First there were the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mystery novels (and the entire mystery genre), where you could try to figure out whodunnit yourself. Physically-minded folks would make scavenger hunts with pages of clues to decipher. Then came muder mysteries and live action roleplaying (LARP), mixing both.

For the past two years, Escape Rooms, the 'larp where you are yourself', have been on the rise. These are a brilliant medium for encouraging team game-like solving in physical space. Typical challenges includes locked wooden boxes to open, doors that require a combination to unlock, containers with mystery latches requiring magnets/air/weights to trigger. My friends and I joked about showing up at an escape room with crowbars, sledgehammers, and bolt cutters.

Recently I picked up the next variation, a card-and-app based game called 'Unlock!' ($10-15 per, well worth it), where you solve a virtual escape room as a team, in the comfort of your house. What makes all of these work is not just puzzles but— going back to the whodunnit genre as an inception— the story.

The reason not to use brute force are twofold. First, it breaks the room and is expensive for the operators. Second, much like how you can't actually kickbox 'monsters' at a Haunted House, there's a code of conduct stating you have to follow the rules, just like not cheating in a game or not flipping to the last page of a mystery.

That's not a problem, but for storytellers, there are hooks to make even that outside social contract ("don't break the game") be part of the internal storyline ("follow the rules"). Horror movies do this by having an observing villain who will terminate the sequence if the players 'cheat' or go off-script. Escape rooms rely on 'gentleman's agreement' to play by the rules.

Are there story ways to encourage this sort of staying within the box? One escape room premise has you retracing the criminal— but since you're a hired team, you can't damage anything while doing it. A quick proof that, yes, keeping to the rules can be in in-game story item as well as a required out-of-game mechanic.

Other media has toyed with this, beyond escape rooms and movies. There's a brilliant bit in the DC comic book Impulse #?, where, to give it short shift, the Riddler begins reading one of his elaborate clues to the speedster, Impulse. Impulse, with a short attention span, just runs off. By the end of the clue reading, he reports "while you were talking, I just checked every building in the town and found the bombs."

Brute force can win the day. The twist comes when, in the process of debating with Riddler, neither Riddler nor Impulse are aware the clocks are still ticking and the fuses (being off-market) run fast. That's a character-drive reason to keep tension.

In escape rooms, your character is you. Therefore, the role of story is not just to engage the player, but to set the stage so you (as player and character) follow the rules because they fit the story.

Looking at past and current examples, then, the solution to immersing players is less the role of putting them in an action game, and instead putting them in a forensic or investigative game, where simple escape or survival is less important than the act of tracing the breadcrumbs to find the established path. In short, the personality of the off-camera trap-maker is the guide to switching escape room design from survival horror to puzzle solving, in a reasonable way.

Story. It's needed.

Until next month,
Sandy (sandy@rpg.net, freelance)