Thread by @rdonoghue

Related to the other tweet, I am currently looking very hard at Gumshoe and going "Ok, what if it's ALL investigative skills and nothing else?".

It introduces challenges, yes, but if you're already deep down the diceless rabbithole, very few of them are novel.

To get very nerdy - the thing that *I* find necessary to make Gumshoe fun is to have a robust *cycle* of currency. That is, points are spent, but they are also redeemed, and that back and forth is dynamic. Without it, the engine chokes (again, for me, not in a universal sense).

So, given that, the refund rules are important. But they reveal a weird split - If you think ONLY in terms of bonuses, an investigative spend can get you +3, and a non-investigative spend gets you +1. This *seems* like its offset by non-investigative pools being bigger. But!

In practice, they're roughly 3x as big as the investigative pools. Close enough that if you did that mapping, it would not change much.
At first glance, that just seems like extra complication - a 3x(+3) pool is very nearly identical to a 9x(+1) pool, so it's just color.

Technically the 9 pool supports more granular spends, but since Margin of Success steps are ALSO 3, most spends will be in increments of 3 anyway, unless there's no choice. So, I'm comfortable calling them equivalent.

But where this gets weird is the rebate engine. The rebate points are universal, so the payoff on rebating investigative skills is 3x as good as rebating non-investigative skills.

This is something that is easy to intuit (esp because non-investigative spends can be used for other things too) which becomes more apparent as you look at the math.

Even more, since one of the ways you can earn rebate points is to drop a mook, which mechanically requires you to roll 3 better (because MoS), investigative spends can be nearly free, depending on timing.

Now, to be clear, this is not a bad thing. I view it as an intentional incentivization of leaning into the investigative skills, which are the heart and soul of Gumshoe. As with many rules around aspects, the "Exploit" actually pushes play in the intended direction.

But, to me, it raises the question of why the non-investigative skills are there at all. And the answer is a practical one - they're the things games *expect* to be rolling for - fights and stealth and athletics and such.

For Gumshoe to handle them similarly to investigative abilities would be too "weird" for a lot of tabletop gamers. I do not say that as a condemnation of either Gumshoe or gamers - for a lot of people, this is just not their bag.

It is, however, my bag.

Curiously, the thing that this *does* break in Serpentine is something I don't want to lose. A lot of character details on the sheet are, effectively, 1 point non-investigative pools which can be tapped for very flexible +1 advantages.

Though the solution is to make these invocations a bit MORE potent, so their at parity with investigative spends. And it's a solution I'm very comfortable with.

Something that is a bit hilarious about this (to me) is that all-investigation Gumshoe starts having a really neat overlapping venn diagram with all-aspects Fate.

Two other benefits of going all investigative (for me):
* Fewer points/tokens to track
* "Chunkier" spends remove the stress of false precision. It is really easy to stress out over a 1 point spend difference when the difference is not really in alignment to the emotional cost

Now, to be clear, this is ALL ABOUT my biases. Gumshoe contains a robust resource tracking minigame, and that is going to be a super fun minigame for many folks. I'm less enaged by it than I am by other parts, so this just me leaning into what I dig.