#ttrpg dev

Hey remember those d100 tables I hastily made a week or so ago thanks to a suggestion from @probablybadrpgideas ?

Well I made an improved 2.0 version and made up 50 items for you to have a play with! I even included illustrations and an NPC!

This is my first time uploading to dmsguild, so hope I've gotten it correct. Please enjoy!

And like I said in another post, this all, like, comes from people trying to run mysteries in Dungeons & Dragons and shit and other TTRPGs where the PCs just are not equipped to be mystery-solvers any more than the players are.

Anyway all that is to say that Eureka mystery modules contain all the taboos (clues that don’t spontaneously fall at the party’s feet when they get stuck, facts that don’t change just because the party is wrong, and even the dreaded red herrings, and they are still consistently solvable without being impossible to fail. In fact they’re pretty challenging.

But I’m not just saying that, I set out to prove it.

I took surveys of all the three official Eureka modules that I know have been played a bunch at the time of writing this to see how frequently they’re solved vs going unsolved.

All three of these mysteries contain clues which must be sought after actively by initiative rather than just coming to the PCs, their truths are fixed and don’t change to match the theories of the players, and they all contain “red herrings,” which are something that “conventional wisdom” says is the absolute worst thing you can put in a TTRPG mystery and will make it impossible to solve in a way that is completely unfair to players. But as you can see, despite the “red herrings” and other challenging elements, these mysteries mostly end up fully or partially solved.

I’m defining “red herrings” here as “clues/information that seem to point towards a conclusion that is wrong.” The thing about red herrings, though, is that, like, it really is not unrealistic for a clue to make multiple people look suspicious even if only one of them is the real culprit, it isn’t unrealistic for a culprit to try to frame someone else by tampering with evidence, and it isn’t unrealistic for detectives to receive completely nonsense information that isn’t actually helpful to the case. And being thorough and examining all the possibilities and evidence to rule out red herrings is what a detective’s job is. A mystery/detective game without “red herrings” would be like a FPS where the enemies don’t shoot or attack the player.

It feels like the conventional wisdom of “don’t put enemies in your game that shoot or attack the player” is coming from a design space where nobody has thought yet to give the FPS protagonist a loaded gun.

I’m extremely happy with these result spreads, they tell me we’re doing a good job of making mysteries that are highly challenging but not impossible. If there weren’t a good number of Failures on each one, I’d say that our mysteries were way too easy.

Finished spreads for Dullscythe, a magical girl TTRPG built out of the bones of the Panic Engine, an (upcoming) SRD by Tuesday Knight Games.