Crafting Good a Mystery

>>54873710
Detailed questions too long for OP:

>How do I ensure they're invested?
I'm big on always letting the pcs fuck off and do something else if they want.
Threatening NPC's doesn't always work.
The only way I can thing of is to pull the tired bit of accusing them for a crime that they must prove themselves innocent of or compelling them with a geas, which raises more questions like:
>"Why aren't the ones in charge (or forcing the PCs to investigate) doing the investigating?"


>How do I make the mystery good, interesting, challenging, but not too hard?
I might have to steal from a another source and file serial numbers off.
Which leads to...

>How do I run a mystery investigation using characters and setting not intended for it?
The setting is not-medieval fantasy, so let's say I'm running a fantasy game like D&D 2nd AD&D, or a low powered D&D 3.x game.
If I would be better off translating and transferring to another system for the mystery, which one?

>How do you run an investigation mystery in a setting with medium to high levels of magic?
Speak with dead is a definite factor and psychics of all kinds exist but wouldn't necessarily be a problem, I don't think.
But dealing with those kinds of powers is an interesting related question.

>What kind of mystery to run?
My instincts are either:
1. Convoluted murder mystery by a sneaky wizard covering their tracks with deception and subterfuge. (cheesy goodness)
2. Political assassination/attack with multiple victims with the motives and true target unknown. (My pick)
3. Reverse caper trying to catch a serial thief. (Easiest and least interesting, imo)

>How do keep them from guessing the answer immediately and what do you do if they do?

>How do keep them from never guessing the answer and what do you do if they do get stuck?

Thanks for reading and any help you can offer.

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Read a bit.
Stumbled upon Gumshoe.
Anybody familiar with it?
Do you think it would work for what I'm intending?

>>54874165
Gunshoe is both great and terrible. It does a goid job of teaching players to manage resources for role-playing benefit and not juat combat but it's almost too simple and turns players into having about 4 specific "keys" to just try in every lock until they find one that fits. It keeps the plot moving but if they are experienced roleplayers it is pretty constraining. It's like Call of Cthulhu with training wheels.

You can learn a bit about designing mysteries from the system though. Basically you work backward and create "links" between scenes by placing key clues to find and supplementary clues that point towards the key clue to help the players decide what to look into next.

Here's a mystery:
I just bumped my own thread without a single other poster.
My previous experience led me to believe that wouldn't work.
Have I been wrong about that this whole time?
Or is something else afoot?

>>54874240
>it's almost too simple
>turns players into having about 4 specific "keys" to just try in every lock until they find one that fits.
>If they are experienced roleplayers it is pretty constraining.
You pretty much hit all the things I was worried about when I saw it described.
Thank you though.

It seems to have been used to make decent games with mysteries.
But I think what I want is how to steal the other secrets they used to get good mysteries.
Maybe another system wouldn't help.

I've thought of just stealing the plot of some other mystery, but stories are just linear inspiration and I'm not sure what game mysteries I could lift without the players guessing.
I usually twist around formulas and tropes for fun affect, but there's very little true "mystery" involved.