, that won't work, eldrich horrors don't smoke... your inventiveness usually makes us feel sympathetic enough to toss you a bone like "Well, no, but you will totally notice the slime on the ashtray now."
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