Pteryx

Hexcrawls often involve keying a location of interest to every hex, and rolling for random encounters that aren't location-linked beyond being suitable for the wider region. However, it seems to me like also keying a random encounter to each hex (likely linked with that hex's location of interest, such as 2d4 bandits for a hex whose location of interest is a bandit camp) and having your random encounter rolls involve a chance of getting a nearby linked encounter instead of a wider regional one would be worthwhile. Localized random encounters like this could serve as clues as to what points of interest could be found nearby, particularly if the party has been missing its rolls to discover actual locations by pure chance.

1d6	Encounter Type
1-3	Local (roll 1d10)
4	Nearby (roll 1d12)
5-6	Regional (roll on regional table)

Of course, if a hex's keyed location of interest changes in some way, change the linked random encounter, too!

A lot of my anxieties as a GM (though not all of them) stem from a D&D 3.5 campaign that I ran in the late '00s. The idea was an Eberron campaign set in Sharn, wherein the PCs would be dragonmarked heirs who inexplicably had not just the normal powers of their marks, but also powers similar to those of hybrids with highly magical creatures. Most templates that gained spell-like abilities according to a creature's HD were fair game. Since being dragonmarked at all puts some pressure on characters to serve their Dragonmarked House, the more powerful the mark the greater the responsibilities, these extra powers that broke the marks' normal patterns could lead to a variety of problems if people's Houses learned about them, and D&D is first and foremost about having adventures, I was basically envisioning this as a superhero campaign, secret identities and all.

The campaign was called "Mighty Scions"... which was intended to be a working title and I'd said as much, but maddeningly none of the PCs would come up with either a name for their party/superhero team nor a term for those with planar-empowered marks other than "like us". I ended up having someone in-world come up with the term "mighty scions" later to finally put a lid on their constant use of "like us".

And it didn't last more than a few months total, because so much went so horribly wrong.

• The party in general, being played by people assembled from the very small pool of anyone I knew at all with any interest in D&D, had a severe case of "pickup party syndrome" — behaving as though the rest of the group were just uninteresting coworkers, and all they themselves had to do was play their role well in isolation. I had intended "We have this unusual problem in common that we can't talk with most other people about, and we also have in common that we want to try to use our weird powers to help people despite this; let's band together!" to serve as party glue, but it didn't. Given prior GMing experience, I had attempted to head off "pickup party syndrome" and foster a party dynamic by linking people to the Five Man Band trope page, but it seemed to be processed as just a second layer of "balanced party" rather than an attempt to foster relationship dynamics. (To be fair, in later years it did wind up identified more as functional roles and less as a set of character dynamics, but it wasn't at the time.) Basically, of the original party, the two friends of mine tended to only interact with each other, and the two acquaintances of mine likewise; I was treated like the only person worth addressing otherwise.


• In retrospect, a better introductory adventure centered on making a big deal about the group's unusual powers would have gone a long way towards hammering the commonality home, and what I created as a first adventure might've made a better second adventure. It would've been very hard to do without blowing the lid off of what was supposed to be a long-term secret, but it would've paid dividends. It would have done a lot to hammer home that the premise was not a light flavoring or an element of only one character, but a major influence over the campaign's style. Some people, it seems, don't really listen to campaign premises and don't realize their implications until they see them in gameplay.


• I had, at the beginning, thought that a good introductory recurring villain would be a "Smithy" sort of character, someone who was interested in causing havoc by arming people. Unfortunately, it turned out that one of the acquaintances I'd recruited — the one who pounced on the opportunity to be "the leader" and "the detective" of the group, for reasons that we'll get into later — was in no way, shape, or form onboard with the concept of a recurring villain. She would not let the adventure end until the person who'd supplied the minor lackey who was supposed to be the villain of what was supposed to be "issue 1" was absolutely and unequivocally dead. Clearly, to her mind, a recurring villain was a loss condition in the game of D&D, not a potentially entertaining trope. She acted so outraged at the idea that the lackey had a bigger villain behind him, and so zealous in her insistence that he must die, that it was obvious that if I'd let said bigger villain escape or pivoted to a different recurring villain in some fashion, she would have felt cheated and still would not have let the adventure end until things were neatly tied with a blood-soaked bow. The entire campaign would have distorted around chasing down this one villain or his replacement, and nobody would have had fun — not the other PCs who signed up for a different campaign and didn't see this villain as being nearly so unbearable an existence, not myself who did not want to be running an endless pursuit campaign, not even the "leader and detective" player who would've seen the whole thing as continued malicious denial of her demand for closure. Even after the mini-dungeon and boss fight in which the party did in fact get to kill him, she complained that the resulting "issue 1" was too long and should be called "arc 1" instead, as though this wasn't the result of her own persistence. This forced the campaign into a completely episodic format for the majority of its run, though I still held out hope that once the party gelled, I could bring in larger myth-arc elements.


• Looking back on this, it's an object lesson in what happens when fundamental agendas are mismatched. This acquaintance wanted to absolutely and unconditionally win a game, and considered leaving any sort of loose end to be a chump move. If I'd known she would behave like this and had a choice of other players to consider, I wouldn't have recruited a player who thought this way. Clearly, she wouldn't have been on board with long-term arcs later any more than she was at the start.


• The other acquaintance wanted to be "the smart guy", but turned out to have neither the brains for it nor the skills to compensate. He made the common culturally-induced mistake of thinking "intelligence" only involved knowing more facts than other people. This most notably led to him keeping information pertinent to the whole party to himself early on, partly in the interests of trying to "seem smart", partly because he mistook the underlying premise of the campaign for "his character's thing" only. He also once asked me what the strongest summon he had available was in the context of wanting to fight something in a stone-paved area, I pointed at the fire elemental, and he then proceeded to send said fire elemental into a garden and was surprised that this set things on fire; insert shocked Pikachu face here. The one intelligent thing I remember his character doing was being the first to run away from a losing fight.


• This guy was the most obvious problem in the early campaign. Because his issues were so flashy, they ended up distracting me from the deeper, more insidious problems in the game... particularly his friend the "leader and detective", as strange as that may sound in retrospect. As a result, I sweat the small stuff, assuming it's going to turn out to be symptoms of some kind of enormous problem. To his credit, unlike the educated character in my prior campaign attempt that got anywhere, he at least didn't assume that being "the smart guy" meant that he had a Correctness Halo giving him as much or more power over the truth of the setting as I... somebody else did that instead.


• The acquaintance who jumped on the opportunity to be "the leader" and "the detective" was secretly thinking in pure dungeon-crawling terms, considering her character to be first and foremost a melee warrior and grousing if the party didn't get to fights fast enough. She didn't do detective things because (as she later explained) "D&D doesn't have detectives"... never mind that this was an urban campaign in Eberron, she had detective skills and feats on her sheet, and the detective part was not an artifact of the Five Man Band but a specific request I'd made for the purposes of this campaign. She also quietly assumed that a superhero premise meant logic did not apply at all, compounding the issue. Her treating the "detective" role as a joke and an imposition when I expected her character to actually do detective work ironically led to the campaign having more mystery focus and less combat focus than I'd intended, even though she expected and wanted the opposite. Because she couldn't actually do the job properly, the mystery parts of the game wound up stretched out and distributed around the group as a whole. Note that through all of this, she never actually explained what she did and did not expect or want, only occasionally griped in very unclear ways; this becomes important later.


• One thing I learned from this is that some people, no matter how much you explain or demonstrate a premise that changes core gameplay, will still never see past your game system's brand name. Some people are convinced that D&D is only one specific thing, or Call of Cthulhu is only one specific thing, or DWRP jamjars are only one specific thing. If your campaign doesn't fit their expectations, they'll act as though it does anyway — sometimes blatantly (treating NPCs as monsters to be killed for lack of actual monsters, for example), but other times far more subtly (treating NPCs as meaningless background color instead of someone to interact with or someone who might overhear your character). In the subtle cases, one may not even realize something's wrong until it's too late... One reason why I long to make a coherent game system of my own is that it would, in theory, prevent people from stubbornly expecting whatever they think "D&D" is instead of the actual campaign premise.


• In addition to this player pouncing on the "detective" role and yet not actually buying into it, this player also didn't actually seem to like, let alone buy into, the superhero premise. Why she joined such a game despite this is something that to this day I don't completely understand. Her lack of buy-in for superheroes manifested not only in her loud and zealous opposition to recurring villains and her assumption that logic didn't apply, but also in horrible Clark Kenting. I had to work around her giving no regard to secrecy at all, her refusal to consider the idea of the party getting a base of operations, and her disinterest in actually having her character be meaningfully connected to members of her own House (which is to say, her character's "secret identity" life). She tended to actively resist genre conventions; I had to basically have NPC authorities warn them that killing enemies rather than subduing them and turning them in would have negative consequences for them in order for murders like that at the end of arc 1 to stop.


• While the matter of refusing to grasp the implications of an urban campaign that calls for a detective can be chalked up to a failure to accept the idea that a premise can change fundamental gameplay loops within the context of a known tabletop RPG system, the active resistance to a genre aspect of a campaign that one joins anyway is something I've had a harder time making sense of. On the other hand, by sheer coincidence the player had chosen a House with a major counterintelligence aspect, which made it easy for me to assume that they understood the need for secrecy even if the character didn't, and were thus cleaning up after her character as best they could... which still was not perfectly, given just how much the "detective and leader" was flaunting any concept of secrecy. Unfortunately, the campaign did not last long enough for the group to see the consequences of her having the party talk shop in a bakery.


• The distribution of detective duties meant a lot of splitting up, which resulted in my players having contradictory expectations of me. On one hand, I was supposed to let everyone play every session, or else it "wasn't worth showing up". On the other hand, players refused to schedule sessions outside of our scheduled weekly session so we could get split-party scenes done and have group sessions dedicated to group scenes. And on the mutant third hand, they refused to stop splitting up, because splitting up saves time from an in-world perspective. Do people think the role of GM comes with the ability to bend space and time in the real world?


• This bullshit is one of a number of things that has convinced me that in dedicated roleplaying campaigns, not all responsibility lies on the GM. There are player responsibilities too. Roleplaying is not passive entertainment, but an active and participatory craft. While it is fun, it is also work; you need to put in effort, you need to cooperate with the GM and with each other, and you need to take scheduling seriously to make it all possible in the first place. This isn't even a new idea; sports teams and musical bands have existed for a long time. (For that matter, the same can be said of raiding guilds in MMOs; I've found similar concerns to apply to them.) If I seem "pushy", "overzealous", or "overinvested" when it comes to making an RP work, this is why. I'm actually trying. How about you?


• One pattern that started to show up was that while players understood perfectly well how to search for clues — examine bodies, scour suspicious sites, talk to people, and so forth — they generally had no idea what they were supposed to actually do with the clues once they found them. They knew they were supposed to report their findings to each other, of course... but after that, the chat room would go silent. There were many times when I had to kick the game back into gear by rolling Knowledge checks for the players, because they never did anything like discuss clues amongst themselves, compare clues with other clues, or above all ask questions. This was the point where "pickup party syndrome" really struck me as the most glaring, as characters did not of their own accord converse with each other about the clues; I had to feed them Knowledge check results I rolled one at a time, from lowest roll to highest, in order to create results anything like such a conversation. Damningly, there was one piece of information that I gave to two different players that went in one ear and out the other in both cases; apparently, if they didn't understand it, it was better to pretend it didn't exist than to suffer the humiliation of saying "huh?"


• To be entirely fair, as mentioned above Mighty Scions was not intended first and foremost to be a mystery campaign; it just worked out that way. Even so, I believe the way things played out here exposes something critical about mystery campaigns that literally no one ever managed to realize before. I talk about it at length in On the missing half of mystery tabletop RP... including how it took me over a decade to pin down a cause, and how dismaying it was that third parties flat-out gaslit me about the effects I saw.


• The "pickup party syndrome" and so-called "leader and detective" issues came to a head in the fourth adventure. Because the party was not gelling or working together well as a team, I decided they should face a party who did work together well as foes. Unfortunately, the player of the "leader and detective" took the PCs having to retreat from a losing fight against a well-coordinated team not as an object lesson in how the party could use better teamwork, but as a metagame signal that chasing the villains was "wrong" — even though the party gained a level from the ordeal and had a new party member show up, both things that could have tilted a future confrontation in the party's favor. What she did instead, between that misinterpretation and my own poor handling of investigative elements on the fly, was to decide that the villains would rob the same place they'd already robbed again, "because they're evil!", and absolutely refuse to let the party budge from the building — or even fortify it or create rumors of there being anything new to steal so it would make any kind of logical or narrative sense. Even my trying to actually use a metagame signal (a reporter showing up with news from outside the building) that the villains had done something somewhere else was dismissed as "a trick!", which led to my letting some snark through in my building anger and the session stopping. It ultimately turned out that what she expected was that volunteering for the roles of "leader" and "detective" would mean that I as the DM would bend reality to make her character always look smart and be right — that these were not things her character was supposed to actively do through her effort, but things her character was supposed to passively be by my grace. She thought she was volunteering to have her character glorified in a situation that was being made up as I went, not taking on part of a team's responsibilities in a world with some level of solidity. She didn't speak up about any of this until I confronted her in rage, so her issues were stealthy compared to the "smart guy's"... though I can see the warning signs in retrospect. Ultimately, I kicked her out.


• To be fair, one aspect of the problem here was underprep on my part. I should have anticipated the possibility that instead of either following the blood trail of the villains or trying to guess where they might go next, the group might instead investigate the hotel they were already at in order to figure out where to go next. Even so, though, the insistence on sulking in a corner until I made her character right was frankly inexcusable in the context of a traditional RPG. At best, it reminded me of camping a respawning special mob in an MMO because it didn't drop the Obvious Clue key item the first time. At worst, it struck me as the behavior of a petulant child. Frankly, it should have never come to this; in the face of my asking for a detective in a game that in her view "doesn't have detectives", she should have asked what I meant, not assumed that I meant a free Correctness Halo.


• For a moment of relative levity in this litany of things that went wrong, there was a combat encounter I didn't balance properly, making it too strong — partly the system's fault for having the CRs of many "dumb brute" animals be too low (and this was, in the end, a templated big cat), but partly because I overestimated the players' ability to make particular intuitive leaps. I had structured it with the intent that the physical sorts would struggle for a couple of turns, then the cleric would swoop in and save the day. Unfortunately, the cleric didn't end up turning the tide. Why? Because I expected these players, as players of JRPGs, to attempt one of the most basic of JRPG strategies: if physical damage is working poorly, try magic damage. Not only did this not seem to occur to them, but the magic damage I was expecting them to exploit was this cleric's ability to spontaneously cast sanctified spells such as Ayailla's Radiant Burst... if he succeeded at a Knowledge (religion) roll, as to my mind he was right on the edge. In the end, the group wound up setting up a dramatic moment for me to fiat it to death.


• Aside from learning the hard way that big cats' CR in D&D 3.5 is underestimated (a lesson my current DM as of this writing also wound up learning the hard way), I learned not to take people applying knowledge I know for a fact that they have for granted, and not to have an encounter rely on the use of an ability that the PCs literally never use and have openly written off as something that may as well not be there. This is not the first time I had seen somebody simply refuse to use an ability with a random chance element, though I didn't in that case get to see that person refuse to use it even under duress.


• In response to us losing our so-called "detective" and the so-called "smart guy" leaving alongside his friend without comment, a new player joined with a character to replace both of those roles at once. This player was both intrigued by the game I was running on its own terms and actually understood mysteries. Unfortunately, this also meant that this player was so much better than anyone else at understanding and thus playing mysteries that it fostered envy and resentment from other players. (Well, one also had a personal reason for resentment that actually stemmed from a misunderstanding, but that's a whole other story.) While this never led to a crash and burn, it did dampen goodwill and probably made the game less fun for everyone else.


• This is why Justin Alexander's growing thoughts on the concept of game structures (which were only posted years after the campaign took place) really grabs my attention. Not only was the difference between someone who understood how to play a mystery and those who did not a matter of night and day, but it seems to me as though everyone understanding how to play the game being run is absolutely critical to the game being fun for everyone. This, too, factors into my desire to make a game system that is centered on the kinds of games I actually want to play and run; with the right framework well-presented, everyone will actually understand what they're signing up for and how to play.


• After one more arc, one of my other initial players in the campaign at the time quit and terminated our friendship over my getting mad at and kicking out the so-called "detective"... right as I was preparing a focus episode for his character. Through the pain, I wound up retooling the adventure so that his character was one of the murder victims (no thanks to one group of people I'd thought were my friends joking about it all in an over-the-top manner when I tried to ask for their help in said pained retooling). It turned out to be one of the campaign's better adventures. This was a noteworthy case of actually overcoming an awkward situation.


• The character's player saw the edited log years later, and was satisfied with the way I handled his character's death. I think that speaks particularly well of how it turned out and proves it's something to be proud of.


• Over the course of all of this, I had been running things in a relatively episodic fashion, in the hopes that the party would gel over time before I brought in anything serious. Six episodic adventures, three lost players, and two new players later, I got sick of waiting and gave up hope on this approach, and tried running an introductory adventure for a longer-term arc... only to be met with cries of "too intense!" and demands of a beach episode at the most awkward possible time.


• I feel like some of my mistake here was not reiterating that starting out episodic and becoming serialized later was my intent to begin with. If I recall correctly, I only really mentioned this in passing at the start of the campaign, when — as has been established — a lot of information went in one ear and out the other. The one player who was still here from the start thought of the campaign only as episodic, and was blindsided by the attempted shift to the campaign being in one way what I wanted to do in the first place.


• During the course of my trying to run a side arc away from the city since obviously the players didn't actually want to dive into the serious stuff there I'd only just introduced, it became clear that the three players I had left wanted completely incompatible campaign structures, and I couldn't please more than one of them at a time. One wanted to be able to explore freely at will with no regard for what other players or characters wanted or the consequences of wandering off, like an Elder Scrolls game. Another wanted a completely linear game with minimal thought required and bright-line indications of where to go when, with his only responsibility being to fight fights and come up with dialogue, like a Final Fantasy game. The third was actually here for the mission-based, mystery-centric game I had wound up running in the first place (which I labeled "Shin Megami Tensei" for lack of a better analogy). ...And yet people were still confused when I gave up on the campaign on these grounds.


• I feel as though this was a problem that partly stemmed from a fundamental lack of deeper understanding of tabletop RP in general, especially game structures, and partly stemmed from my having to work with so small a pool of potential players that I couldn't assemble a like-minded group even if we'd had the necessary shared vocabulary to identify them in the first place. What distresses me is that even when I try to explain to others that I can't run a game where one player wants The Elder Scrolls, one wants Final Fantasy, and one wants Shin Megami Tensei, no one gets it.


• One house rule I had in place for this game was somehow so incomprehensible to my entire playerbase that it was never made use of within the context of my own campaign. The context of the house rule basically went like this: As an Eberron game, we were using action points. As I understand the action point rules, your action points reset whenever you level up; thus, the action points you gain each level are on a use-it-or-lose-it basis. We were essentially using what these days would be called milestone experience; thus, everyone would level up at the same time and I'd know when that would be. Of course, this also happened to conceptually be a superhero game. Therefore, I had this house rule: during a fight that the group would level up after, players could spend two action points to use a capability that they were just about to obtain from their level up one fight ahead of time. I reminded players of this house rule whenever we got into such a fight... but nobody ever used it, and lots of unused action points went to waste. In a shounen-anime-flavored D&D 3.5 campaign I played in a few years later with basically exactly the same rules context, I asked the DM for permission to use this old Mighty Scions house rule. He agreed, and it was with my demonstration of how to use the house rule that it finally clicked. At the cusp of every level in that game from there on out, someone would use a "class feature preview".


• The positive way to look at this is that some things are better demonstrated than explained. However, I can't help but feel as if this instead means that I can't verbally explain simple ideas for the life of me... I also feel as though I failed to take into account that people were reluctant to spend action points at all despite their use-it-or-lose-it status. They were inappropriately suffering from the same hoarding instincts that make people reluctant to use consumables in JRPGs... even on the final boss, after which point those consumables would become meaningless because the game is about to end. The players' refusal to use the "class feature/superpower preview" house rule was very much like a JRPG player's refusal to use a Megalixir while fighting the final boss.

All of this led to my losing friends, losing confidence in my ability to communicate at all let alone GM, fearing that GMing is only for people popular enough to have dozens of players to choose from and assemble into a coherent group of four to six people with universal buy-in and compatible schedules, and fearing that any small problem in RP will snowball into disaster within weeks if left unaddressed. I seem to have somehow lost the ability to interest people in campaign concepts since then, too, and I'm not entirely sure how or why.

And yet, at the same time, enough good came out of Mighty Scions that rather than regarding it as an unmitigated disaster, I see it as a successful failure. More good RP came out of it than just the one salvaged focus adventure. Kyra, Liridon, and especially Althea were all excellent characters, and Gharta wasn't bad either. I may not have been good at running mysteries and most of my players may not have been good at playing them, but I enjoyed trying, I improved a little over time, and I'd like to try again — on purpose this time. I feel I've learned some lessons about appropriate levels of prep from it, and I've studied GMing a lot over the years since then as well.

If one follows The Alexandrian, one may be familiar with his emphasis on the importance of game structures, and how the tabletop game industry and community alike seem to have very little awareness of them, to the detriment of all involved. A crucial piece of his idea of tabletop RPG game structures involves the concept of default actions — picking an enemy and making a regular attack in a combat, picking a direction and going that way in dungeon crawls, and so on. However, when he discusses the structure of a mystery, I feel he's overlooking something crucial. This is surprising given that he's the one who codified the Three Clue Rule and other well-regarded mystery-running advice... though at the same time, not entirely so in that it seems to be such a stubborn and commonplace blind spot that an entire popular mystery game system exists that ignores it completely while declaring itself the solution to all bottlenecks, when I try to talk to people about the problem I feel gaslit when people don't see it, and just generally I'm thwarted at every turn in trying to find any prior art in looking at this issue at all.

Here's the problem as I see it: Mysteries don't have one structure and one default action. They have two subsystems, each with a different default action.

Think of it as though people know that in a typical D&D game their characters are adventurers who fight monsters, and understand that they can always try swinging a weapon at a monster, but as soon as you put them into a dungeon room with no monsters in it they freeze, not having any idea that they're supposed to just pick an exit and go through it in order to advance the scenario — or, if they do, they're utterly terrified of picking the "wrong" exit, as though they can't backtrack if they encounter a dead end or an obstacle too dangerous for them. You can't run a dungeon crawl if people don't know both that the default action in a fight is to attack a foe and the default action when there's not a fight is to pick an exit and go through. You need the dungeon crawl structure and the combat system, or you won't have a complete and playable game.

Likewise, the specific problem I've run into in attempting to run mystery scenarios in tabletop RPGs isn't that people don't understand that they should search for clues (well, except one player). Skill systems exploded in popularity after Call of Cthulhu achieved success, and popular skills in tabletop RPGs thus tend to include reasonable actions to take to find clues within their range. You can notice things, you can actively search for things, you can take various approaches to speaking with people, you can recognize things your character is educated about. Furthermore, searching for clues is the part of detective work that gets the most cultural emphasis. Detective iconography involves magnifying glasses, fingerprints, and footprints.

Instead, the problem I've run into is that people don't understand that they're supposed to do anything with clues once they find them. If you look at detectives in fiction, they don't just collect clues and suddenly get awarded an ending as though completing a "collect the clues" quest in a video game (or if they do, it's not a very well-written detective story). They think about them. If there are multiple detectives, they'll specifically discuss the clues; in doing this, they reason out their next line of investigation or, in the end, the culprit. Even if there's only one detective, there tends to be a partner for them to explain their reasoning to, or else the story will be from their perspective and we'll get to look directly into their heads — the important part being, they do engage in reasoning. Mysteries do not solve themselves once you've collected enough clues.

The tabletop RPG industry has a sufficient structure in place for the clue-finding half of mysteries, as Justin Alexander points out. Unfortunately, they don't have anything at all in place to help organize attempts to reason anything out from the clues and leads that have been found — or even help players realize that's a thing they need to do at all. If they don't draw conclusions, they can't decide where to investigate next, which means they won't find new places to search for clues and the game will grind to a halt. Half of the gameplay loop is missing, and that's a tremendous omission. If people don't bring that understanding in from outside the game, perhaps by already being avid fans of the mystery genre, the result can be blank stares as they expect the GM to explain what the clues they've so dutifully found mean... as though the GM were the detective, and their characters were mere CSIs meant to deliver their results to the cusp of the fourth wall.

Of course, it isn't necessarily that they don't know they need to draw conclusions. It may instead be that they're afraid to draw the wrong ones and look stupid, much like the hypothetical would-be dungeon-crawlers who cower in the face of a fork in the hallway. Much as in a dungeon you can backtrack, in a mystery you can realize you're on the wrong track and reevaluate what you've learned so far. If fear is the problem, then no amount of additional clues found will help — players will simply refuse to try to draw any conclusions, even though putting leads together may be important to deciding where to search for clues next. Here, too, I see the solution as making it absolutely plain that drawing conclusions is something expected of them as a fundamental part of gameplay. This permutation of the problem suggests something further as well: that it needs to be made clear for people not used to the mystery genre that you don't have to get it right the first time. Indeed, it's perfectly normal for a detective to proceed from clueless to confused or wrong to less confused/wrong to right over the course of a story.

All in all, I see a need to invent a structure and/or subsystem which helps players 1) recognize that their characters need to draw conclusions from what they find, 2) feel comfortable doing so even if they don't get it right the first time, and 3) have any idea how to proceed in trying to interpret what they know so far. For my own purposes, it also needs to not rely heavily on physical props; clue cards and handouts in the middle of the table and setting little notebooks at each seat as a "hint, hint" are all well and good, but none of that really works online.

The limitations of physical-prop-based advice notwithstanding, tracking clues in some way seems important; it just needs to be far simpler than cards with clues written on them. Perhaps as important as tracking the clues themselves is tracking their interpretation status. I see there being four states for a clue that's been found: known only to some PCs and unshared with the rest, known to all PCs but uninterpreted, interpreted as possibly meaning something in particular, and having an interpretation confirmed as true. Perhaps simply having a count of unshared, uninterpreted, interpreted, and confirmed clues would be enough to remind players that interpretation is a thing that needs to happen at all. Having such a count on hand also subtly suggests a default action for the reasoning half of mysteries: try to advance the status of a clue.

It may not necessarily be a complete solution, but it's a start — and a start is far more than I've had in the past decade of agonizing over this problem.