The Investigate Basic Move is a bit of a tricky beast. It's something of an odd one out amongst the other Basic Moves, and while it may not be immediately apparent from reading it on paper at first, I've seen several GMs stumble over its practical implementation in-game. Why is that?
The biggest reason I have determined is that it uses a slightly altered process for handling how the information that this move yields is given out, compared to other, more widely familiar, PbtA-based "information gain" moves.
I too was thrown off by it at first. In fact I even resolved to hack it to something different for my own personal games... much like I did with Observe a Situation, over here... but I have since figured out how (I believe) it is actually intended to be used.
And as it turns out, I find it is quite good when played RAW like that. Trust me, it will all make sense once you follow me all the way down this rabbit hole!
But let's start at the beginning.
In the following I'll render some quotes from people I've seen wondering about this move that I came across on discord, reddit, facebook, or other places. These 'quotes' are not 100% faithful, in fact I'm gleefully twisting and butchering them to make them fit my purpose here. But they're all based on stuff I've really seen or heard asked.
The move does seem really narrow in scope - should a Basic Move even be dealing with something as specific as criminal investigations, or is that just bad design by the K:DL developers?
The name might be a tad misleading, but this move is not only for crime scene investigation and other police procedures. In fact there is a whole separate that Advantage focuses on this particular application of it:
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| unsurprisingly, it's called Crime Scene Investigator (check it out on p.110) |
However, Investigate can be used equally well for academic research, ear-to-the-streets information gathering, solving logical or mathematical riddles, figuring out how to open cursed puzzle cubes, jury-rigging ancient alien machines into functionality, finding the hidden visual code in an antique painting, or otherwise examining puzzles and mysteries of all sorts. Like all good Basic Moves in PbtA, it is broadly applicable and highly flexible in its uses.
The images I have added to the rest of this article are intended to show just some of the ways this move could come into play. You can scroll down to browse them real quick, to get an idea of its considerable spectrum.
My text however will discuss the move only in the most general terms, the naked mechanics as it were. I have indulged in lengthy example-giving in other posts of mine on here, but for this one I decided that would certainly exceed the frame of this piece. I trust you to fill in the detailed applications in various concrete situations, as needed.
Let's move on to our next puzzlement:
The Clues
Okay, but so... what's the point in rolling for this move, in the first place? It says the player gets all the clues anyways. Doesn't this kinda beat the idea of "playing to find out"?
Understandable first impression - but read more closely: It doesn't actually say that!
What it does in fact say: "On a success, the player gets all direct leads". Slight difference, you might think, but a meaningful one nonetheless.
"On a success" here means on 10+. So either a partial success or a full success will yield all relevant direct leads, and by "relevant leads" it means 'the sort of stuff needed to avoid plot-bottlenecks.'
(And by "plot-bottlenecks", I mean the kind of situation where the whole scenario stalls because if you fail to [pick this one lock / solve this one riddle / interrogate this one person], the PCs are stuck and have no way left to advance. It goes without saying you should almost never use these in your scenario designs - but that's perhaps more the stuff of another article altogether.)
So taking this into account, you can - and should - still play to find out!
A fail result (-9), on the other hand, may or may not yield the required leads to continue investigating (GM's discretion), and will additionally not allow you to ask any of the questions listed in the move. (We'll get to those in a moment.)
So here the GM is free to either let a plot bottleneck arise, i.e. let you hit a dead end to your research, inquiries, or puzzling...
...or the GM could gracefully let you find a single clue (or however many s/he deems appropriate / necessary / whatever). But if you do, it'll most likely happen at a cost or complication, as the move's fail result specifies.
The Questions
These seemed extremely weird to me at first glance. They're strongly unlike the list of questions you get for ostensibly similar moves like Read a Person or Read a Situation, and to be honest felt eminently useless to me in most cases I could actually imagine.
I mean, moves that follow the "Question Move" pattern are very well established throughout most - if not all - games that are based on PbtA rulesets - so it would seem only reasonable to assume that Investigate would follow a similar structure, right?
Wrong.
It does its whole own thing with the questions instead.
And it does tend to confuse people familiar with PbtA games especially, since it's such an unexpected deviation. See, the questions here aren't the main thing that the move is concerned with. They're not really what it consists of in the same ways as RaP and Oas do. That main thing is in fact the move's clue/lead management, as discussed above.
The questions, then, are just a bonus - very much in the sense of like a hidden bonus level in a video game, you could say. They unlock extra content, in this case in the form of additional info about the investigated mystery at hand.
Importance-wise, they take the place of that +1 when acting upon the answers in the OaS move. A nice carry-on for the player to cherish, but not the main purpose of the move in question.
Absolutio in Veritas: The Divine Path to the Truth
So here's my take on what the GM should be doing when this move is invoked:
Unfortunately the corebook text is a bit, uhm... bad at communicating this. I understand that they went for brevity over detailed explication in their writing of the moves themselves. Yet without some explanatory text to elaborate on the underlying design ideas, I have to admit it took me a while to puzzle it out.
I'll try to unravel (my take on) it for you. Here's a step-by-step of things happening chronologically in a game:
0. [Fiction happens, fiction happens, fiction happens...]
1. [a character does something that triggers the Investigate move]
2. Have the player roll +Reason, and check the result.
3. Do not ask the player what questions they want to ask!
Instead,
on (10+) give them at least one direct lead (or maybe more than one) that is useful for their continued research / the plot to progress.
on (-9) perhaps do the above, but add a complication or cost. Or let them fail, and find nothing.
Additionally, in both cases, you can make a GM Move.
4. After revealing any and all clues you're gonna reveal,
now ask the player about which question(s) they want to ask.
The three questions neatly cater to three basic impulses a player might have at this time:
- Shit, I'm gonna need more intel than that!
- Uuh... what does my intuition say about all this?
- Uuh... what does my logic say about all this?
5. If they ask it, tell them. Honestly and without too much obfuscation.
6. ...then ask them "What Do You Do?"
7. [resume fiction happening, leading to more fiction happening, moves being triggered, the conversation moving forward...]
You see, the questions only make sense when building on the revealed leads, so you have to move asking them to after the clues are already revealed. Otherwise, you'll find yourself tempted to answer the questions in ways that don't really fit their scope, and when you then try to hand out "additional" direct leads afterwards, they runs a high risk of feeling weird and oddly uncalled for.
Therefore, doing it the way I described above makes, in my experience, for a much smoother flow of narrating the move's results and leading the conversation back into the general fiction afterwards.
As a general guideline, I try to make the information flow conform roughly to this:
"Here's what you find. Here's what you think about it. Now what do you do with that?"
Here's a final thought:
If you write your own scenarios, you can design investigative scenes (or, y'know, potentially investigative scenes) from the ground up with these processes and questions in mind!
Some guidelines, perhaps:
> What essential, necessary, important, direct leads are here to be found?
> What additional sources of knowledge or insight could help make a more complete picture than what is here alone? Where else could you look, who else could you ask, what other approach could you try?
> What emotional or intuitive vibe does it give off? What about it feels weird, disturbing, scary, or enticing?
> What problems or hiccups would a viewpoint of rational analysis run into when examining this? What about it doesn't add up, seems self-contradicting, irrational, or plain impossible?
If you do this, you will never be caught unprepared when your players start asking you for clues and leads and answers to those additional questions.
You'll already have thought them up beforehand and can now simply dole them out as needed, without the system becoming awkwardly at odds with the organically unfolding fiction.
I think that's it. This is my wisdom on the Investigate move.
Now you've seen the Truth. Now you know what we must do!
I told you it would all make sense once you followed me all the way down here!
