I'm never running a murder mystery ever again. At least not for morons

>Cumberbatch's Holmes

That makes me sad.

Let the players find another criminal through the false lead, and let them catch him.
When they think that they got the guy, have an NPC show up with the actual culprit captured.
Now you've shown that they went the completely wrong way and did everything wrong, but at least they did a little bit right through the sheer force of bullheaded perseverance.

This seems like the most elegant solution.

What's obvious to you is not obvious to your players. You know everything, they only know what they get told. You may have overlooked saying something

Your problem is you didn't design any method of informing the players of failure. You didn't design any lose-points in your game, so the fact that they have failed has never been conveyed to the PCs, so all they're going to do is keep trucking away despite their lost game state.

theangrygm.com/ask-angry-building-a-mystery/

Go read that.

ok OP, sounds like you have a problem I have, in that you want to write it linearly.

However, you must consider crime when writing a murder mystery. The murderer does not lay out clues in a fashion, intending that the detectives will discover them one by one, like steps leading up the the criminal's gallows, but instead in his haste, passion or inexperience, lets details emerge at the scene and in the area.

My advice: Write the story of a crime. Have that clear in your head the entire campaign, and let your description of the RP come from that. That way, you aren't writing clues to be found, but an actual mystery to solve.

>tl;dr, don't write to clues to the murder, write the murder and let the clues fall from that naturally.

NEVER WRITE A FALSE LEAD OR DEAD END THAT DOESN'T REDIRECT THE PLAYERS.

It's just like how you're supposed to give the illusion of the players having a branching path through the woods/dungeon even though you just move the encounters you want to wherever they go.

For the false leads, you create a slightly stinging failstate penalty, and then provide a clue that redirects them.

With mysteries especially, it's important that you flowchart things out, and have at least one or two "They've completely fallen off the rails, how do I fix this?" fixes.

You don't know how to write a mystery for an RPG.
The key to to have multiple paths, but they all lead to the same/similar conclusion[s]. Player choices should be merely (or at least 80%) an illusion.
If they insist on following these dead ends, make those dead ends the real clues.

I want to take something from that article and apply it to what is saying, kind of
>See, the dirty little secret is that when players are demanding a mystery game, they are secretly asking you to engage THEIR brains. THEY (the players) want to solve something and feel like bada$& detectives. They are really saying they want a puzzle.
My old GM would make a TON of puzzles and riddles and tricks, but he never came up with answers to them. If we, the players, did something that made sense, and seemed like the right solution, he deemed that the answer. He just never told us that was the case until years later when the campaign ended.

THis is good post, reminds me of my first awful mystery campaign

Right, and that's gay.

Welcome to every roleplaying game as a paranoid player. Every night after the game, you'll lay in bed, sweating, wondering whether or not the GM had a solution to the mystery planned and you found it, or whether the GM just went along with what you did as the right thing to do.

The cure is fairly simple; just shrug your shoulders and move on. If it was fun, it was fun, right?

Aside from RDJ's I think Cumberbatch's Holmes is my least favourite portrayal of the charactet, but that might all be due to Moffat being a hack writer who cannot into intelligent characters.

"Twenty questions" is not actually fun if every answer you give is the right one.

I haven't GM'd before but I want to run a mystery game. Any tips or things to avoid?

kill your players then the game ends and you're free again

Read

Create an interesting and fleshed out cast of characters, but don't get attached to any of them because the PCs will always single out your favourites and hate them.

>Instead, what they present is a story about someone solving a mystery. And usually, around the 44 minute mark (of the show), the detective gets that last crucial bit of evidence or information that makes the case solvable and then solves the case. The mystery wasn’t actually solvable before that point.
Whoever wrote this doesnt have a clue about the mystery genre, fair play is the standard not the deviation. The fact that he calls a psych and monk a "true mystery" and he seems to think the sherlock holmes storys were fair play(they usually were not) pretty much makes it clear that he has never read Christie, Dickson, Ellery or any other legitimate mistery writer outside of Doyle.

that's not my dog

>I didn't think these players would obsess over these diversions as much as they do.

New to gaming?

What if I answer "no" to your second, fifth and sixth questions, and then I say that you get it right after your fourth guess? Would it really make any difference when it comes to playing the game with you? Most people aren't going to ask the same question twice in order to see if there's a contradiction there, because they're trying to use logic to solve the puzzle.

Same goes with gaming. Most players are not going to try and actively probe their GM to see whether or not they're running this game by the seat of their fucking pants because, at the end of the day, whether the mystery was solved because the players happened to put everything together correctly or because the GM decided that the chain of logic that the players followed was good enough to make their suspicions correct doesn't change what happened during the game session. You could worry about whether it was somehow legitimate after the fact, but roleplaying games are - in my view, at least - something that you should be enjoying the process of playing, rather than trying to work out whether or not the GM was hand-waving stuff.

The player comes along wanting to figure out a mystery. The GM wants to let players experience that.

Well. People have given good advice here. I thought to mention that one thing the players are enjoying is to try to figure out the clues and play. Regardless if they are on right track or not, if they are enjoying the challenge you have given them (even if they are reversing ass first up into the tree, it is a challenge) they seem to be enjoying it. Try to adapt yourself as people have here adviced. I've run two murder mysteries and they went this way too. Had to adapt and in the end players were really happy. Mysteries are fun. They just take long time :P

>being "the city's greatest detective".

Guess that it is one of those ironic nicknames then.

While I do think that OP needs to fix and redirect his adventure, there's also the problem with the players thinking that ignoring distractions will lead to the solution.

>They took such obvious dead ends and my desperate attempts to return them to the first clue as further proof that they're on the right track, one of them proudly proclaiming "Okay, he's trying to distract us, so we're definitely getting somewhere".
If OP lets them beat the mystery even though it wasn't the original solution, the players will be sure that this how the rest of his mysteries are presented. That's no good, how to fix it?

Sounds pretty irritating, but honestly, better than my experience. When I tried to run a mystery game, my players were so astonishingly incompetent at following up on clues that I honestly began to wonder if they had brain damage or were all huffing paint before the session. The most basic concepts eluded them. They would dismiss witnesses without asking even rudimentary questions beyond "do you know who killed him?". They never looked for clues, and when I handed them clues, they did nothing. In one instance they found the car of a murder victim and there was a strange buckle in it on the passenger side floor. An NPC cop gave them this, because they did not bother to search the car. They shrugged it off and never investigated to figure out what it was. I had to have the NPCs tell them they should look into it. Then when they found out it was from a shoe, I again had to have the NPCs tell them they should maybe see if they could find out where those shoes were sold or who might own one.

They were so incapable of even wrapping their heads around the idea that they were the police, that they spent half an hour sneaking through a hotel, using stealth and disguises and bluff checks, to try and get into the security room and steal camera footage of a crime. When they failed and got frustrated, I finally asked them why they didn't just show the hotel manager their badges and ask for the tapes. They were like, "oh, I forgot we had those". In a police detective campaign, they had forgotten they were the police.

The whole campaign was a surreal disaster. I've never put a mystery into a game since.

>The player comes along wanting to figure out a mystery. The GM wants to let players experience that.

Then he should actually create a mystery for them to figure out, not pretend he's making one.

You're just another bad GM who thinks he's a master showman whose players never catch onto the fact that his sessions are all pulled squarely out of his ass and pretend that the narrative discrepancies formed from this will never catch up to you. They will, and they absolutely do harm the feeling of validity of the game.

> I wrote a bunch of dead ends and red herrings and now my players are lost!
>waah wahh they're so dumb!