Investigations Draft (But Cooler)

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Gameplay

There have been dynasties with a theme of murder mystery before, notably Kevan VI and Kevan XXIV, so I'm trying to approach this from a different angle, with a focus on discovering the "correct" set of clues among false leads. Less "Clue - The Board Game" and more "Mastermind" or similar logic puzzles. Players guess who committed a crime, with what weapon, and where it was committed, but they get rough answers as to how many of those things they got right.

Clue Types are meant to be lists that the players propose to add themselves, with a starter string for each clue type. The longer the list, the more difficult the logic puzzle is to get right, so it's up to the players to adjust the difficulty.

Guesses are Story Posts that the Emperor checks with the privately tracked information to see how well each Guess matches, then the historical record of Guesses is publicly tracked. This is to make dynastic activity a little more visible, rather than making Guesses private Virtual Actions. There's the potential for timing issues where more than one player has the same Guess, and the first one to post gets it first, but it might be hard to overcome that without making all the info private, and thus the dynasty appear to be fairly inactive.

It's likely that this could turn into multiple rounds of Crime Scenes, with each completely successful Guess turning into some type of victory-achieving score.

It's also would be way cooler than https://wiki.blognomic.com/index.php?title=Investigations_Draft

Hypothetical Rules

Clue Types

A Clue Type is a collection of similar items. Each possible Clue Type is defined in a subrule to this rule.

Suspect

A Suspect is a Clue Type that is a flavor text string representing the name of a person.

The following list contains the possible Suspects:

  • Caitlin Hastings's Cool Aunt

Location

A Location is a Clue Type that is a flavor text string representing the name of a place.

The following list contains the possible Locations:

  • Cool Spot Where All The Cool Kids Hang Out

Item

An Item is a Clue Type that is a flavor text string representing the name of a thing.

The following list contains the possible Items:

  • Letter Opener With Flames On It

The Crime

The Crime is a combination of one Suspect, one Location, and one Item that is privately tracked by the Crime Scene. The Crime defaults to an empty Suspect, an empty Location, and an empty Item.

Guesses

There is a publicly tracked list called Guesses which defaults to an empty list. Each entry in the list has the following:

  • Name, which is the name of an Investigator
  • Suspect, which is a string matching a Suspect Clue Type
  • Location, which is a string matching a Location Clue Type
  • Item, which is a string matching an Item Clue Type
  • Evidence, which is either None, Weak, Strong, or Irrefutable.

A Guess is a Story Post where the title of that post starts with the text "[Guess]" and the body of that post contains one Suspect, one Location, and one Item, plus any other flavor text of the author's choosing as long as none of the flavor text matches a defined Suspect, Location, or Item.

If they have not done so in the past 48 hours, an Investigator may post a Guess, selecting any Suspect, Location, and Item of their choosing as part of the Guess, none of which may be empty. At their earliest convenience, the Crime Scene should Collect Evidence for that Guess, which is an atomic action with the following steps:

  • If all of the Suspect, Location, and Item match the respective values of The Crime, set the Evidence for that Guess to Irrefutable
  • If only two of the Suspect, Location, or Item match the respective values of The Crime, set the Evidence for that Guess to Strong
  • If only one of the Suspect, Location, or Item match the respective values of The Crime, set the Evidence for that Guess to Weak
  • If none of the Suspect, Location, or Item match the respective values of The Crime, set the Evidence for that Guess to None
  • Post a comment to that Guess indicating the resulting Evidence, but not which Clue Types were matched, in the body of that comment
  • Add the Guess, including the name of the Investigator who posted that Guess and the Evidence of that Guess, to the Guesses
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