Mysteries and Skill Checks: How Do I Run A Whodunnit?

[intothenight]

So, I had an idea a while back of making a mystery session for my Edge of the Empire characters. It's meant to be fun and more than a bit silly, but I still want to do the mystery aspect of it justice. It's going to have the basic setup of a murder mystery, with a suspect line-up of all kinds of shady characters with big guns and mysterious pasts. Then the fact will come out that the crime needing to be solved is "Who stole the Moff's cat's milk dish?" There's a reason why it's worth stealing, but that's another story for another day.

The point here is, I've never run a mystery before. What are some fun twists to put in? What are some pitfalls to watch out for? How many red herrings and twists are too many? And above all, how do I keep it more interesting than "roll well to solve the mystery or roll badly to let the thief get away"?

Heck, if you've got any stories about fun mystery sessions, that could give me some ideas and help me find a good direction to take my session.

Experienced GMs and DMs, come to my aid!

[BWR]

I'm not familiar with the EotE system so I'll be no help mechanically, but the best thing you can do if you are ucnertain how to do something is steal. Ideally, find some good mystery modules for any system, shamelessly rewrite it to work for SW and throw it at your players. If this is hard to do, find said mystery modules and see how they structure the mystery, then write something similar. Failing that, take the sort of mystery story you want to tell in what other medium, likely novel or tv series, watch/read it critically and think "what sort of skill check did the investigator use in this scene", write down the basic type of scene and skills used, then use this as a template for your own adventure.

Good luck with the endeavor.

[Thrawn4]

Every culprit needs a motivation and an opportunity. Investigating the background and the alibi of several NPC's provides a lot of room for challenges and roleplaying. Maybe one NPC is forced into something by another (which might or might not be related to the crime).
People have weaknesses and sometimes those are embarrassing. Maybe the PC's have to follow someone into the sewers where they meet in secret (to plot murder or enjoy illegal drugs), or the PC's only witness is a hut prostitute who tries to... appeal... to the PC's, or the witness is just embarrassed about something the PC's discover.

Be careful about mindreading and anything related to this. I don't know what forceusers can do in this system so I can't help you with this one.