(Friday blog, cross-posted as always from Dreamwidth and LJ)

Murder mysteries are rubbish.

I don't mean the books or the TV shows, which are of the usual variable quality. Nor do I mean live-action shows, whether the actors interact with the audience or not. No, I'm referring to the ones where you get a box full of booklets, assign your friends and family to the roles, and act out the mystery yourself.

My mother owns a lot of these, from several different series, and they all fall into much the same pattern:

-Everyone reads a very stilted script. Mostly these are filled with utterly appalling puns on the theme of the game.

-There are optional characters (for when you have too many people) who are blatantly optional, with very few lines and totally out-there personalities. Weirdly, they're often religious personages; our last two had a Catholic priest, a medium, and a Buddhist(?) monk.

-You're directly told what probing questions you should ask, and what answers you should give to them. You're not given any other information, so if someone tries to dig deeper, you just hit them with 'I don't know'. We had 'Why did you steal the money?' at our last one, with the response being '... I was a bit short that month?'.

-There is a tape or video with a dodgy knock-off Poirot recapping what was just said.

-Everything hinges on some random bit of trivia, regardless of whether the person it implicates actually has a decent motive. One time, the only way to identify the murderer was a brief mention that she played polo.

-The murderer doesn't know they did it until the very end. In our last one, I found out I did it on the very last page, right as we were about to make our guesses. I'm still not clear on why I did it, or what made me look particularly suspicious.

I get that there's a need to cater for people who don't know what sort of questions to ask. I get that you want there to be lots of different guesses at the end. I get that not everyone has watched a dozen different crime/mystery TV shows and learnt exactly how this is supposed to work - but we kind of... have?

So - and I'm still not 100% sure how - I've wound up making custom murder mysteries for family gatherings. I've made four so far, all very different, and have refined the idea each time.

1 - The Pharaoh's Tomb - Ancient Egypt & 2 - No Longer At This Address - Stamp Collecting

The first pair, nearly 10 years ago, were designed to be Lunchbox Mysteries: something you can do with three or four people over 15 minutes on your lunch break. Each player had a single sheet of paper, which mostly followed the pattern of the games we'd played: you have two rounds, prescribed questions and answers, and evidence you get to read out. You also had secrets, which you wanted to keep (including in one case You Are The Murderer).

One thing I did drop was the stilted scripts. Your sheet tells you who you are - you can introduce yourself from that, you don't need hand-holding.

I don't really know how well they worked - my parents did one of them when I wasn't there. After that, I dropped the idea for a good few years.

3 - Hogwarts: A Mystery - Harry Potter

I revived it last year, wanting to let my children take part in a murder mystery before we did an official one without them in the evening. Now I had to work out something for nine people, including myself. Creating something I had to work to solve proved... challenging.

I started with a theme, and drew on the Al-Salazar theory to create a coherent account of the Hogwarts founders as 10th century British wizards. Gryffindor is King's Wizard to Aethelred of Wessex, Hufflepuff is from the Welsh tribes, etc etc. This time I crafted the booklets into, well, booklets, with the traditional 'don't turn the page yet' rules. Once again, there was very little scripting - everyone playing knew enough about Harry Potter to slip easily into character (including the 6-year-old!).

In order to let myself play, three of the characters actually had variable booklets. I printed out three copies of the page that contained their secrets (the first page after the cover - I have no truck with hiding the murderer from themselves), and randomly selected one. That page also included their alibis, which meant I could tweak them accordingly so that the guilty party was the person without one.

It worked... okay. The three possible thieves all looked pretty much equally guilty, so people had to pay attention to precisely the right trivia to guess correctly. It was fun (I played the Sorting Hat; I had poems ^_^), but I could do better.

4 - Murder on the Gwernol Express - Victorian Wales

This murder mystery, played out this week, is the culmination of all my experience so far. Like the Lunchbox Mysteries, each player had only a single sheet of paper, with all their information visible from the start; I really prefer it that way, as it allows you to play things how you want to, not how the gamemaker wants. Like 'Hogwarts: A Mystery', I provided pieces of evidence as separate pages - but, like the Lunchbox Mysteries, everyone gets one. These ranged from the obscure (a photo of a miner's tools) to the overwhelming (a log of everyone's movements around the village).

For this game, I did away with scripts entirely. Each player had a description of their character, their day, and which of the other players they knew; a subject they like to talk about (usually, though not always, unrelated to anything, and just there for flavour) and a description of their evidence; and their secret, which they tried to greater or lesser degrees to keep secret.

I say 'they', because for this one I gave myself the role of the Inspector; it meant I could push the conversation along without having to resort to scripting. Players were allowed to do whatever they wanted with their evidence, though all of it - and all the secrets - came out by the end of the game.

In contrast to the Hogwarts mystery, almost everyone picked the murderer as, well, the murderer. The main culprit for this was the aforementioned log of events, which was passed around and repeatedly examined. I had considered saying evidence could be read out but not shown, which would probably have averted that issue, but decided against it to help out the children (7 and 9 years old). Apart from that, people seemed to focus very tightly on who had the opportunity to be the murderer; motive and means were mostly ignored (there was no actual evidence that the killer had the means to commit the murder).

Where Next?

There are clearly a few changes needed from the Victorian mystery, but I do feel it was an improvement over its predecessors, and its boxed inspirations. I'm buzzing with ideas for new settings - anything from medieval sieges to Doctor Who to parodies of detective TV (all of it) - and expect to try out new game mechanics, too. One idea I've had is that you're given a character to try and get other people to suspect, and a second character to divert suspicion from; I'm sure there will be other concepts to play with. (We also play a lot of One Night Werewolf; you can sort of tell.) Another is to give players one or more secret goals to accomplish, while at the same time finding the murderer. I'd love to find a way to let myself play again, too, though that may wind up being impossible.

Ultimately? It's fun, it's probably going to keep being fun, it's a heck of a lot better than the prepackaged ones, and I'll keep making the things as long as people keep playing them. :)

hS