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Good OP. I just bought the Mutant City Blues pdf and while I was planning on GMing something gritty and down-to-earth for my group using the police procedural rules, I've actually warmed to the mutant stuff so I might play it straight. It looks like a lot of fun. I am a bit concerned about the granularity of some of the rules. I hate when a game starts talking about 25 vs 50 metre distances based on how many points you put into a power, I don't think that level of precision is necessary for an RPG (and it reminds me of D&D in a bad way). If I'm gonna run it I'd want to do it a little more freeform, in an AW kind of style. Anyone have any advice for specific ways to override the basic GUMSHOE rules in that way? Particularly the combat system I think could be trimmed down significantly, and the need for NPCs to roll dice removed, which sounded easy at first but seems more complicated the more I look at the mutant power rules and all the stuff for blast powers and so on.
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Mar 8, 2015 11:37
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 22:45 |
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I ran my first Gumshoe game tonight. Wrote up a murder mystery plot for a Mutant City Blues case, spent an hour and a bit with my 3 players getting them through character creation, picking up investigative and mutant powers and so on. It was a lot of fun - However, the main thing I found was that I ended up not using the Gumshoe system at all. I occasionally asked people if they had certain investigative powers to do certain things with their characters, and sometimes they offered those themselves, but it seemed a formality and actually slowed down the otherwise organic narrative pacing of the game. I don't think we ever even rolled a single die, but that's because I didn't really have any action scenes planned out because I wasn't sure what their characters would end up being (maybe for next time). So it was all investigative casework. And that worked really well, they loved interviewing witnesses and suspects and combing crime scenes for clues and asking for warrants and DNA tests and CCTV footage. I don't think I even needed the Gumshoe system - just the setting notes for the Mutant City Blues, with the Quade diagram and everything, and the reference sheets and background info. The only important part of the system was the basic idea that the players are not gonna miss clues, and once you have that I don't think you need all the other crunch surrounding it. So really I agree with this I guess: Lichtenstein posted:GUMSHOE is really a barebones lovely excuse of a system to print awesome settings and scenarios. There's literally nothing you really need this particular system for* if you just keep the principles on how to run the scenarios in mind. Maybe not 'barebones lovely excuse of a system' but more like 'overspecified and not really necessary to get to the fun part of the game'.
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Mar 16, 2015 02:17
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