Transcript: Always Give Them The Clue (GUMSHOE) with Tristan Zimmerman

Listen to this episode here.

My friend Tristan Zimmerman is currently crowdfunding Ballad Hunters, a GUMSHOE game, meaning it’s based on a core mechanic built for investigation games and gathering clues. That mechanic goes like this: “always give the players the clue.” Simple! And I think so astute as to what the actual fun part of investigation is in RPGs: it’s not “can we roll high enough to progress,” it’s “once we have all these clues, how do we put them together and what do we do with them?”

Further Reading

Ballad Hunters by Tristan Zimmerman, now on Kickstarter

GUMSHOE by Cat Tobin, a list of resources for and articles about GUMSHOE

The Rule Book: The Building Blocks of Games by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola

Socials

Tristan on Bluesky.

Molten Sulfur Blog, Nations & Cannons, and Shanty Hunters from Tristan

Sam on Bluesky and itch.

The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Credits

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

This episode was edited by Em Acosta.

Sam: Hello and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week we take a tabletop mechanic and investigate where was it last night? My name is Sam Dunnewold, and my cohost today is Tristan Zimmerman. Tristan's back! He's been on the show before, most recently, on the third episode of my After Image series, friend of mine from college.

He's the guy behind the molten sulfur blog where he posts about real history and folklore and how to use them in your own campaigns. He works as a designer on Nations and Cannons at Dungeons and Dragons 5E hack about the American Revolutionary War and most relevantly today, he's maybe best known for the award-winning game Shanty Hunters, an RPG about collecting magical sea shanties that have come to life in 1880.

Right now, Tristan Sequel Game Ballad Hunters is on Kickstarter. It's about amateur folklores in 1813 England and Scotland, who are investigating and fighting against living ballads and legends. Ballad Hunters is a Gumshoe game. Meaning it's based on a core mechanic built for investigation games and gathering clues, and that core Gumshoe mechanic is very compelling and very easy to understand.

It goes like this: always give the players the clue. Simple, and I think so astute as to what the actual fun part of investigation is in RPGs, it's not can we roll high enough to find the clue and progress? It's once we have all these clues, how do we put them together and what do we make of them? What do we do with them?

Today we get into all this. Gumshoe investigations and RPGs at large. And what parts of all this Tristan used in Ballad Hunters. So let's get into it. Here is Tristan Zimmerman with, always give them the clue from Gumshoe.

Tristan Zimmerman, welcome back to Dice Exploder.

Tristan: Well Sam, it's a delight to be back. 

Sam: So what are we talking about today? We're doing Gumshoe! What's Gumshoe? 

Tristan: Gumshoe is a line of roleplaying games intended to do investigative adventures and campaigns, and it's... it's a whole line of games all built specifically to prevent that issue, that moment where you're running an investigation, the players are looking for clues, right?

Maybe the clue is, is like "oh, we're gonna find some physical object." Or maybe it's like, "hey, we're talking to someone and trying to get a particular piece of information out of them," or whatever it is. You know, you're trying to get. A clue. And the clue is gonna direct the players onwards in a useful direction that will continue the adventure.

And a player goes to roll... and they fail! And the GM says: "Oh no, what do I do here?" Because, sure, maybe you don't need to get the party like specifically to that next scene. Right? You're not like, oh yeah, you know, I've just, you go to this scene and this scene and this scene, but like you do have to provide more information to the players so that they can move onwards in some direction or another.

And the players just don't get it. Right? They don't get the thing. 

Sam: Yeah, you don't have to provide more information, but the game is going to be very boring. If you do not. Yeah, this is the classic problem with skill checks at large. This is just like the best example of it, right? If the skill check results are either we progress or we don't progress, it's the same as if you're like at a wall and the characters must climb up the wall and they fail to climb up the wall, and it's like, now what? Uh, this sucks.

Tristan: Yeah. And the answer to "now what?" very often winds up being like okay, the GM just vamps for 20 minutes and then finds a way to justify like, okay, you can roll again.

Or maybe even worse it's just like, uh, you failed, but like, uh. Crap. Like, okay, I guess you get it anyway.

In which case, why have a roll? 

And it's this, the central observation that when players fail to get the information, that almost never leads to interesting stories. It just stops stories. There's this particular thing in Sherlock Holmes stories where Sherlock never fails to identify the brand of cigar that produced to the ash at the crime scene.

Right? He's never like, oh, there's some cigar ash over there. I, Sherlock Holmes, famous expert in identifying cigar ash, a real thing in some of the short stories. Nope, I just, I wasn't able to figure it out because that's not an interesting story. There's no, no interesting direction to go from there.

And so it's an entire collection of games designed to combat that. And it has this origin story behind it that I think is delightful because it's so boring, it's so prosaic. There's no like, "oh, and then the apple fell off the tree and hit Isaac Newton on the head." The co-owner of Pelgrane Press, Simon Rogers just approached Robin Laws, noted game designer, and said: "Well, golly, Robin, doesn't it suck when this happens? Can you just write me a roleplaying game where this can't happen?" And so Robin just wrote like, "okay, this can't happen. The roleplaying game." And the rest is history. 

Sam: Yeah. To put a finer point on it, the way that this can't happen in This Can't Happen, The Roleplaying Game is there's a rule that says you don't roll, you give them the clue. And yeah, that's the thing that we're here to talk about today is that rule. 

Tristan: Yeah, yeah. We're here just to talk about that specific mechanic of... you don't roll. You just get the clue. Oh, your character is capable of getting the clue? You look for the clue, like, alright, here's the clue.

Sam: So was there like an original Gumshoe? Is there a game called Gumshoe? Like, uh...

Tristan: So there is not a game called Gumshoe. You are not the first person to ask this question. The first Gumshoe game by Robin Laws was The Esoterrorists in 2006 very cool horror investigation game. Some other Gumshoe games that folks might have heard of include Trail of Cthulhu, Nights Black Agents, Fear Itself, Time Watch, Swords of the Serpentine, The Yellow King Roleplaying game, and hopefully now Ballad Hunters.

Sam: Hooray. Yeah, the one Gumshoe game that I've read is Bubble Gumshoe from Evil Hat which I love. It's like a Encyclopedia Brown kind of bullshit. Like the teen Detectives kind of thing. And I yeah, I like the vibes of that a lot.

Okay. Great. So the reason we're here to talk about this "always give them the clue mechanic" today, is because it's kind of a funny rule, right? Like it feels weird to do investigations like this to like skip the challenging investigation part. And there are other ways to do investigations, right?

Like a thing that I would say if you're running an investigation, you want people to roll to find clues. Then like if they fail, maybe the issue is not, they don't find the clue.

Maybe the issue is someone finds them finding the clue. Or like some other consequence befalls them as they are investigating. But then, you're still just giving them the clue, right? So like there are other ways to handle investigation. Brindlewood Bay is another game that, that handles investigations very, very differently.

So this isn't like the end all, be all of how to run investigations, but the rule. It's almost not a rule. It's almost player advice. It's a very different quality of rule. It, it feels very different. 

Tristan: Yeah, I agree. And it's one of those things where basically every time I run a game, regardless of what kind of game it is, I just give players the clue.

And it doesn't matter if the game is like, "oh yeah, this is a rule. We wrote it down in the game book that you paid money for. Like no. You could just. Do this. You can also, even in a Gumshoe game, theoretically, if you wanted to, and it's a bad idea, but you can, you can just not do this if you want, and you.

Yeah. To me that feels very different from like, okay, well no, this is how an attack roll works. You roll a D20 you add some numbers to it, which like, no, that's not advice. Like, no, no. This is how it works. 

Sam: Yeah. So I wanted to, I wanted to kinda like talk out with you like. What are the like actual practical differences here, and what kind of effects do they have? Because in some ways, I could take a skill check and shove that into my Fiasco game. Fiasco is a diceless game. You're just doing group improv together. There are only rules really around framing scenes, but if in the middle of a scene, I'm jumping off of a moving vehicle and I wanna know whether I hurt myself.

A thing I can do is roll a die and find out, I don't know, like that rule, like also travels from game to game. Or you could move that rule from game to game and. Like what? What is the actual qualitative difference here? You know, like if it's, what's different about this from the advice of, I don't know if you're uncertain just to roll a die to decide. That's also advice.

Tristan: Yeah. I would argue there is a difference, but that it's not a hard and fast difference. Right? That it's a spectrum. There's a spectrum between advice and rule, but that. In practice in a hobby where everybody's always home brewing everything, nothing is ever 100% rule or 100% advice. It's always somewhere between the two.

My story of rules or advice in some ways flies in the face of what you were just saying. Which was with a gaming group several years ago we played 10 Candles and we had an amazing time. There was one player who wasn't there for that session and like a year later he said, well, you guys had such a great time playing 10 Candles.

I would like to run 10 Candles, so I'm gonna run 10 Candles. And we get there and we're sitting down to play and we discover that he has someone who has never run 10 Candles. Never played 10 Candles, never experienced it. He's just unilaterally made some rules changes to this game that he's never played before.

Up to and including: in 10 Candles, you're supposed to roll six sided dice. And he says, well, I'd much prefer the physical feeling of rolling 10 sided dice. So. I'm just gonna replace all these D6's with D10's and I'm not gonna change anything about the way the numbers work. And that was not the only change that he made where he is just like, oh, I generally prefer this in game, so I'm just gonna implement it.

And 10 Candles, which is a brilliant piece of design, doesn't have a lot of rules, but what rules it has fit together perfectly. Like gears on a watch. And so just going in there and being like. "Oh, you know, this gear is supposed to have 12 spokes on it. What if I just give it... 10? Like no, the watch doesn't run anymore. And we had a bad time. And at the end he said "well, I don't get what all the fuss is about with 10 Candles. Like this wasn't fun." So even when you set something out as "no, this is a rule." I would argue for a significant part of the gaming public, the idea of home brewing or making your own changes or customizing the game to what you enjoy is so baked into the experience that you almost can't have a rule that's like, "no, for the first time, play it as written. I promise it's meaningful." Like, no, it's all advice and maybe it shouldn't be at some tables, but... 

Sam: Yeah, I fully agree. There's, it's, yeah. What's a rule and what's advice? Who knows? Anyway, I wanna talk about like writing mysteries for this rule because when you are putting together a mystery for Brindlewood Bay that looks really, really, really different from what you are doing when you write a mystery for this, which looks really different, I think from what you're doing when you write a fucking dungeon crawl module that happens to have a murder mystery in it.

And so I'm curious to hear from you, especially as someone who has designed one of these games now, like what are the essentials of designing a mystery that fits this rule? Like what are the knock-on effects of this rule? 

Tristan: Ballad Hunters is tuned to produce very short adventures. Adventures usually about two hours long. And, when you're running such a short adventure, things can be more free form because there's fewer plates to keep to keep spinning. But in a long form Gumshoe adventure, like for example, the absolutely fabulous campaign, Eternal Lies by Will Hindmarch for Trail of Cthulhu which is very long. I think took us about a year to play. What you wind up with is an adventure structure that actually looks very much like a dungeon map with the scenes taking the place of rooms where you arrive on scene and there's some sort of impetus to adventure. And you're here and there are, let's say.

Four different clues in this scene, and each of these clues points someplace else. You can think of them as four different doors out of the same dungeon room. And your players are looking at their character sheets, they're saying, oh, my character's really good at reassurance, so I'm gonna reassure the person who saw the Eldritch Horror and, you know, oh, she says that the Eldritch Horror went into the Tobacconist shop. So, you know, that's a direction we could go and oh, well my character's really good at evidence collection, so I find this weird slime that's the same color as the jewels in the Gem Museum. So we could go to the Gem Museum.

And so from the start of the adventure. You have these different leads that lead you out in different directions. And then each scene you go to ideally contains multiple doors and each of these doors lead out. And some of these clues will point you to scenes that you already have a clue to.

So in a later scene, you might. Also find something that points you to the Tobacconist shop or the Gemstone Museum. 

It's 

Sam: another door into the Tobacconist shop.

Tristan: Exactly. But the idea is: by having the number of leads that you have grows with every scene that you do, it means that the players can't hit a dead end. Because even though the players are getting the clues.

They're not always gonna be interested in all these clues. The players might say, "Ugh, the Gemstone Museum. Terrible. That sounds boring." I remember when Gary ran an adventure set in a gemstone museum. We didn't have any fun. Let's not go to the Gemstone Museum. Well, cool, that's fine because you have lots of other leads and with every lead that you chase, you get more leads and so it kind of branches out and branches out, and there's no penalty to backtracking through the dungeon. And eventually it gets to a point where, the new leads that you are finding no longer are branching out into more and more and more different possible scenes. They're starting to shrink down. They're starting to all be pointing to similar scenes.

You're figuring out that like, oh no, the evil cultist who's, who's summoned the rubbery monster, is in the old, meat rendering plant. So all these leads start pointing to the meat rendering plant. 

God, 

Sam: I love a meat rendering plant. 

Tristan: Oh yeah. Right. Perfect. And so, in my opinion and reasonable minds may differ, and one of the interesting things Gumshoe adventure design, the first Gumshoe game, The Esoterrorists came out in 2006.

The concept has been around for a long enough time that there have developed multiple different interpretations of what good Gumshoe adventure design looks like. And I come out of kind of a folk tradition of Gumshoe adventure design, where, in my opinion, your platonic ideal Gumshoe adventure, if you were to map out all the scenes, which you should do because it's very convenient and makes things easy to follow.

It looks like a diamond, right? You start at the top and then it gets wider as you have more and more scenes available to you, and then once you're about halfway through, it starts getting smaller. It starts getting narrower as you have fewer and fewer scenes available to you. So whatever route you wind up taking through the diamond, eventually, you start out at the crime scene and you end in the meat rendering plant.

But what's really cool about this adventure design, is the players, unlike in a dungeon crawl. The players never see the map. The players just know what leads they have. And so it doesn't feel like " oh, well we started here and we ended up here."

All they ever know is, we took a route, we made our own decisions, consequences followed on from our decisions, and because we are interested in figuring out where the rubbery monster came from, here we are in the place where the rubbery monster came from at the end of this adventure. Of course that's the platonic ideal, in my opinion. Reasonable minds may differ. So actual published adventures may take forms that are very different from that.

But yeah, that's the scene map that you get because every time you go into a scene, the players just get the leads out of that scene. And then the interesting question is, "what do they do with those leads?" What do they do with the information? And when you get to the rendering plant at the end, have you pieced together:

"Oh no, it's not the foreman, it's the janitor. And what you do with the information that you have gathered is, in my opinion, far more interesting than the question. Are they going to be able to get to the rendering 

Sam: plant? 

Totally. Totally. Well, on that note, I feel like a sticking point for me in the whole concept of "just give them the clue" is how are they gonna know what to do with the clue?

Like when you give them cigarette ash, how do they know to go to the Tobacconist? I mean like that one, it feels like maybe there's like a direct line, but also like, I'm not gonna know that 'cause I didn't know like, a Tobacconist was a thing that exists, you know, like, like, I can easily imagine other clues where it's like, oh yeah, we found a bill from a doctor or like a bunch of money in an envelope in a desk or something.

You know? Suspicious kind of shit that like doesn't point anywhere. And I suppose, you just wanna design stuff that points somewhere, but like, what does that look like? How do you design clues that actually are going to act like doorways into other scenes? 

Tristan: They need to be explicit.

You can't just be like. Oh, here is an envelope with a bunch of money in it, I don't know, I guess we go to the bank, they know about money. No, you need to have the envelope with a bunch of money in it and the money is blood stained. So, okay, well we need to go to the lab to type the blood.

And you know, okay, well now we know that it's type O blood and the janitor's type O blood. But the foreman, the foreman was AV positive. Ooh. That's information. So yeah, you need to make sure that the knowledge that the clues lead you to another scene.

And in Gumshoe, those are called core clues. The clues that lead you to another scene, the clues that keep the game going that keep it from bogging down with everybody just looking at each other and saying, "well, I don't know." Those just need to be very explicit. It, needs to be really clear where this goes.

And you can't expect the players to read your mind. And that also has to be tuned somewhat to your table because different players enjoy different things. I definitely know players who really appreciate being told, "oh, you have evidence collection, that's one of your investigative abilities, you recognize that the cigar ash comes from this brand of cigar. You should go to the Tobacconist shop and ask if anybody gets that cigar." I absolutely know players who love being told that. And I also know players who would hate that.

Never, never, never want that. And you know, know, your players, calibrate the way you're running these adventures to what your players enjoy. And one of the nice things about. "No, no, no. You just get the clue," is by the time you're halfway through the adventure, you've gotten a lot of clues. 

And if you have a player who just wants to figure it out for themselves, well they're not gonna get everything, and that's fine. Because they have lots of clues available to them that they can chase that they have figured out 

Sam: Totally. How do you prevent this from feeling easy?

Like, if I'm sitting down and I don't know that a tobacconist shop exists because I'm not used to playing in the period that we're playing in. So I want you to tell me, "cool, you found this cigarette ash, you should go to the tobacconist shop." And then I do, and then the tobacconist is like,

okay here's the next thing you should go do. How does this not end up feeling railroady? Like what then becomes the meat of a scene? What are you doing inside of a scene that keeps it interesting? 

Tristan: The meat of a scene then becomes the decision making. Because yes, absolutely, if it's just okay. Click the cigar ash that teleports you to the Tobacconist.

Yeah. Yeah. Click the tab. Tobacconist that teleports you. 

Then we don't have a diamond, we have a 

Sam: line. And like 

Tristan: that's 

Sam: not interesting to just down the line. Yeah. Okay. 

Tristan: What's really fun is you go to the Tobacconist, and the Tobacconist doesn't want to talk to you. She's, she's afraid. And that of course, that's not just a Gumshoe thing that's any good investigative story. You can't just roll up to a person and say, tell me what you know, clue dispenser. Like, no. There's always a reason why they don't want to tell you what they know. 

I've 

Sam: seen some cop shows, so sometimes they do do that, but... 

Tristan: But, you know, so, okay, now we've got to talk to the Tobacconist, and maybe the player says, "hey GM, just a reminder I have this particular interpersonal investigative ability on my character sheet. And then depending on what your table wants, maybe that's enough.

And usually, that is something that I would calibrate down to the level of the individual player, right? If I know that Susan doesn't really enjoy this kind of roleplay, then it's just like, okay, cool. You have "Reassurance"? You have Reassured the tobacconist. But other players are like "okay, cool. Thank you for telling me that that's what you're gonna try to do. Now let's role play it out. and we know that you're gonna succeed. That's not the interesting question. The interesting question is what does this reveal about your character? What does this reveal about who the Tobacconist is as a person and how you go about doing this?

And then when you get that information from the Tobacconist, what do you do with it? If the Tobacconist, gives you two leads, which of these leads looks more urgent and pressing and interesting to you?

Do either of these leads look interesting? Are they. Less interesting or less pressing than all the other leads you've already accumulated? Or do you say, oh geez, the Tobacconist is pointing us at the, the Gem Museum. This is the third time we've heard about this Gem Museum.

I can't, I believe we're 

Sam: going back to the stupid Gem Museum. Fuck. 

Tristan: But then if the players say no, we're not going to the damn Gem Museum like. Cool. To me. That's interesting, right? That's table play. That shows something about who the characters are. That's the players making interesting decisions.

And it's not about the destination, it's about the journey of getting 

Sam: there.

Yeah. And like maybe you're doing a thing where it's like, okay, cool, if we, like we got this really good lead from the tobacconist, but we also know if we follow it up, then her dad's gonna be pissed and like, that's gonna come back and hurt her.

And we really like her now. And, you know, you can do that kind of stuff too. Sure. 

Tristan: Yeah. So you have consequences of your decisions. And you, also have a lot of Gumshoe adventure design has what's called floating scenes which boils down to the classic, you know. Have a, have a man barge in with a gun kind of scene, right? Like, oh, the adversary, whoever you're going up against is not happy that you're poking around. So, every so often they get to respond. And that's part of the fun and it keeps things feeling very organic. And yeah, it's about the process of telling this fun story collaboratively.

And in my opinion, the best Gumshoe adventures also have a component of. Well, yeah, you're gonna get to the end, but by the time you get to the end, are you gonna know what to do? Once you get there, have you managed to collect enough extra information that you know, like, oh God, we need to shut down the rendering process.

But whatever you do, don't tip over the rendering valve, that's what the blobbery monster's in. The question of are we going to have enough information to do something about this once we get to the end? That is an interesting question. Yeah. And that is something that you, you can and should build a story around.

Sam: Yeah. And you see that in, like, I remember Apocalypse Keys having a more codified version of the dynamic you're describing at the end of its mysteries, where you get to the end point and you kind of roll to find out, were you right? Were you pretty right? Or were you completely wrong and now massively unprepared for the boss battle or boss battle equivalent.

Right? And the adventure is sort of setting up what kind of position are you gonna be in when you finally get to that confrontation at the end? 

Tristan: Yeah. And that's a very Brindlewood Bay way to determine, "hey, were we right?" And Brindlewood Bay is of course just a very different way of handling an investigation because a Gumshoe adventure almost invariably has as a core foundational assumption that there is a specific right answer.

There is a specific thing that's going on, the GM knows what it is, the players don't. Whereas with a Carved from Brindlewood type game, what you've got is, hey. Nobody knows what happened, including the GM, and we are going to determine together, and I am not of the opinion that one is better or worse.

It's two very different ways of handling, telling a story about an investigation. And what's important is what your playgroup really enjoys. 

Sam: It's a matter of taste. And if people want to hear about my taste in regards to Brindlewood Bay games, one of the first episodes of this show is on the Theorize mechanic from that game.

Yes. And you can go back and listen to how much I don't like Brindlewood Bay.

I was struck in there thinking about the permissions thing I was thinking about, there's an ability in Blades in the Dark that a character can take that just says, you always know when someone's lying to you and. I remember like a character taking this ability in a game I was running and then just every interaction was better because it's better when I tell the players, yeah, this guy's lying to you.

What are you gonna fucking do about it? 'Cause they don't know what the truth is, right? . What are you gonna do about it now? And that feels so similar to me. To the clue rule of like, always give them the clue of just like, always just tell them that the guy's lying.

Then ask like, what are you gonna fucking do about it? Um...

Tristan: Yeah. It's good for players to have information. For me at least, and this isn't universal, but for me at least, one of the things that I adore about  role-playing games. Is being able to make interesting and important and impactful decisions.

I have a spiel that I say about this, that in my day-to-day life, I almost never make interesting or impactful decisions. The decisions that are important, well, it's really obvious what the right answer is. You should call your mom. You should tell people you love that you love them, right?

Like that's really important, but it's not an interesting decision. It's obvious what you should do. And the decisions that genuinely could go either way, like they don't matter. It doesn't matter whether I have chicken or fish for dinner. And so in a role-playing game, I get to play out the fantasy of making interesting decisions.

But yeah, give the players the clue, tell the players when someone is lying, just give the players information. Because information makes these decisions possible, it makes them interesting. It reveals the stakes of the decision. It just makes the story better.

Sam: Okay. So Tristan, I wanna hear you talk a little bit about Ballad Hunters here, because Ballad Hunters is your Gumshoe game. It's on Kickstarter. What is the deal with Ballad Hunters? Why are you using Gumshoe for it? And then what, if any of this, have you changed in your particular game? 

Tristan: So Ballad Hunters is a follow on game to a game called Shanty Hunters. And Shanty Hunters was and presumably still is a game about singing and fighting magical sea shanties in 1880. You play as sailors and scholars, who are going out there and documenting sea shanties.

But every time you document them, the sea shanty comes to life and sailors aboard the ship that you are sailing aboard wind up playing out the events of the song. And they wind up taking on roles from the song and doing what their characters did in the song. They do that in real life, and imagery and metaphors from the song pop into real existence aboard the ship and this causes serious problems. And it's up to the players to try to get everyone to the end of the song safely.

And then Ballad Hunters takes the same idea of songs coming to life, moves it to 1813 England and Scotland. And specifically targets a genre of music called the Child Ballads, not ballads for children.

They were ballads compiled by Harvard folklorist Francis James Child in the late 18 hundreds. And one of the fun things about child ballads is they tend to be tragedies, they tend to go very badly. They're stories of grief and betrayal and loss and heartbreak and ghosts and supernatural stuff. So it's really bad when these songs come to life.

The first drafts of Ballad Hunters did not have the fundamental Gumshoe thing of you always get the clue. I was not wedded to that idea and I play tested it a bunch of different ways. And what I found was: the players not having the clue, never produced an interesting story. Like not even a single time did something interesting come out of. "Boy, wouldn't you like to know?" Um...

Sam: Yeah Yep. 

Tristan: But even when it was okay, "roll to see if you get the clue." When the players did get the clue, that almost always produced an interesting story. So I said, okay, well, geez, I've just put in a bunch of work to verify the thing that smarter designers than I had already determined.

And that was not the only thing in Ballad Hunters like that. There were a bunch of different, moments in the design where I said, okay, well I'm gonna try deviating from the way other Gumshoe games do this and see how it goes. And I wound up through the process of years of play testing, iterating my way back to the way Gumshoe games have been doing this since 2006.

It's like, okay, well I could have saved myself a lot of effort. And anyway, after all this iteration and all this play testing, I realized, "well, it's a Gumshoe game, and it's doing a lot of things very differently." One thing I would point to is the compass verse mechanic, where every investigator has basically what amounts to a story game prompt that in the course of this investigation, they could just deploy the story game prompt and explain the way they interpret the prompt and how this bears upon the situation in which they find themselves. It's this very strong improvisational mechanic. That is the most powerful way that the players have to influence the world in which they find themselves. But it's really, really fun. And playtesters love it and it's absolutely the thing they always walk away from the table talking about. And that's very different from core Gumshoe.

Sam: I think we're kind of wrapping up here, but is there any last bit of thing that you wanted to touch on or to bring us back home or to revisit from throughout this conversation?

Tristan: So, yeah, there is one thing I would like to bring the conversation back to as we kind of close, which is the concept of what even is advice versus rule and what is the difference. And I think an important difference between the two is to what extent you can just do it wherever and whenever, as long as it's something that your players and you, the person running the game, the facilitator enjoy.

Because I feel like good advice should be almost universally applicable, right? Like, "be kind" is almost, but not quite universally applicable advice. Whereas a rule is something that like, okay, you're playing this game. This game has these particular rules. You're doing the thing. And with the concept of like,

oh, just give the players the clues there is one really important place where you would not want to implement this. And that is in a role-playing game that has a complicated character build thing where like, oh, I've built up my character and he is got a bunch of bells and whistles and knobs and levers.

Because usually in these sorts of character build games. One of the directions you can build your character towards is getting information, right? Like, ooh, I've made an investigator, I've made a detective. You know, my detective can always tell when someone is lying to her, that sort of thing.

And so if you just say, oh, well I'm just gonna implement Gumshoe, I'm just gonna say, oh, the players always get the clue. Well. Great. Why did the person who made this detective show up to game tonight if they're just playing the same characters everybody else, but without cool bells and whistles, because everyone gets those cool bells and whistles.

So, you know, I'm not sure what the there is for " to what extent is this a rule? To what extent is this advice?" But like I definitely feel like there's something there about that. 

Sam: I mean, that's just the thing with any rule and any advice. I'm not sure I agree with you that good advice is universally or near universally applicable.

Tristan: Ooh, okay. 

Sam: Because I think like context is just always so important. Like this has been one of the mantras of Dice Exploder since the beginning. And the longer I've done the show, the more I've become convinced by it. The specifics matter. The specific example matters, the specific context you're in matters. " Just give them the clue" is great advice for like this particular kind of  role-playing game.

But if the fantasy is, "I wanna be better than my friends at finding clues." It's not good advice there. If we wanna sit down and write a murder mystery together instead of embodying characters walking through one, then you wanna play the Brindlewood Bay kind of thing.

Like there are plenty of other contexts in which this rule is not the thing that you want to do. We talked about a lot of them, and I just think that that is true across the board. I mean, going back to the Apocalypse World example we had at the top, I think a major mistake people have made as designers of powered by the Apocalypse games is just kind of copy and pasting the Apocalypse World list of MC moves,

when that list of moves is very, very tailored to the kinds of conflict and the kinds of stories that Apocalypse World wants to tell. And if you look at a lot of other people's games, the list really resemble that. But if you look at Under Hollow Hills, another game by the Bakers, the list is really different. Like it's really different. And I just feel that way about everything.

I just feel like the context matters and as much as I think this is really, really good advice, for the kind of  role-playing mystery that I enjoy playing through, that's not the only thing out there, you know? 

Tristan: Yeah, yeah. You know, I am convinced I take it back. You're right.

Advice has to be contextual and you can't just say like. "Oh, this is good advice because it's universally applicable. Like, no, there's, in the field of human experience, there's lots and lots of good advice that's highly contextual. So, yeah. So I don't even know anymore, like there's definitely a difference between rules and advice, but I, I'm not sure I know what it is.

Sam: Tristan, thanks so much for coming back on Dice Exploder. 

Tristan: Thank you so much for having me, Sam. This is a delight.

Sam: Thanks again to Tristan for being here. You can back Ballad Hunters now on Kickstarter. Google it, or there's a link in the show notes and you can follow Tristan on Blueksy at @moltensulfur. Thanks to everyone who supports Dice Exploder on Patreon. As always, you can find me on Bluesky at Dice Exploder, and you can find my games at sdunnewold.itch.io.

Our logo was designed by Sporgory. Our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Gray, and our ad music is Lily Pads by my boy, travis Tesser. This episode was edited by Ema Acosta Thank you Em! And thank you for listening. I'll see you next time.