"The Players Are Stumped" - an excerpt from the upcoming Lurking Fear GM's Guide
The following is an except from The Lurking Fear GM's Guide, an upcoming companion to my game The Lurking Fear. The final text may change before the guide is published, but I think it's decent advice in its current form:
One of the biggest challenges with investigative horror is making sure that the players never “lose the thread”. If they’ve signed up to play investigative horror, then they probably want to have their investigative abilities challenged on some level – but if they become stumped by a mystery and don’t see a way to proceed, that creates frustration. This gets even worse if clues rely on succeeding at a skill check – there’s never a guarantee that any skill check will succeed. Worst of all is if critical information requires more time to pass before it arrives or is discovered, but engaged players are convinced there’s more they need to find, so they keep trying harder to figure out what they’re missing even though they’ve already found out everything they can. You know how to deal with that last one by now; skip ahead quickly, signpost, or simply don’t include that situation in your adventure.
A classic way to avoid stumped players is the Three Clues method. In every scene, place at least three completely separate clues that each lead to another scene. It doesn’t matter if they all lead to the same scene or to different ones. As GMs have found out from experience, as long as there are three separate clues in a scene, at least one player will eventually find one of them and figure out where it points to. Sometimes a very perceptive group will find themselves up to their elbows in clues as they catch everything in every scene. You can fix this on the fly by eliminating any clues you haven’t mentioned yet in a scene after someone has figured out where the first one leads to. The Three Clues method is almost foolproof, but it can take a lot of prep time to figure out three plausible clues for each scene, and if you run a lot of investigative games for the same players, they may start to catch on to the pattern eventually.
Another method to avoid stumped players is to establish minimum information for each scene. Plan out the bare minimum that every group needs to know to get from one scene to the next, and give it to them without any cost or action required. Further investigation, dice rolls, and other Cost can be used to get more useful information or other resources. In a game with lots of minimum information, the key choices facing the players should be how they interpret and act on the clues they find, not how they find the clues.
Failing forwards is one of the most elegant ways to avoid stumped players. Design your adventure so that the threats will become worse and more dangerous whether or not the players succeed at investigating them. Investigation and finding clues will yield ways for the players to protect themselves, escape, or solve their problems, but are not required to find the next scene.
Success at a cost is a hybrid of minimum information and failing forwards. If players succeed with a roll or take the right actions to get a clue, give them the clue without any other cost. If the players fail the roll or do not take actions to get the clue, give it to them anyway, but with an additional cost. For example, they are able to find the dropped murder weapon when they accidentally cut themselves on it, taking damage, or an NPC tells them she has the information they need, but will only give it to them in exchange for a large payment. Success at a cost can be easy to improvise in the moment, even if you didn’t plan for it.
All of these methods can be helped by a generous GM. If you’ve set expectations, then you know how difficult your players expect the investigation to be, and should always be adjusting to make sure it stays that difficult. It’s rare but possible to find a group that really want to solve things through the pure mental ability of players. Most want some level of difficulty, but are happiest when the plot keeps advancing even if they don’t have any new insights after a certain amount of time. For that kind of group, feel out how long their patience for fruitless investigation lasts (I find 10-15 minutes is common), and then be generous with information once they hit that limit. When you’re in generous mode, if players ask for a way to spend resources or make a roll to get additional information, try to find a way to justify saying yes. If they’re really stumped, ask them to roll appropriate skills to see what kind of ideas their characters might have, based on the experience and knowledge that the PCs have but the players do not. Always make sure there’s at least a little Cost built into getting the information, so it doesn’t feel like an act of pity.