Thinking about motives has got me thinking about Smoke Screens and Red Herrings. If you are unfamiliar with the terms, it basically means misleading your audience by either hiding information, trying to obfuscate the information or offering false or unimportant information to muddle the issue. In writing, these are common, especially in mystery writing. They have to, or it would be a very short book.
In murder mystery party games there are multiple schools of thought. Some people believe that red herrings are hilarious and necessary because they add challenge to a traditionally light mystery. Others believe that they are unnecesarry because they frustrate the players. Honestly, I see both sides. I've played enough Mystery Party Games to know that it can be written very badly and enrage the players because there was no way to "win". It can also be written very well and not land for the audience because there is too much information and it got lost in the crowd. It has been my experience that even when I write a red herring that is VERY outlandish, and I think NO ONE will believe it, people will pick it up and run with it to the finish line. In my experience, people will make up their own red herrings. I don't include them in large mystery party games at all because the large crowd is already a smoke screen. Getting all the information requires the character to be intentional about seeking out and prying information from every other character. Not everyone who plays is going to be an extrovert much less have played enough of these games to focus in on solving the mystery. People will always be slightly uncomfortable with strangers, being dressed up weird, trying to embody a character and taking in tons of information.
Whether you choose to include a red herring into your story or not, never over saturate your story with them. Red herrings really shouldn't be more than 20% of your total clues and I wouldn't personally go over 10%. The percentage is always scaled down with the size of your group. Remember that 90% of the story is already leading to false ends. Only one person is "guilty", the rest just have motive.
It can be tempting to think of writing a mysetery party game as a competition between you and your audience. If you can trick most of them, you win! If that's your goal, remember that you still want your audience to have fun. Including red herrings can certainly help you acheive the goal of fooling your audience but it will also frustrate your players. So when you are thinking of motive, and including red herrings, don't forget to check your motivation. You'll have much more fun watching your audience enjoy themselves than hoping they don't figure it out.
What's the most outlandish red herring you've ever read? (Communism doesn't count, everyone knows its a red herring ;))
So my thinking is why go with the everyone could be guilty. I would think having multiple roles in the game makes it more interesting and fun. Roles like Detective, Suspect, and antagonist. Where some people are solving, some people hiding and some are misleading. Also changing the roles/adding Roles in each act could keep it fun. So you could be adding the detective role to people as you go so by the 3rd act you are down to 3 suspects but they are secret and the people with role changes are also unknown. To win you have to compete the mission of the role you are assigned in act 3
ReplyDeleteThere are some occasions where writing characters to have different roles is desireable, but it's tricky. #1 it creates an "us" vs "them" scenario right off the bat. If that's what you're going for then it can work but the problem is that most people don't like being labeled "the bad guy". If you know your group, and they are cool with it, then great. There are lots of ways to write scenarios that allow for everyone to play how they want. #2 Eliminating motive from any given character makes them irrelivant. It puts them in the role of observer. It can work but again, it all depends on your audience.
DeleteI do think your idea can work well and would be adaptable for large groups. Since the missions can be seperate from any personality or background motivations, they can be assigned at random.