SCRPG: Roll Perception

Games Sentinel Comics RPG
1

On some other threads I noticed concerns regarding difficultly creating investigation scenes or porting the ever popular "roll perception"over from the various d20 systems.

If its being rolled in a proactive way, that is the players are actively trying to find things, I would have it be a regular Overcome roll and craft twists accordingly. You Overcome to find a clue in a murder scene. A success with no twists is you find the clue, an overwhelimg success is you find the clue and some other kind of bonus hint. a success with a minor twist is you find the clue but the clue has been slightly damaged making it harder for you to parse out. Success with a major twist is you find two clues and one of them is a red herring.

These just being examples

If you want to be particularly mean, the GM could roll the dice for the overcoming player behind a screen so they don't know what level of twist the are dealing with.

If rolling in a reactive way, seeing who notices the stalker, You could treat it like a reaction roll, have the players roll onerelevant Power or Quality die and compare the result to a chart. Something like

0 or less: You are perfectly sure that nothing is wrong and relax, suffering a penalty of some kind in the first round of combat or some other approperate consequence

1-3: You don't notice anything

4-7: Something doesn't feel right, you know a danger is near by but can't pinpoint what.

9-11: You notice the danger, know where it is where it is coming from, and have a vague idea what it generally is: i.e. someone with a gun

12+: You notice exactly what the danger is in incredible detail and could likely reverse the ambush if you wanted to

2

I love your idea with the red herring, that's a really cool way of giving the players some extra work (and story)!

However, part of the basic mechanics in "success with a twist" is that you never take away from the story's momentum, but always add to it. As such, be careful that the twist doesn't deminish the sucess of the original action in any way, but gives you new things to worry about!
This is such a major difference from other RPG where a failed test usually means that the plot is temporarily haltet or hindered.

With that in mind,  "f you want to be particularly mean," has me worried a little. If you have to roll secretly, why roll at all? More dramatically, why bind yourself to chance, when your primary task is to serve the group with a great story? 

Letting players roll and then rigging or superseding that roll because you needed a pre-fixed result for your plot will only cause frustration.
Abandoning your well-prepared story for a roll that didn't go as expected is even worse.

So how about this: 

  • If you want players to notice some clue (because that is how you scripted the plot), you'll certainly find a convincing way to let them know. If they rolled badly and you told them anyway, they'll feel fooled, so just pick the best-suited for character or plot reasos, and simply tell them they are the one to find the smoking gun behind the arm chair - and together, weave a nice piece of story around how that might come to be.
  • If you don't want to let them know, then simply don't. If possible, involve the players into what their characters cannot know! Tell them how for the audience, sneaky shadows can be seen shifting from cover to cover, or how the camera shows some crooks-in-waiting, watching your every step from the rooftops, all of this clearly foreshadowing an ambush. But the heroes are oblivious, and that is required for the next scene to unfold into action!
  • Only if you don't care either way, or you want your players to feel especially useful, ask them to roll; but then go with either result (because, of course, you had prepared for both variants anyway).

I know that many groups play RPG as some sort of duel between the GM and the players (and for that clientéle, some RPG rulebooks are full of extra-rules that only serve to reign in the omnipotence of a "malevolent" GM). This might work well if both sides stick to a comprehensive set of rules as try to outsmart each other, and there's nothing wrong with that. (Personally, that style isn't for me, but mostly because I had a few instances with people seriously fighting over a certain interpretation of rule, while leafing though various rulebooks and totally pulling everyone out of the atmosphere).

However, I think Sentinels RPG doesn't work too well with that competitive style - it too much depends on everybody trying to contribute to a cool story, and for that purpose gives a rather light-weight set of rules that barely cover the basics of interaction. On the other hand, SCRPG brings a quite unique way of cooperatively discussing iterations, and every once in a while even roll back some past action for an impromptu-retcon when everybody agrees that things could develop so much cooler now if we had zigged instead of zagged in that last scene.
And then of course, I make sure to always have a few good and bad news I can pull out of my sleeve any time if I feel I need to adjust the density of a scene for better pacing.

Naturally, there is a delicate balance to be found between too much and too little consequence, but overall I think one of SCRPG's main features is that it allows to handle that whole "suffer the consequences of your doing" thing very situational, and usually even involve the players to judge what works best to make for a great story!

[Sorry, I had to edit a few times. English isn't my first language...]

3

If you don’t want chance to have anything to do with the story you are collaboratively telling, then the SCRPG and indeed any table top RPG is not the method you want to be using.

The purpose of secret rolls, here as in any circumstances, is to deny the players information. It is not the way I would run most encounters, but a mystery investigation can greatly benefit from it. It is also not always needed, many veteran players are good at separating player knowledge from hero knowledge, but it can be fun.

In dnd for example a player might roll insight to determine if an NPC is bluffing. If the player makes the roll, then the player has a reasonable idea about if they passed or failed the check. Where as if the GM makes the roll in secret and only tells them the information they gleamed from the check they don’t know if they rolled a natural 1 or a natural 20.

Likewise, in the SCRPG, if the player knows what level of severity the twist they incurred is it will impact what they do with the information they turned up.

The idea here is that a success but with the minor twist points the heroes in the correct direction, but also misleads about a detail, or does so in a more roundabout way.

For example: a hero with a super sense of smell rolls to determine who has recently been in an alleyway where a murder takes places. They succeed but with a minor twist. They recognize the body spray of Tanner “The Ax Man” Conner, a well known heavy who hangs out in a bar downtown. They succeed and got information, but the twist is that Conner came by after the murder. Going to talk to Conner gives them the chance to interrogate him and get closer to the murderer, but gives the villain more time to plot their next move.

A major twist also points them towards Conner, who has information to advance the plot, but makes it seem even more likely that he was the murderer. Maybe he cut himself shaving that morning so there is a scent of blood mixed with the aftershave. When confronted with this Conner takes offense at being accused of a murder he didn’t commit and is harder to get information out of, and may even get violent with some of his buddies.

A success without a twist lets the super nosed slueth detect cigar smoke under the aftershave and find a match book belonging to a hotel way to fancy to let a low life like Conner in. They can skip the Conner detour all together.

Keeping the result hidden means that they don’t know if they can just go forward trusting the clue completely, or if they need to be super cautious because some major complication is going to come up.

TL:DR, the twists for an investigation game will always move the players forward, but might not do so in the most direct or easiest route. Keeping the result of the overcome check hidden adds to a sense of unknown mystery.

4

I can see this makes a lot of sense in situations where you want to keep up the suspense.

I think I had misunderstood this as a general modus of playing, which is my bad.

Thank you for the extra explanation, much appreciated!