Interesting article on using GUMSHOE in D&D.

Interesting discussion here on how to incorporate GUMSHOE’s investigative …sorry, but ‘paradigm’ really does seem to be the best word to use – into a D&D game.  Basically, the idea behind GUMSHOE is that you don’t need to roll dice to get a vital clue: you just have to have the relevant investigative skill. It’s explicitly designed to avoid a situation where the GM and PCs are left staring at each other helplessly because nobody made a critical skill roll, thus causing the adventure to freeze up until the GM finds some way to justify giving his players a relevant clue. It happens to everybody, so it’s nice to have a system that eliminates the problem.

The only quibble I have about porting the idea over to a game like D&D is this: one of the things that GUMSHOE also does is make sure that a party has at least one player who has all the investigative skills. This requires a certain amount of coordination between the PCs, not to mention everybody seeing everybody else’s character sheets. Some campaigns may not be so cool about that sort of thing.

Still, the idea of porting into your game a system that’s designed explicitly to let you run investigative scenarios is definitely something to consider…