Creating a Murder Mystery Weekend Problem III: Getting Players to Solve the Mystery (SPOILER FREE)

Third entry in my process notes on developing a murder-mystery weekend! If you missed it, you can also check out the second installment.

When I first started planning this hunt, I wanted to solve what seemed to me to be the main problem with all the murder mysteries I’d played in the past: nobody cared about solving the murder.

I think this happens for three reasons:

1. You can’t actually solve the mystery based on the information you’re given. In the two or three out-of-a-box murder mysteries I played, this was definitely the main reason. These games are designed so that every character’s version of events gives him or her motive, means, and opportunity. Maybe maybe maybe, if you’re diligent, lucky, and careful, you can catch one of the other players in a lie, but 99% of the time, it’s essentially a die roll. Your best bet is playing meta — figuring out which of your friends is hiding the fact that they’ve been chosen as the murderer — instead of playing in character.

2. The murderer can’t hurt you. Or, there’s no penalty for failing to find the murderer. He or she can’t keep killing people — the murderer is a passive character, not an active malicious force. The worst that happens if you don’t catch the murderer is everyone laughs and you have dessert.

3. Figuring out who the murderer is makes the game less fun. If, despite all these obstacles, you figure out who the murderer, that’s it. You just get to wait around for the end of the game so you can announce you won, or you can tell everyone else who the murderer is and end the game prematurely. You can’t make the murderer’s life harder in-game, you can’t get ahead by knowing more — nothing.

4. (Bonus reason) Even if you want to find the murderer, you have no way to get other players to help you. In one of the murder mysteries I played, one of the other players was the police — it was his job to find the murderer. But unlike the real police, he had no way of getting people to cooperate with his investigation. If players didn’t want to answer his questions, they just… didn’t. Or they walked away.

I’m not counting #4, because it’s more of an overall gameplay issue: you need ways to gain an advantage over other players so there are interesting choices to make.

Anyhow, I’m still not entirely sure how I want to motivate the other characters to catch the murderer. Obviously, I want to solve all of these problems with my rules, but I don’t want the game to be unbalanced — that is, I don’t want the murderer’s job to be either way too difficult (one person against thirteen!) or way too easy (the thirteen would have to do a lot of work to catch the murderer!) compared to everyone else’s.

Here’s the idea I’m running with so far: unless identified, the murderer can steal the win from anybody without knowing their secret.

I like this one because it’s similar to the end of some classic murder mysteries in which the detectives are also looking for some MacGuffin: as Joe and Jane Protagonist finally find the secret family fortune, the bad guy surprises them with a gun and steals it. (“I knew sooner or later you’d lead me right to the rubies!” etc.) I also like it because the murderer has reason to be part of the clue solving — all he or she wants is for someone to solve the clues.

I don’t like this one because I’m worried about the balance problem — even though one of the tracks I have planned will lead unequivocally to the solution to the murder, it might be way easier for the murderer to elude capture than it is for the players to pin down him or her. I’m particularly worried that this might be the case because the clues in question are designed so that every player will have to take a personal (in-game) risk in order to cooperate and catch the murderer, but each player will want to trick all the other players into taking that risk and profiting from the information gained without risking his or her own chances of winning. Because I can’t test clues on this group of people beforehand without spoiling them, I don’t know if I’ve geared the difficulty level appropriately.

As a partial solution to this problem, I’m introducing a method of catching the murderer that means the players don’t have to be 100% certain of his or her identity. I’ve bought some cheap toy handcuffs (cheap so that they can break easily in an emergency; they’re a prop, not a restraint). The murderer is “caught” when he or she is in handcuffs.

The handcuffs combined with the ability of the murderer to win the game so long as he or she hasn’t been caught solve most of the problems I listed.

1. There’s a clear way to find out the murderer’s identity to 100% certainty, so it’s definitely not a crapshoot. Even if you can’t, the non-murderers can afford to make a couple pre-emptive wrong guesses. After all, you can always switch the handcuffs from one player to another.

2. The murderer can hurt you — not only can he or she kill you like any other player, if you want to win the game, you pretty much have to catch him or her before finding the treasure.

3. Figuring out who the murderer is makes the game more fun, because there’s actually something you can do about it right away. You can decide how you want to handle it and when to reveal your knowledge. Maybe you want to get him or her in handcuffs right away. Maybe you want to play him or her, getting help to solve the treasure-track clues, and then slap on the cuffs at the last minute.

Bonus, there’s also something you can do about it if you catch another player killing a character — you can put him or her in handcuffs, hamstringing any attempts to solve clues, follow the treasure track, or just plain eat lunch in a dignified fashion. It makes it harder for him or her to kill again. And all the players know not to trust the person in handcuffs.

So, clue construction pending, I think I’ve solved this problem as best I can for now. We’ll see how I feel about it once I put together the mystery track.