I've got an Investigator in the party I'm running and I'm want to do my best to make sure they get benefit out of their abilities, with the Red Herring feat sticking out to me the most currently(they're only level 2 so far).
I understand the baseline part of it telling you when something like a random splotch of dirt I described slightly too well is inconsequential, but does it help you avoid being misled? Such as someone giving you a false clue to throw you off, where you might not know that they're specifically trying to mislead you, but would you know if the clue they're trying to get you to follow is a red herring?
I'd personally let the player tell me what they think of their Lead. Because as a GM, you have information the players don't have, you nearly always find a meaning to anything. But the player may find that your meaning is meaningless to them.
So, if they find tracks, just let them tell you where they think it leads. And if they are far away from the actual meaning of the tracks, you can just tell them they won't lead there, allowing them to choose to use Red Herring or not.
That way, you'll avoid cases where what you think is consequential is inconsequential to them.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'd personally let the player tell me what they think of their Lead. Because as a GM, you have information the players don't have, you nearly always find a meaning to anything. But the player may find that your meaning is meaningless to them.
So, if they find tracks, just let them tell you where they think it leads. And if they are far away from the actual meaning of the tracks, you can just tell them they won't lead there, allowing them to choose to use Red Herring or not.
That way, you'll avoid cases where what you think is consequential is inconsequential to them.
There isn't really a "choose to use" in Red Herring though.
You have a keen sense for avoiding spurious lines of inquiry. When you Pursue a Lead, the GM tells you if the lead you chose is inconsequential. For example, if you found a splatter of gray mud on the wall, thought it was suspicious, and Pursued it as a Lead, the GM would tell you if there was no greater mystery related to it. When the GM tells you a lead is inconsequential, you can decline to Pursue the Lead, keeping any leads you were already pursuing. You still can't use Pursue a Lead again for 10 minutes, as normal.
The GM just informs you that such and such lead is or is not inconsequential. So by default, Red Herring assumes that whatever the GM sees as inconsequential is true.
This is good for the Investigator because, by default, you can only track two investigations at a time. If you had two topics being investigated, and found some juicy clue not directly tied to either of those, you would have to drop one to pursue the new lead. With Red Herring, the GM must tell you up front whether or not that lead is a good lead, saving time.
Imagine you as an investigator are investigating a bunch of disappearances in a town. You already have an open investigation into the widower who lives alone at the edge of town, and the gravedigger who has been making shady deals with the townsfolk. Your party finds the location of one of the disappearances. You note that there are animal tracks leading into and out of the area that look more fresh than the act itself, but in reality this is just a bit of detail the GM included to set the scene a bit better, and nothing more.
Without Red Herring, you would have to Pursue a Lead, drop one of your active investigations and pursue those tracks as their own investigation, probably wasting a bunch of time.
With Red Herring, the GM just tells you that those tracks are inconsequential to what you are trying to investigate. You wasted your Pursue a Lead for the next 10 minutes, but saved maybe hours of fruitless investigation into nothing.
The only real input that the Player has where Red Herring is concerned is telling the GM their suspicions about the clue. And it is possible that the clue IS important in some way but is technically inconsequential to what the Investigator is currently trying to do.
Agree with the above. Red Herring exists as a way for the GM to tell a player they're wasting their time with something that's not meant to be important and nudge them back on track.
Honestly a little bit gross it's a feat at all.
The only real input that the Player has where Red Herring is concerned is telling the GM their suspicions about the clue. And it is possible that the clue IS important in some way but is technically inconsequential to what the Investigator is currently trying to do.
Your animal tracks example is not a very good one because in general you'll know it's inconsequential even without Red Herring. I've rarely seen GMs adding misleading details, so it's certainly a detail added for ambiance and as such there are certainly tons of animal tracks because the woods around are bursting with life. As such, the Investigator can quickly determine how consequential the tracks are.
Let's take a more complex one: The Investigator finds a clue about the second part of the adventure, a forewarning. Is it consequential or not? Right now, it's inconsequential as the Investigator is following another investigation. But it will become consequential soon.
Stating that it's inconsequential can be misleading, as the player may think that it's really inconsequential and not just momentarily inconsequential.
Stating that it's consequential can also be misleading, as the Investigator may use one Lead on something that won't come up before long.
The issue being that the Investigator with Red Herring may end up in a worse situation than the one without Red Herring who will always consider that it can be either consequential or inconsequential.
So I think it's better to tell the player that it seems consequential, but not to the current investigation. So they can choose what to do with the Lead and won't be mad at you because their definition of consequential is not 100% in line with yours.
I agree that it's not exactly what the feat says but I think it's hard to really determine what the player considers as consequential or not.
In fact, the more I think about this feat and the more I realize that the definition of inconsequential is hard to give. It varies a lot. For example, if the tracks the PCs find are those of the pack of wolves they'll meet if they ever get lost in the woods. Depending on the result of their Survival check, these wolves can be the next fight or you may never meet them at all. How to assess if something is consequential without reading the future?
In my opinion SB, you are overthinking this whole issue. What is or is not consequential to any given situation is obviously up to personal opinion. You, or the GM, really only have one option: Make your best judgment in the moment and roll with it. We literally have no guidance beyond that.
Saying that, I also believe that the only person whose opinion really matters in regard to Red Herring , when it is applied, is the GM. They are the only one with all of the information in front of them. The player obviously doesn't know the significance of a given clue, else they wouldn't even bother pursuing said clue.
And given that the GM designed, or has read in the case of an AP, the adventure they are also the only person who can even say whether something is or is not really of consequence to the rest of the story right?
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
This is JUST a feeling right, but based on my limited PFS play I have a feeling that this feat would be useless with organized play because every session I've played really only EVER includes things that are relevant to the actual story due to the fact they have to be focused to keep the game session able to be run within a single session.
In other words, I suspect it would never trigger because of the distinct lack of content (seemingly by design) that is intended to send them down a dead-end or false lead.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
This is JUST a feeling right, but based on my limited PFS play I have a feeling that this feat would be useless with organized play because every session I've played really only EVER includes things that are relevant to the actual story due to the fact they have to be focused to keep the game session able to be run within a single session.
Most of the Investigator feats that mess with narrative are marked Restricted or have PFS specific notes for this reason. Red Herring probably isn't that way because it shouldn't really give you all that much information to be honest.
It helps an Investigator by cutting out unimportant stuff that a player may latch onto and think is super important. We've all been there right? Where you think this shiny golden statue in a ruin is important or something, so you spend 10 irl minutes trying to figure out what is so special about it just to have the GM inform you that it doesn't matter in the slightest.
Remember that Red Herring ONLY applies to things that an Investigator chooses to try to Pursue a Lead on. So in my earlier foot prints example, the Investigator latches onto the idea that animals have been in the area. They try to Pursue that as a lead, probably to get the bonus on a Nature check to determine what kind of prints those are. The GM then informs them that the animal tracks are inconsequential to the disappearance. The Investigator (character, not player) now knows that he can ignore those tracks in relation to the disappearances. That doesn't mean that there isn't a wild animal nearby, or that those tracks don't exist anymore. It just means that for his purposes, he can ignore those tracks.
Edit: If I wasn't clear enough, what this means is that 90% of the time, the only things Red Herring will apply to are things that the player Thinks may be important but the GM knows is not. Narrows the possibilities considerably.