Goal

Test how well improv mystery works, find problems, and suggest changes to scene structure and play to solve these problems

Overview

This long-form experiment is similar to an improvised murder mystery game or episode of Scooby Doo.

Players

Minimum characters needed are a hero, a few suspects, and maybe a victim.

Play

The players develop their stories and disagreements, each offering hints that they're the culprit. At the end, the hero fingers the most likely villian.

Victim

Active passenger. The victim's job is to make the suspects' stories plausible, to support each suspect's motive, and to die horribly and mysteriously. Unless the story is in the Scooby genre in which case the victim is either kidnapped or the mastermind.

Hero

The hero may be the Scooby Gang in which case there's probably no victim (or the victim has been kidnapped.) In a murder mystery, there's a body and usually only one hero, a cop. The hero is above suspicion and can narrate at the end. The hero may be part of the investigation (Scooby) or may only show up in the middle after the crime has been committed, continuing to the end to finger the culprit. The hero's job is to provide opportunities for the suspects to reveal information, to identify the villian, challenge him and make sure his story is strong and plausible, and validate or replace him. This role is crucial and requires a confident player with a good judge of story.

Suspects

People who have the opportunity and motive to commit the crime. A suspect's relationship should be strongest with the victim, secondarily with each other. Each suspect should come up with a concept or plan (like objective), offer hints as to why they're the culprit, maybe two or three offers at most. Each suspect does this, eventually the scene will be littered with offers, and we'll reach the climax where the hero unmaskes the villian.

Unmasking the Villian

Here we enter the improv committment showdown where the villian is put on the spot to drive and justify. Nobody knows which suspect is the villian at the beginning of the story. The villian must play this with high confidence to convince the hero (and the rest of the players) that he's really the culprit. The other players must be confident and secure enough to justify their realities to support the villian's story. The goal is for the villian to convince the other players that his is the dominant reality. That's not always possible, so it's the hero's job to destroy the would-be villian's credibility and to put the next-most-convincing villian on the spot.

This is tricky because if, as a suspect, you're not villian #1, you may justify your actions as innocent, invalidating yourself as villian #2. There are two ways out of that. First, the other players should be listening to villian #1's story and should ask questions without neutralizing their own offers, at least until there's an unspoken consensus that villian #1's justification is strong enough to resolve the story. Second, there should be at least one character who holds back as part of story formula (preferably the one whose offers and hints were very strong), so after accepting villian #1, the rest of the players ask "But what about herring #2's actions?" This is similar to a Scooby Doo episode where the most promising shifty character turns out to be an undercover cop.

Characteristics of Strong Mystery Players

I'm guessing here.

Thoughts

I believe this would make a good lab show, especially combined with a Commedia structure.

Links, Important and Otherwise