Research Notebooks and Puzzle Trails
The ability to defer the availability of information can be extremely useful for GMs who want players to shift strategies in the middle of the game with the arrival of new intelligence. This gives players a new challenge during the course of a game. This sort of “twist� can produce interesting opportunities for plot and character development, and players that make bad decisions early in the game may receive new opportunities to even the score. Although mempacks can be quite effective in these regards, there are ways to achieve similar effects with less intensive preparation.
Trails have already been mentioned in the previous chapter as a simple means of providing an abstracted, goal-oriented activity that will last the duration of a game. Some trails may make rare or powerful game items available to players. By making the reward at the end of a trail a crucial piece of information, trails can also be effective tools for delaying the arrival of that information. Complicated trails may also have similar rewards interspersed with the completion of intermediate steps.
Because of their intellectual qualities, puzzle trails are often used for deferring information. Players need to perform mental gymnastics to advance to later stages in a puzzle trail. Some puzzles may be copied directly out of games magazines but many GMs try to work the setting of the game into the puzzles, designing visual stumpers using thematic images or word-association quizzes derived from the text of the scenario. A more ambitious version of the puzzle trail may resemble the annual MIT IAP Mystery Hunt, a puzzle competition held in MIT every January where the solutions for puzzles often provide clues for other puzzles.
There are a number of different ways to progressively reveal the subsequent puzzles in a puzzle trail, such as having a publicly accessible collection of mempack-like slips, each one marked with the name of the trail and a sequential number instead of a trigger. As with a riddle trail, people pursuing the same puzzle trail would be able to use the same collection of mempacks. With a sufficiently wide variety of puzzles, puzzle trails can encourage many players to distribute the effort of solving the puzzles and to work together to share their findings, although overly complex puzzle trails have an unfortunate tendency to direct the attention of players away from interacting with each other as characters.
To keep the benefits of puzzle trails without taking too much time away from actual roleplaying and gaming, GMs sometimes implement “research trails,� which can be understood as simplified puzzle trails combined with item hunting. Most research trails involve the collection of some scarce item, such as “Random Technical Items� (RTIs ) or blood samples from characters instead of solutions to puzzles. This often involves the efforts of multiple players scouring the game area for the correct game items or the cooperation of multiple players to volunteer some private information. Unlike the venturing and deductive qualities of puzzle trails, research trails often resemble a checklist of tasks. Thus, some GMs make research trails available in the form of “research notebooks.� These are in-game documents listing each step in sequential prose, possibly with a minor amount of text scrambling.
Some research trails may also require players to perform word-association tests with a number of characters that have “research skills,� making it possible for others to deduce a character’s hidden agenda. The types of items required to advance to the next step of a research trail may also hint at the nature of the research. Because research notebooks are in-game documents, they can be stolen or distributed, allowing multiple players to capitalize on a research trail through negotiation or skullduggery.
By providing clues for players to find out what others are working on, research trails can provide interesting opportunities for competitive interaction. Players may be able to find out who their opposition is, what sorts of materials they require, and ways of stopping the availability of those materials. Alternatively, they may be able to devise means of opposing the results of the research, they can try to deprive their opposition of their research notebooks, or they may even attempt to continue the research on their own.
