As happens with Call of Cthulhu scenarios, the characters often need to do a lot of research to resolve the scenario. This research usually involves books, but increasingly that just doesn't make sense in a modern world where Google indexes half the known universe of everything there is to know about everything. Throw in a super-secret database that contains the other half of that knowledge and characters have little excuse to spend days sitting around reading.

Which is fine with me, because we're running an action horror game and the agents don't have any time to sit around while the world teeters on the brink. There's nothing quite like slowing down an action movie by having a montage of characters sitting around goofing off in a library (flash images of The Breakfast Club, only with guns).

The problem is that the output of that research, the actual knowledge, is a lot to absorb. PCs typically roll multiple times to learn snippets of the material. So you have to have a certain skill to come up with the information, then you have to roll a certain number to retrieve that particular tidbit of information. And there are arguably a dozen ways to find out any one piece of information. For example, if I want to learn more about Unclean Shamblers. I could:

• Talk to my crazy uncle, who may know such things because, well, he's crazy and disappeared for a year in that expedition…
• Ask my local Miksatonic University professors if they've ever heard of them.
• Or failing that, make a grant to the same professors so they're more inclined to help.
• Using my wicked Google-fu, I could search for Unclean Shamblers and find them on an obscure web site.
• I could thumb through musty old tomes in a library.

Requiring a skill to find out an important piece of information is something of a zero-sum game. If the characters need to have a particular skill to discover a critical clue that's key to succeeding in the scenario, it doesn't matter what skills I decided the character needs to discover it -- it only matters that one of the PCs has the skill. This is the difference between a published scenario suitable for any group, and a GM customizing the scenario for his group.

I admit I'm lazy. I don't always check to see what everybody's skills are and sometimes have to fudge it. "Oh, you don't have Research? Well you have a contact that can dig it up for you…"

The only thing that matters is that the PCs have the skill so they can be challenged, in the same way that the combat-types have the gun skills and toughness to survive a fight. For example, Guppy and Archive are both research types that aren't very well-suited to combat. In Archive's case, his specialty is research of musty old web sites (or even just tomes). In Guppy's case, it's technology: hacking computers, using search engines, and otherwise bending the Internet to his will to find out what he needs.

Even though both characters have the appropriate skills to research an esoteric topic, sometimes they just roll poorly. And then I'm facing another dilemma: how much do I tell them? If they roll high, do I throw out all the information at once? If they roll low and get one of the easy pieces of nigh-useful information ("Unclean Shamblers eat people? So THAT'S why chewed off one of my fingers!"), do I just leave it at that?

Sometimes the lack of information isn't a big deal. If there's more than one way to succeed in the scenario, failing a roll isn't a problem. On the other hand, this is how the research characters contribute. A combat-type gets to inflict harm and gradually get harm inflicted upon him until he goes down. For a researcher, it all comes down to that one roll. And if he has a bad day, said researcher can become awfully useless fast.

Trail of Cthulhu deals with this issue by simply having certain information, the kind that's critical to the investigation, automatically gained by the character with the right skill. Since a group of characters are designed to complement each other, someone always has the right skill. There are no rolls involved. The key to investigation, says Trail of Cthulhu, is figuring out what the clues mean, not finding the clues.

Makes sense to me! So off I went, pitching the idea that certain ranks in a skill would automatically mean the players succeed in finding the clues. No more rolling. No more failing to find critical information. And no more fudging from me. Everybody wins!

"That's a terrible idea," said George. "I like rolling higher than everybody else."

I overlooked one small point: the research players aren't just competing against the challenges in the game – they're COMPETING AGAINST EACH OTHER. The players enjoyed the fact that they had better Research skills than the other guy and liked the notion that their character's expertise would be missed if he wasn't present. They liked rolling dice, especially if multiple characters were rolling. Given that I give out more clues the higher they roll, there's a form of reward for the high rollers, in the same way the combat monsters deal more damage with high rolls.

So we're sticking with our plain old, sometimes fudged, research rolls for now.

Lesson Learned: Rules for making research smoother can do a disservice to players that like to compete, even with skill checks.

Resources

• About Me: http://michael.tresca.net
• Ghost Hunting: http://michael.tresca.net/icecc
• Slasher Hunting: http://michael.tresca.net/pru
• Zombie Hunting: http://michael.tresca.net/ncrpc