Detective Fiction Part 2

Okay since I outlined the difference between American hardboiled detective fiction and classic whodunnit in the previous post, I suppose I should say how to use this knowledge in an actual rpg.

So to reiterate without rambling:

1) for the classic detective, the status quo is good and is worth restoring, which happens by solving the mystery; and
2) for the hardboiled detective, the status quo is oppressive and must be survived in order to solve the mystery (and protect whomever needs it).

So the difference doesn’t really lie with the players’ characters, it lies with the setting, and with whichever person or persons that has the responsibility of portraying it (usually the person with the Game Master role).

In both types of stories you have protagonists that stick their nose into things they might be better off leaving alone. Miss Marple and Marlowe both do this. So all you really need to encourage that is tying xp to investigating mysteries. Just because the cops are always happy to see Miss Marple in her novels doesn’t mean you can’t play an rpg where the cops try to put the frame on an old woman, who has to find the real killer to prove her innocence, yeah? Then again, if Philip Marlowe didn’t have any police corruption to complain about, he wouldn’t be the same character, would he? Not really. The environment he has to live in is what makes him the cynical detective he is.

So anyway, that means if you are going to GM a hardboiled detective setting, you portray the cops as corrupt and in the pocket of the rich who are evil. Nobody wants the detective protagonist(s) around, except the ones who want to use them. The hardboiled detective solves the mysteries that the police don’t want to solve because they don’t want to do the work and because powerful people don’t want the truth to come out. The harboiled protagonist has to fight against all that to get anywhere.

And if you want to GM a classic whodunnit, you portray cops as either incompetent or merely no match for the clever villain, who is some kind of evil anomaly (even if they murder for inheritance). The classic detective solves the mysteries no one else is able to solve.

And everyone is grateful when they do solve it. For the hardboiled private eye, maybe their client is satisfied and maybe they aren’t hated by the cops. Maybe.

So there you go: build some tools to do those things and voila you’ve got yourself a game that emulates the genre.