15.4 Deduction

Deduction is a vague skill that can serve multiple purposes, which can make it one of the hardest skills to resolve as a GM. Some players specifically dislike solving in-game puzzles, and they want to use Deduction to allow their character to be skilled in that area even if they don’t like doing that themselves. It’s similar to players who want to play socially skilled characters despite not enjoying in-character roleplaying, or not having superhuman social skills in real life. That’s totally fine! If you want this sort of player to have fun, you probably shouldn’t be using puzzle-heavy games anyway. When puzzles do arise, allowing a sufficiently high Deduction check to basically solve the puzzle on its own will only increase that player’s overall fun.

On the other hand, some players really like puzzle-solving, and they want to use the Deduction skill to give their characters more opportunities to do that. For those players, you should generally use their Deduction checks to give them additional clues and allow them to identify evidence that is relevant and discard red herrings. However, you should let them draw the final conclusions on their own.

Of course, you won’t always be able to draw those easy divisions. Some games will have multiple different player types in it, where some players like puzzles and other players don’t. You also might not know your players well enough to understand their preferred play styles at first. One reliable approach is to say that a successful Deduction check will solve a problem on its own eventually, but the players can try to figure it out first if they want. In this context, “eventually” can refer either to in-game time or real-life time.

For example, you might give players a ten-minute time limit in real life to solve a puzzle room on their own. If they don’t solve it in that time, a successful Deduction check either provides a key hint to get the players unstuck, or simply solves the puzzle completely, depending on whether the players seem to want to spend more time on the puzzle.

As another example, you can let a character spend an in-game week making a Deduction check to identify the murderer, assuming the party has access to the crime scene and suspects to interrogate. The party can accelerate that time frame and lower the difficulty value of the Deduction check by making specific investigations on their own to eliminate suspects or gather additional evidence. However, if they don’t enjoy that process, it’s fine if they just wait a week and roll a die to decide.