Episode Details

How to Play Pocket Gumshoe

Pocket Gumshoe is a very short, genre-agnostic implementation of the Gumshoe investigation game system. You play a character in a mystery, which you must solve by finding clues. Clues that must be found in order to progress the mystery are called Core Clues, and you cannot miss them. If you spend time in a scene where there's a core clue, and you use an appropriate approach to looking for the clue, you will get the clue. No dice roll required. You do use a six-sided die for other types of actions and for combat.

In Pocket Gumshoe, you have three investigative approaches: Academic, Interpersonal, and Technical, and for each of these you can have a number of tags that help define how you use that approach. In this game, each player starts with one rank in each approach, and can add two more ranks (distributed as they see fit). I gave players three tags per rank in an approach-- Pocket Gumshoe leaves this and skill points up to the GM's discretion.

Here's an example of using an investigative approach. I'm playing Tom, an elderly wizard who knows a lot about medicinal plants and likes to paint. I've been hired by a nobleman to find a stolen family heirloom, a necklace. I'm in the kitchen, where there's an elderly cook and a maid, working. I could use an interpersonal approach, and maybe one of my tags is "elderly," so I get along pretty well with older folks. I chat up the cook and learn that the lord fired a footman last week. On my character sheet, I have one rank in Interpersonal, and I want to get a little more information about this footman, so I spend it to get some more dirt. The maid overhears us and shares the gossip that the footman was always flirting with the nobleman's son. From the GM's side of this, the fired footman is a suspect, and the core clue was that the footman was fired-- I want the players to go interview the footman in a future scene, so this sets them up for that. The gossip about the footman is an extra clue, and may even give them leverage when they talk to the footman. When they go talk to the footman, I can still use my interpersonal approach and tags, but I no longer have a point in Interpersonal to spend and get extra clues or benefits. I can still use the ability, but I don't have extra points to spend.  In a Gumshoe one-shot, your investigation approach points will not refresh, so use them wisely!

In addition to the investivative approaches, you have General Skills, and for this game, the players had 50 points to spend on the general skills. General skills are for actions that don't fall into clue-finding. They're things like athletics and driving, but also include your health points pool. Everyone starts with one point of health and stability. In Pocket Gumshoe, the GM can decide which skills to include or exclude. For our adventure, I excluded Shrink and Stability, as those are for mental health consequences and fit more into a horror investigation rather than fantasy action. I also added a Magic skill to give a general-purpose skill for Firebreathing Kittens who have magic abilities or knowledge. In this case, I also made a special rule that you cannot use a magical ability without spending a point, which we will talk about next.

When I want to do something that has a decent chance of failure and is not gathering a clue, I use one of the general skills and roll for it. For most skills, you do not need to have points in the skill to attempt to do it-- my custom Magic skill is an exception to that rule. Health and Stability skills are also not rolled-- they represent your physical and mental health points, and you lose them when you take damage.

When I roll in a test-- that's a static check to see if I succeed at a task, the GM usually tells me the difficulty, and I can spend some of my skill points to add to my roll. I roll one d6, and for each general skill point I spend, I add a point to the dice result. The skill points