GUMSHOE: First Impressions

I was lucky enough to have a chance to play a session of GUMSHOE yesterday. GUMSHOE being an RPG intended for a much more investigative style of play than a 'standard' RPG, where the major difference is that characters tend to just be given clues to solve the mystery, rather than having to roll everything and thus missing out on things.

Or, at least, that's the one-sentence summary. It's actually a bit more complex than that - it apppears your characters training gives you various points, and you can then use those points to 'buy' clues where they appear (with the caveat that if there's no clue there, you don't pay). This is rather better than I'd envisaged, in that it allows the character easy access to the clue, but still has something of an associated cost. (I also liked our GM's enhancement of a small pool of 'floating' skills.)

The game itself was based on a TV series I haven't ever seen. But it seemed to be pretty much "X-Files" meets Indiana Jones - there was the episodic report of weirdness happening, so off we went to investigate and eventually find some artifact of historical interest. Fortunately, there are loads of shows like that, and they all pretty much work the same way, so although I didn't 'get' the characters (due to lack of viewing), I was able to 'get' the concepts easily enough.

And it all worked out pretty well. The adventure was well-designed - plenty of mysteries to tease out, plenty of clues for those mysteries, and a compelling premise. Good stuff.

The one thing I didn't really care for was the combat system, but that was perhaps inevitable - it's just not the focus of the game. I suspect that GUMSHOE may well be best handled if the characters just don't go into combat often: most shows in the genre tend to lead to a climax where the bad guy is unmasked and thus 'trapped' - they end up revealing their motive/underlying pain/general nastiness, and then they get led away by the relevant authorities. (But, on the other hand, that's much less true of the pilot episode, which invariably has a gunfight at the end, so that was appropriate here, too.)

I don't have much more to say, really. I would definitely be happy to play GUMSHOE again, but I fear it's a game that virtually necessitates some serious preparation work from the GM. I also suspect that a lot of the underlying principles can be adapted very easily to other games - indeed, the "spend a point..." concept is much like Numenera's concept of 'effort', and most of the rest is stylistic rather than mechanical anyway.

Anyway, good game.