RPG Errata: Brindlewood Bay, and Embracing Imperfection

Brindlewood Bay is a game that, to quote the website, “…combines Murder, She Wrote with H.P. Lovecraft.” You play the roles of a elderly women book-club, who regularly meet to discuss their favorite murder-mystery series of books. As de-facto mystery experts, the gang is constantly drawn into (or push their noses into) the murders that strike their quiet little New England town.

The H.P. Lovecraft part comes in with the Dark Conspiracy; a secret and occult plot that is behind every murder, and threatens to destroy the community if the players don’t thwart it. Along with all the clues you collect for each mystery, you sometimes find a “dark clue” — a sigil, a dagger, a note scrawled in an unfamiliar language — that brings the mysterious and evil plot more into focus.

The game is low prep. You, as a GM, are not supposed to know “whodunnit” for any individual case. Instead, the clues are randomly generated (or picked from a list at the moment of discovery) and it is up to the players to decide how these clues are relevant.

Let me say that again, because it’s significant: this is a mystery game, that includes a dark conspiracy that winds its tendrils through the entire campaign…and there’s no prep for any of it. No idea who killed who, who is involved in the conspiracy, who knows how much and is willing to talk about it…nothing.

Way, way¹ back, I wrote about the game Cobwebs, specifically about how it handles mysteries when there is no GM. I only partially regret using Cobwebs for this example, as the means it uses to create and resolve the mystery is quite interesting in its own right, and I could have easily used it for this post. Brindlewood Bay uses a very simple method: you find clues by going to places where clues might be, and succeeding at clue-finding rolls. The GM tells you what clue you find, and it’s up to you to figure out how those clues connect, and which suspect they point to.

Once you have enough clues and a solid theory on whodunnit, you roll the dice. If you make the roll, you’re correct, your theory is how it went down. If you fail the roll, that theory is incorrect and you have to come up with a different theory.

The first time I played Brindlewood Bay, there were four of us, plus the GM. Our group became a kind of “Golden Girls” gang, with the smart one, the sassy one, the sexed one, and the hippy/spirit-talker. It worked out quite well, and our first theory happened to be the correct one, thanks to the dice.

There was tension in that final roll. Not because the stakes were particularly high, but they were clear. If the roll went poorly, we were wrong; we’d have to come up with a completely different theory of the case, and at the time I couldn’t see how the clues could be connected in any other way. I’m sure we would have come up with a good answer together, but all the same, our first theory was clearly “the best” theory. It fit together well, was narratively fulfilling, and didn’t have any weird loose threads about how, who, when, or why.

But sometimes the dice don’t go your way. While you can often tip the scales quite a bit, once you allow dice into your game, they’ll do what they want, your plans be damned. I’ve talked quote a bit about how RPGs are a sub-par way to craft a story because they don’t always allow for editing, pre-planning, or any of the usual tools writers use to create a solid narrative. Add onto all that the fact that your first idea is likely the one that makes the most obvious sense, and a series of bad die rolls could turn a relatively straightforward and satisfying answer into a cavalcade of farce.

Let me be clear, Brindlewood Bay is fun, well designed, and worth your time. I am in no way saying that its method of mystery-solving is bad. What I am saying is I am an anxious perfectionist.

I’ve had a lot of trouble over the years handling failure. I don’t like making mistakes, and I make a lot of them. Often-times, I catch my mistakes only after re-checking my work for the fifth or sixth time. I had something like twenty different drafts of the first Edmund Moulde book before I published it, and even then I was furiously re-reading each chapter, desperately hunting for the mistakes and imperfections I knew were there.

This website has been a mixed blessing. I’ve found something of a comfortable middle-ground where I publish my work without expectation of it being read. It’s a kind of pretend where I write what I would write if I had readers, and I publish work that is polished and worthy of pride.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s helped. It’s given me a bit of “faking it ’til I make it” and I am more comfortable with the idea of publishing unfinished, unpolished, or imperfect work. At the same time, I still feel the twinge of preemptive shame every time I post. I cringe at the idea of people cringing when they read my humble efforts.

I have a fear of imperfection.

I was told, ever since I was young, that I was so smart, so creative, so mature, I was put in the gifted classes, got A’s without trying to hard…In the end, I was Jude Law’s character in Gattaca; “I was not made for second place.”

It’s been a hard neurosis to fight, especially for someone who was bullied for ’not being normal.’ The idea that the less narratively sound murderer might be the right answer is a struggle for me to appreciate.

Of course, I also get stuck on ideas. If we had rolled poorly and needed a different answer, we might have come up with a better one. Just because I didn’t think of it doesn’t mean it’s not a good answer, after all.

All of this is a long introduction to how I feel about the next thing I’m going to be posting, but that’s a post for next time.