Pushes vs Spends on Trail

A few backers have asked why Trail 2^nd Edition sticks to the old GUMSHOE method of having point Spends for each individual investigative ability, instead of switching to the Pushes used in the Yellow King/GUMSHOE One-2-One and Mutant City Blues.

There’s no standalone GUMSHOE rules engine – each game takes the precepts and techniques and technologies of GUMSHOE and implements them to fit the game’s setting and concept, not to mention the tastes of the designers. While the core of GUMSHOE is always “it’s more fun for the players to get the clues”, everything else gets approached in different ways. You can even track different trees of GUMSHOE development. As Ken says, he exists to put stuff into GUMSHOE (leading to the more mechanic-heavy branch of Night’s Black Agents), and Robin takes stuff out (hence the more story-focused, stripped-down Yellow King approach). And meanwhile, Kevin’s over there with his shortened investigative ability lists and refresh tokens.

Pushes have two advantages over spends. First, obviously – they’re easier to track. You have a handful of Pushes, as opposed to more than a dozen points split among numerous investigative abilities. Second, they even out spotlight time by giving all the players a chance to shine – all players get the same number of pushes, and can always use them on the ability that’s most apt for the current situation.

We did consider using Pushes for Trail. It’s a very easy change to make (you can do it yourself, if you really want – just cut the number of investigative ability build points by a third or so, and give players two pushes each). We chose not to do so for two reasons.

First, backwards compatibility. There’s a lot of Trail material out there already, and we wanted to make it as easy as possible to use it all. There are a lot of little highly situational spends that are more flavour than anything else (spending investigative points on particular magical rituals, for example) that we wanted to keep. The complexity of Trail feels appropriate too – reeling off the staccato list of investigative abilities always puts me in mind of a mechanical typewriter.

Second, and more importantly, was our approach to the game. We like the idea of the investigators frantically scrabbling to cobble together some sort of defence against the horror. The panic of “agh, I’ve only got points left in Art History, Anthropology, and Theology – can I think of any clever way to use in this situation?” coupled with the dread of making a mistake by spending points now from an ability you’ll really need later on.

There’s a trade-off between ensuring even spotlight time and rewarding player ingenuity. In Trail 2e, we decided on the latter.