Something that working on Eureka, trying to build a better kind of mystery investigation game, and trying to build better mystery modules for that better mystery investigation game, is that the vast vast majority of accepted and entrenched âlawsâ of designing âgoodâ mystery adventures for TTRPGs are actually just concerned with making the mystery impossible not to solve, such as âif the party is stuck just give them the answerâ and âif the party is wrong, just change the answer to match their theory.â
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 donât spontaneously fall at the partyâs feet when they get stuck, facts that donât 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 theyâre pretty challenging.
But Iâm 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 theyâre 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 donât change to match the theories of the players, and they all contain âred herrings,â which are something that âconventional wisdomâ 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 âred herringsâ and other challenging elements, these mysteries mostly end up fully or partially solved.
Iâm defining âred herringsâ here as âclues/information that seem to point towards a conclusion that is wrong.â 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 isnât unrealistic for a culprit to try to frame someone else by tampering with evidence, and it isnât unrealistic for detectives to receive completely nonsense information that isnât actually helpful to the case. And being thorough and examining all the possibilities and evidence to rule out red herrings is what a detectiveâs job is. A mystery/detective game without âred herringsâ would be like a FPS where the enemies donât shoot or attack the player.
It feels like the conventional wisdom of âdonât put enemies in your game that shoot or attack the playerâ is coming from a design space where nobody has thought yet to give the FPS protagonist a loaded gun.
Iâm extremely happy with these result spreads, they tell me weâre doing a good job of making mysteries that are highly challenging but not impossible. If there werenât a good number of Failures on each one, Iâd say that our mysteries were way too easy.