Detective Campaign

[Captain Kablam]

Hey, I'm gonna be running a campaign here pretty soon which will probably delve fairly deeply into crime solving. A problem I see in this shift in gameplay, is that with gameplay becoming less about kill the Green Dragon to get his treausure and more proving that the Green Dragon killed his brother and framed his other brother to get all the gold, it can be hard to determine experience allotment.

So my questions are these. One how should I assign experience in the cracking of a case? And two, while I have a fair number of mysteries raring to go, is there any sort of special D&D reference stuff I should look at with making a detective campaign?

[Dienekes]

The Spell Compendium. If you're entire campaign can be solved through the single use of a "Speak with Dead" spell or Divination or whatever it'll be over very fast.

If I can make a minor suggestion. Finding clues in D&D is either a spell or a skill check, and is over very fast. So when I do a mystery oriented campaign I try to make the game more about putting the clues together than finding them.

I also use the "rule of three" for clues. Make sure every piece of information that would be given by a clue can be found 3 times in your campaign. Unless you can perfectly predict your players, they will probably miss a few of your subtle little hints, and if they find more than one clue that says the same thing, present it to them as a confirmation of their earlier deductions and not as just the same thing over again.

And as to exp, I can't really help you there. My players and I have basically gotten rid of exp and replaced it with an adventure/plot-line leveling system.

*Complete a major mission +1 level
*Complete a minor mission +1/4 level
*Complete a major character event +1/4 level

And so on.

[Galvin]

A campaign like this would have a tough time gaining XP. If you had a climatic chase scene at the end of a story arc where the PCs are chasing an NPC killer jumping from rooftop to rooftop to eventually catch and subdue him with non lethal damage you could gain XP for defeating an enemy.

You could gain XP from roleplaying, like finding clues or questioning witnesses, though this method has been highly controversial around the forums of late.

[Beleron]

Besides the obvious issues with divination magic and skill checks, this kind of thing seems to often to bring up questions of system mastery. The kind of real world things that mystery stories usually feature tend to be easily subverted in a magical setting, but if the mystery ends up revolving around the use of a particular spell or ability (or for that matter a combo), it could place an overly heavy emphasis on knowing the system.

[Grayson01]

CHeck out the Ebberon books, they have an entire PR dedicated to just this. That can give you some hints as to how to set it up. As to the question of XP. Since this game is focusing on solving mystires finding clues and the such XP should be given for finding them. Depending on how fast you wish to level them. You can use a DC based XP benfit. You can use base the DC of the revelvent check made to discover or come about the clue and set that equal to over coming a trap of the same level DC to disarm. As for sloving the mystry it's self a larger XP award should be give and this would take some work on your part deciding a chalange rating of the whole mistery. You can set it equal to over coming the CR of the main BIg Bad who set it into motion plus rewarding them for defeating the Big bad if there is a climatic battle at the end as well, basiclly a double XP award. You could also just make up a XP Award number for solving each mistery and give them that at the conclusion plus all the XP used during the act of sloving the Mistery I.E Battles, RPing, ETC.

[Galvin]

Maybe a low to no magic setting. Or just enact a party gentlemans agreement not to use divinatations to screw up the entire campaign.

[Captain Kablam]

Well as it would have it, the place I've had in mind has outlawed necromancy spells outright (as well as the commercial sale of equipment for illusion spells), because let's face it, very few governments are gonna be realistically a-okay with the raising of the dead, and the number of cons that can be run using illusions can be more trouble than its worth. Moving past that is the fact that it's not like the NPCs wouldn't be aware such magic exists. Granted for the low level stuff I don't see where using divination magic would be a problem, but that's in and of itself a cheat when one relies too heavily on that stuff when the trick runs out.

Anyways, I was thinking that the finding and use of critical and hard to find clues would be equal to the defeat of a monster, and grant an XP award for such. However, how should I value such clues?

[DeltaEmil]

Would governments really be against the Speak with Dead-spell? Sure, it's necromancy (kinda sucks that necromancy always has to be the evil school or something stupid like that), but it's not an evil spell, and it does nothing to the soul of the departed. It's only asking the corpse about stuff, which I would think that most governments would in fact be okay with, since it allows them to ask who killed the king-so-and-so, or where the recipe of the legendary sandwich is.

[Killer Angel]

About speak with dead: the corpse’s knowledge is limited to what the creature knew during life, so it doesn't necessarly know who's the killer.

[Captain Kablam]

Would governments really be against the Speak with Dead-spell? Sure, it's necromancy (kinda sucks that necromancy always has to be the evil school or something stupid like that), but it's not an evil spell, and it does nothing to the soul of the departed. It's only asking the corpse about stuff, which I would think that most governments would in fact be okay with, since it allows them to ask who killed the king-so-and-so, or where the recipe of the legendary sandwich is.

Well that's really more a discussion for a different thread. However the rational I had with it, is that the process for doing it and the way it need to be done are just illegal, not impossible and I think we can all agree that there are plenty of victimless crimes and that yes the law can be stupid at times. Not to mention, despite what the rules say, speak with the dead would definitely hold certain religious connotations which sadly can and, in the case of my setting, does influence the law.