Creating a Murder Mystery Weekend Problem II: Letting Players “Kill” Each Other (SPOILER FREE)

Second entry in my process notes on developing a murder-mystery weekend!

At one friend’s murder mystery party, players could kill each other using in-game weapons. I thought this was a lot of fun, so I wanted to include a similar mechanic in my murder mystery weekend. (Besides, it would help me develop the And Then There Were None atmosphere I hoped for.)

First, though, I had to deal with the downsides to the rules I’d experienced as a player. For example, in that game, there was no difference between handing someone a weapon and murdering them with that weapon. I still feel bad because one of my friends had a perfect plan to murder me (I was the mafia capo and he was one of my henchmen), but I messed it up because I thought he was giving me a weapon to use on someone else instead of trying to kill me. Not wanting to get caught by everyone else, he couldn’t explain without drawing attention to himself.

So, my first criterion in developing my own rules for “murdering” other players is that it should be crystal clear that you are dead without any explanation from the “killer.”

Thinking about the atmosphere I want to encourage, I came up with some further criteria:

1. Players should be able to avoid getting killed if that’s all they care about, but staying 100% safe should require enough of a time investment that, practically speaking, you’re better off taking risks and playing the game.
2. Murderers should be able to decrease the risk of getting caught by planning more carefully but improve their chances of a successful kill if they don’t care about getting caught.
3. Dead players should still be able to have fun for the rest of the weekend.
4. Players should be able to completely eliminate the threat another player poses by “murdering” him or her.

You’ll notice that #3 and #4 have more to do with the rules of “being dead.” This is one of the biggest challenges for me. Because my treasure hunt/mystery lasts the whole weekend, I don’t want someone who gets killed on Friday night to have nothing to do until Sunday morning. There will be a “safe area” in the house, a section of the basement with board games, a TV, and a PS3, but if someone just wanted to play video games, they would have stayed home, right? So there should still be an important way in which dead players get to “play.”

One thing that makes this easier is the fact that my event has two separate tracks: the murder mystery track (figure out people’s secrets and solve the murder!) and the treasure hunt track (find the treasure that is part of the plot!). Most of the time, when players “kill” each other, it will be for murder-mystery-track reasons (or just because they can, but that’s a different story). I can boot “dead” players off the mystery track without booting them off the treasure track.

But I also want there to be some penalty for being dead — otherwise, why bother staying alive? After some discussion with various players, I decided I liked the idea that “ghosts” have to whisper for the rest of the weekend after their deaths. This poses enough of a communication barrier that you don’t want to be dead, but it’s not so annoying that you’ll want to murder someone for real.

I haven’t decided if I want to give ghosts the opportunity the win the game after they “die.” Right now, I’m pondering ways I can give them an “assist” credit: in hockey, the players who pass to the player who scores share the glory, and maybe I can do something similar for ghosts who help a living player win. Still working on that one.

But (again, after lots of discussion with players) I have figured out the two in-game ways to “murder” someone: poison and Angel of Death.

Poison is relatively simple. There will be a strong and easily identifiable flavour (e.g. mint, vanilla) that is “poison.” (I’ve already chosen this flavour, but for obvious reasons, I’m not going to disclose it until all the players are in the house for the weekend and can no longer acquire their own.) Some players will be armed with varieties of food that have this flavour (e.g. vanilla extract, vanilla-flavoured candies). If at any point, a player tastes this flavour, he or she is poisoned and must “die” dramatically.

Obviously, this depends on good faith that I’m confident all my players have: yes, you could just pretend not to taste the vanilla someone put in your Coke even if you did, but then you’d know you were cheating, and why are you even playing? As with actual poison, there are some people with natural advantages — at least two players that I know of have less sensitive senses of taste than others and so will require a lot more poison to kill, but this counterbalances their difficulty smelling the poison before tasting it.

Because I don’t want to waste food, I’m also ruling that players must target an individual with the poison, not a group; that is, players can’t just dump poison in the soup and spoil an entire dish/poison everyone.

The other method of in-game murder, Angel of Death, solves a lot of the mini-problems extrapolated from the four up there: how do I make people feel in danger outside of mealtimes? How can I have a method of “murder” that’s clear and instantaneous but that doesn’t result in the victim knowing who the murderer is?

Here’s my solution, reached through discussion with some of the players and also from seeing a kind of artsy production of Macbeth over 10 years ago:

1. Each player gets a ping-pong-ball-sized white foam ball that represents his or her life, labelled with his or her name.
2. If a player’s “life ball” is placed in my hand, that player is dead, and I, the Angel of Death, will inform them of this fact immediately.
3. Anyone can move/hide/take etc. anyone else’s “life ball,” but all life balls, whether your own or someone else’s must be kept in plain sight at all times–that is, someone in the right position should be able to see the life ball without moving anything but him- or herself. For example, you can’t put your life in your jeans pocket, because no one can see that without taking it out of your pocket. But you can tape it to the ceiling.

I also like this set-up because it allows an intermediate step between letting a player live and “murdering” a player: you can also gain control of another player’s life ball and threaten them. You can get scared because you can’t find your life ball, and no one will admit to having taken it.

I do have to refine some life-ball rules, such as what happens if your life-ball breaks, and what (if anything) do I want to do about physical struggles for life-balls between players. But those seem to me to be minor amendments to the overall principle.