Who Is Ellen - 57 - HD
Added 2022-11-08 04:00:05 +0000 UTCFailing to keep it twenty words or less.
Commentary
That moment when the players have questions you SO do not have answers for.
Oh hey, I think this counts as yet another way of showing everyone in this limited space. Neat.
I was originally thinking we'd get to see Nanase's attempt at being in-character mode here with her asking the mayor's assistant if any guards were suspicious and/or missing. Instead, she's in freelance detective mode, and it was way more natural to just lean into that (much to Ellen's terror).
She can attempt to act in-character later.
Comments
Ah, lawyers, the only thing the McFeegle fear...
David Howe
2022-11-10 03:11:18 +0000 UTCIt's a pity you can't comment on the main page stories here, the last few have been legends of hysterically awesome.
Prof Sai
2022-11-09 17:34:26 +0000 UTCThis reminds me of the last game of D&D I played. The lawyer in the group turned our hack n slash campaign into a simple diplomacy mission. The DM was utterly unprepared for this, despite knowing that she's a lawyer and negotiates for a living.
Some Ed
2022-11-08 23:41:59 +0000 UTCThat moment when a player changes your dungeon fetch quest into a detective novel. If you have one of those, your job just got a lot easier; write an outline, and they'll fill in the details for you. Just make sure the rest of the players are also having fun.
Daryl Sawyer
2022-11-08 17:07:19 +0000 UTCSomeone has to be ready whenever they solve a mystery...
J DD
2022-11-08 14:33:01 +0000 UTCThat's some quick thinking and pretty solid GM skills on Ellen's part right there. It's entirely reasonable for the Mayor to not want to give a 1st level adventuring party he just met the complete security details of his manor. If they were 5th level or so and had a reputation of being lawful, then maybe.
wargrunt42
2022-11-08 13:51:29 +0000 UTCI still find it absolutely hilarious that a certain quote applies just as well to DnD as it does to the military: "Plans are useless, but planning is indispensible."
Chordat
2022-11-08 10:20:01 +0000 UTCIn retrospect, it should have been obvious that Nanase has detective skills. She and Ellen form a Scooby-Doo-esque "teen detective" duo, and we've already seen that Ellen tends to approach investigations with a "let me know when it's time to hit somebody" attitude. That only left one candidate to do the planning work.
Dan Merget
2022-11-08 06:11:41 +0000 UTCYup, that worked quite well. It felt like a wall of text in a story sense -- Nanase is being pretty verbose here -- but it didn't feel like one to read.
Brooks Moses
2022-11-08 05:20:28 +0000 UTCI think the most-frequent GM for the weekly session that I'm in has figured out a good way to handle this sort of thing. He'd reply "What are you looking for in that data?" and then, perhaps after a dice-roll for a skill check if it seemed useful, would give the "looking through the data, you see that one of the guards didn't show up for work today" result. It seems to work pretty well without him needing to come up with reams of boring data and without us having the boring job of then looking through it OOC. It occurs to me that for something like this, he'd probably do the skill check and use the result not for "did you find the obvious thing that's needed to move the story forward?" but for the flavor text and level of detail. A low roll might get "it's a big messy logbook that you can't really make much progress with, although you do notice that one of the guards scheduled for today didn't show up," while a high roll might get, "You get the logbook and start checking through it, back-to-front. You immediately see that one of the regular guards for today didn't show up. Looking back, you see that this particular guy has never missed a day for the past three years. You also see that he was one of three guards on shift the night the chicken was stolen. One of the other two guards was absent, with the reason recorded as 'sick due to bad stew'." I do like Ellen's "that's classified" response, though! That could also be fun to work in as a small roadblock to have the characters work around or through it, especially if you hint that perhaps applying a bit of charisma or asking for what information wouldn't be classified would potentially get some results.
Brooks Moses
2022-11-08 05:09:05 +0000 UTCDon't feel bad. One time my group de-railed a campaign for three real-world months to run a fake wine-tour company to scam rich people.
Platus
2022-11-08 04:45:08 +0000 UTCBefore the session: "Alright, I've planned for everything!" During the session: "Ah shit, I didn't expect them to do that."
KC
2022-11-08 04:41:07 +0000 UTCOne of the biggest dangers with running a session based around a mystery is that you never know how long it will take the players to figure everything out. Sometimes a single tug in the wrong (or right) place causes everything to fall apart. My preferred solution to that problem is to provide an obvious trail to follow. That trail should be incorrect, but should include clues that point the players towards the actual solution (for example, the actual culprit tried to frame someone but made a few mistakes that allow the players to see through the frame-up)
Casey
2022-11-08 04:30:32 +0000 UTCModern me has realized that it’s definitely best to treat dialogue balloons like paragraphs, and that I like short paragraphs that could function as bullet points on a list of things being said.
Dan Shive
2022-11-08 04:18:33 +0000 UTCDivided word bubbles sure help it not feel like a wall of text.
Stephen Gilberg
2022-11-08 04:13:19 +0000 UTCWouldn't be an RPG session without someone approaching from an angle the GM hadn't considered in the slightest.
Anthony Wilson
2022-11-08 04:03:19 +0000 UTC
