When an RPG game focuses on combat, it’s easy to know when you’ve won a scene: you’ve beaten the bad guys and are perhaps now busily looting the room. In investigative games, you’re accumulating information rather than treasure or notches on your battle-axe. While developing GUMSHOE, we looked for a way to indicate to players that they’d successfully gleaned the necessary information from a scene. A solution was particularly important for interview interrogation sequences. In procedural shows like Law & Order, the screenwriters always have a way for the witnesses to excuse themselves as soon as they’ve imparted the salient facts. It is sometimes possible to have NPCs bail, but it’s taxing to come up with these reasons on the fly. For this reason, I suggested that GMs indicate the end of scene by holding up a card marked SCENE.

In recent playtesting we’ve found a slight variation that makes a world of difference. Now I’ve taken to loading an audio player on the laptop, to play a brief musical cue to indicate the end of a scene. For Mutant City Blues, we used the hallmark cha-chunk musical sting from Law & Order. Now that we’re on to Trail Of Cthulhu, I’m using a snipped of Franz Waxman’s seminal score for Bride Of Frankenstein: the ominous three-note Frankenstein’s monster motif. Somehow this just goes down better, seeming natural where the card is disruptive. This no doubt relates to the different perceptual levels from which we absorb visual information and music.

I’ve also taken a somewhat longer snippet from the Waxman score to serve as the credit sequence music for the current series. This gets us in the mood for thirties horror, and helps to mark a break from the preliminary chat phase of the evening.

Tags: gaming hut

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