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Tag Archives: GUMSHOE
In Part One, I discussed the basics of running a pre-written GUMSHOE adventure. Based on a recent poll about half of you write your own adventures, or adapt ours, with a few brave souls improvising completely. This article covers the improvisation that’s required when characters go in unexpected directions or ask unexpected questions, whether in […]
By Hao Zhang There’s an idea, a saying that when a thing travels, evolution, alteration, and other unexpected outcomes go with it. This idea sometimes can lead one to pleasant views. And this is how we at Labyrinth see it. Before we formally begin the mumbling, we’d like to notify you dear readers that we […]
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A steady improvement curve for heroes makes sense in certain roleplaying genres. Fighting foes, getting stuff from them, and becoming increasingly powerful is not incidental to F20—it’s the core activity. The journey of a D&D character from first to twentieth level mirrors that of Conan as he progresses from scruffy barbarian to implacable king. Improvement […]
by Simon Rogers In most cases, GUMSHOE puts the dice in the hands of the players. Instead of the GM making a Stealth test for a creature to sneak up on a character, players make a Sense Trouble test to avoid being surprised. When the roles are reversed, it’s the players who make a Stealth […]
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A column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Since investigative roleplaying first burst from its sunken atoll and called itself Call of Cthulhu, mystery solving and horror have always been linked in the gamer mind. As a result, when Simon first asked me to design a system for investigative play, it made sense to debut […]
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A column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Previously on See Page XX, I talked about the difficulties we occasionally hear about when GMs who have trained themselves to say “no” come to the GUMSHOE system with those assumptions in mind. This time I’d like to look at how early roleplaying culture took on that […]
GUMSHOE is a system for designing and playing investigative roleplaying games and adventures, emulating stories where investigators uncover a series of clues, and interpret them to solve a mystery. In a GUMSHOE game, the player characters discover something which triggers their investigation, and then the Game Moderator (GM) narrates them through a number of scenes, […]
A Column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Many moons ago I encountered a phenomenon I later termed an unrule. A rule, as goes without saying, is text the designer includes into a game to explain how it is played. An unrule is text you have to include to prevent players from making a mistaken […]
by Lisa Padol Ever since GUMSHOE came out, there’s been a lot of focus on the investigation skills. But it seems to me that the emphasis in discussion is on the wrong thing. The key thing is not that the PCs will always find the core clues (if they are looking in the right place […]