A Bad Murder Mystery, as told by dogs

[warmskies]

THE CAST

James:
✦ Mastiff, the victim's bff [Canon A]
✦ Malinois, retainer to one of the victim's boyfriends [Canon B]

Friend:
✦ Stray Cat, Mastiff's boyfriend and victim's friend [Canon C]

Dude (dating Binch) :
✦ Corgi [Canon D]
✦ Wolf, murderer [Canon D]
✦ Poodle [Canon E]

Binch (dating Dude) :
✦ Coyote, Wolf's homunculus and boyfriend [Canon D]
✦ Huskie, Wolf's on-again-off-again and former 2nd, and also the victim's Vegas husband [Canon D]

....You can perhaps see a glimmer of the issues already

The Set Up

In theory, the idea is simple. Wolf, canonically a villain, decides to murder Victim when she drunkenly invites him over to bang. I forget the exact reasoning for his decision, but I will uncharitably assume the reason was pretentious. He was a conniving villain sort from a JRPG, so it would fit the bill. "Testing the bonds of people" or whatever.

However, the mod (who also played the victim) didn't run this as you would a full murder game. Instead, there were various areas where you could have your character investigate. Your character could only investigate each area once. Each investigation's success was decided on a dice roll.

As an example, Mastiff investigated the general town area, but, because he rolled below a 10, he didn't find anything. He then investigated the victim's home, and rolled higher, so he got to find some hairs. He THEN investigated back in the main hub area and got the Mod NPC character to give him some valuable information with a fairly high roll (like a 17 or something).

Now, on a OOC level, I was initially quite excited for this plot. I always wanted to be in a murder game at least once, but my prior attempts have always lead to nothing for one reason or another. This wasn't a murder game, but I figured it would scratch the itch and still be fun.

Plus, it hit a lot of things IC that I thought would be fun to get into! Mastiff really cared for Victim, so he had a really personal stake in solving her murder - it didn't matter that this was a game with revive mechanics, she still experienced the trauma of death and, due to various reasons, couldn't remember who had done it - something that was giving her trauma.

Additionally, he ALREADY had negative CR with Wolf for separate reasons. Not only had Corgi told him Wolf's role in his canon (although Mastiff had to admit that he couldn't be sure how biased or not that retelling was), but Mastiff didn't like the way that Wolf had manhandled and generally been weird about Stray Cat.

Honestly, the Mastiff-Cat-Wolf relationship triangle was pretty interesting on what it said about the characters and their relationships could have been an interesting tell to retell on its own...

But anyway. The murder mystery happened.

The Tale

Now, OOCly, Dude and the mod had always been pretty open about how this was a plot they wanted to run, and so all the players already kind of knew that Wolf had done it. The trick was having the characters find all the evidence to have them know ICly. Which meant a lot of investigation attempts.

I like to think we did fairly well on both the OOC-IC boundary, and doing a lot of investigation. I'll grant that my view of course will be biased on that front, but also me and my Friend did a lot of talking about how we were trying not to metagame Wolf's role in it all.

Now, after a good bit of investigations had been rolled, the person who Malinois had pledged himself to decided to scrounge up a sort of town meeting for people to pull all their information and evidence together. Something to make sure everyone knew all the facts that had been gathered, could talk them over, and hopefully they would find the murderer.

Now. Mastiff was pretty open about the evidence he had found, and would go on to make a murder game-esque sort of summary post (including evidence in bold font). As a social character with prior military leadership experience, he was taking a lead on this in a way.

...However, Malinois had also found a pretty important clue alongside his beloved, when they went to counsel victim (which had been rolled for).

I mentioned up in the cast role that Victim and Husky were married - but in that kind of "we were both drunk and have our own weird relationship things going on, so we got randomly married" way you'd hear from a Vegas horror story. Despite this, Victim has a really sensitive spot re:marriage and so, even though Husky IMMEDIATELY fucked off for, like months to live on Wolf's fuckboat in the middle of the ocean rather than talk with his new wife... Victim still held onto the ring from that marriage and wore it around her neck.

After her death, Malinois and his beloved realized that the ring was missing.

(Victim was in such a state that she didn't even realize.)

Now, Malinois is a pretty careful and reserved character. He wasn't inclined to showing his hand to just anyone, and so he kept this bit of evidence to himself to best figure out how to use it for full effect. The player to his beloved also didn't tell anyone of this evidence, and that player admitted to me that he wouldn't have acted if Malinois was so careful.

So for the communal meeting, Malinois kept his evidence close to his chest. The evidence that just him and his beloved had rolled.

...Keep this in mind for later.

In contrast, Mastiff had no such reservations, and so took the lead immediately in the morning. He had already talked to two other characters that had done investigation and were close to Victim, so he felt pretty confident in laying out evidence!

While there were various suspects (a NPC, Wrong Place Wrong Time characters, a guy with the worst social skills), Angeal pointed out that most of the evidence seemed to lead to Wolf:

✦ Victim's scent (picked up by hounds/a hound character) was strongest and most recent around her home in the area
✦ Only a few characters' hairs were there: two boyfriends, sex friend Wolf, and one of the investigators
✦ Victim is a pretty messy person, but her bedroom was freshly clean - a weird side effect of the way sex works in the sex game. This indicated to Mastiff that she'd likely had sex just before her murder
✦ Victim's body was in good condition upon being brought back for revival, save for bruising around her neck and chest

And while he's laying out these facts, he's informed by another character that Victim's body was actually discovered not in the town, but rather on a beach in an entirely separate area! Which isn't what the scent trail indicated at all... and to Mastiff, this hinted that the murderer is likely capable of teleportation or something similar. Technically, all three suspects were capable of that, although Mastiff only knew of Wolf's capabilities.

...And then Stray Cat spoke up with his evidence (gotten by a nat 20 investigation) : that he had gotten testimony from a pervy spirit who regularly set up shop outside Victim's residence. The spirit said that he had indeed seen three men about the day of Victim's murder. The first two came together, the physical descriptions of which matched Malinois's beloved plus the other only serious suspect. The other was the last visitor to be seen.... and matched the description, out of the suspects, of Wolf.

Seeming pretty simple so far, right? Lots of evidence is pointing in Wolf's way, through various characters' hard work!

In Which It Starts To Get Annoying

It starts out in the OOC chat, at first. Friend, who plays Stray Cat, is told by Dude that his Poodle character would speak against Stray Cat's evidence. You can't trust the testimony of some random spirit!

That it matched with all the other evidence was unimportant, apparently.

Friend really didn't want to start a big fight or anything, but it was confided to me that it felt just a wee difficult to tell where the IC-OOC line was in if it was really just Poodle who would argue against Stray Cat, or if Dude was dismissing Friend's nat 20 evidence. And you might feel this is a bad problem to have, when Dude is playing both Poodle AND Wolf.

It got worse then next day, when Binch opted to finally get involved.

Now, there'd already been a little bit of action on his part - Coyote had done a bit of shittalking on Corgi, who had vehemently accused this of being Wolf's fault and basically stirring up problems. However, the real problem was with Husky.

You remember - the guy who was technically married to the Victim, but immediately ditched her after marriage to go hang out on his ex's fuckboat?

Yeah, he, uh. He never showed up in any of the investigation rolls. He also never had any threads with Victim afterwards to check up on her after her death, and I would know, because I was pretty on top of reading all the threads to do with this event because of how invested I was.

Malinois, a man who only vaguely knew Victim as someone his beloved was dating, counseled and reassured Victim more than her actual husband did.

You know what Husky will show up for?

To defend his ex - a character he canonically betrayed and left because Wolf was going too off-the-rails - and basically derail the entire meeting.

Literally his one and only defense was: "It couldn't have been Wolf, because he was with me all night, and you can ask Coyote."

That's right. It couldn't have been Wolf, because his close boyfriends say so.

...Behind the scenes, and Binch/Dude's backs, some unimpressed glances are exchanged.

Still, it is an alibi of sorts! And thus it should be looked into and questioned, instead of just blandly accepted. So both Stray Cat and Mastiff ask questions about this. Stray Cat's is pretty simple, asking Husky if he's sure that they were with each other all night, and that there isn't a way that Wolf could have slipped away... which would have been easy considering his teleportation abilities. Mastiff asks if there's anyone else who can corroborate with this alibi.

Husky insists that, yes, he and Wolf were with each other all night (including during pissing), and there were definitely others that could corroborate it besides him and Coyote. He doesn't name who those other people are.

Instead, he starts questioning the evidence - like, how could you even tell that's WOLF'S hair! ("Because we have scent hounds," Mastiff says patiently.) He even outright says that no one has real evidence, everything is just "circumstantial". What Binch - I mean, what Husky would consider not circumstantial" may very well just have been an outright confession, which is frustrating in its own right.

And it hits its peak when Husky goes, "What will you even do with your evidence, what will you do when you have your culprit?"

Mastiff gives the obvious answer: "Well, we have people who are literally professionally judges. Wee have a jail which nerfs powers. It'll get figured out. Do you have a better idea, Husky?"

He doesn't have a better idea, but he does have a lot of indignant rage, apparently! This is apparently a daft idea, for reasons Husky never bothers to explain. Mastiff does his (read: my) best to be patient about the whole thing in explaining that it is in fact also really bad to just casually dust their hands of a murder investigation and that it will spread paranoia and fear to just have a murderer running around loose.

Mastiff is even specific in that while some people (Husky) are so powerful as to not feel worried about that kind of threat, others aren't in the same boat, and deserve to be considered!

He also finishes with how Husky hasn't really offered anything of value to the discussion at large - no evidence, no alternative method to figuring out the murder, no alternative to dealing with the murderer. All he's really done is naysay everything.

...This falls on deaf ears, because this is when Husky decides to flounce from the meeting, dragging Wolf and Coyote along with him.

It should be noted that Wolf has said absolutely nothing - defense or answering questions or anything else - during this entire meeting. He's just let his homunculus (REVEALED to be a homunculus he made to be loyal to him, during this meeting) and boyfriend speak for him.

(I will also, in fairness, note that Mastiff accidentally set off a Canon D thing, but I'm canon unfamiliar, so that was wholly by accident)

Thus the communal meeting functionally ended in something of a shitshow.

...Except the shitshow kept going.

In a completely separate thread - linked in the OOC chat by Dude and Binch so they could talk about it - Husky gets some alone time with Wolf on the fuckboat. They start getting intimate, and the whole time, Husky is basically trying to cajole a confession to the murder out of Wolf.

One could charitably read that as an explanation for Husky's actions at the meeting - him trying to make a show of being on Wolf's side so that Wolf would let something slip to him. That's what I tried to do, initially.

Except... some of the shit Husky was saying seemed to be nonsense that, OOCly, Dude and Binch also believed or would echo.

For example: Husky said, to Wolf, "It's so unbelievable to me that no one thought to say the most obvious clue, which is that it would have taken IMMENSE STRENGTH to kill Victim! After all, she's not a normal helpless girl, and only you could do that!"

And both Dude and Binch echoed that sentiment in OOC chat.

...It should be noted that the only other serious suspect - the other one that could teleport - was also a JRPG villain who also possessed ridiculous strength.

That's why no one brought it up.

Because it was obvious both serious suspects had that strength, and that knowledge actually narrowed down nothing.

Additionally, Binch and Husky alike (what's a IC/OOC divide?) said things along the lines of how no one did "enough" investigating. Reminder that Husky did NOTHING for this entire plot, not even comfort his recently murdered wife.

Me and my Friend were both starting to suspect that this entire plot was going to become a wash. when all your evidence is getting dismissed and tossed aside - including by the murderer's player, leading one to wonder just why the hell he made this a game-wide plot - it's hard to feel any different.

But there was one more thing to really dig this through the whole into absolute batshit levels beyond just a simple screwed-over plot.

The Ring

While all of the above was happening, Binch pinged the player of another character. This character has something of a gag attached to him, where he could just randomly and casually find lost objects belonging to other people.

Binch calls that player over and goes, "Hey, what if Husky took your character over to Wolf's fuckboat and had him find Victim's wedding ring?"

The other player, Metal Detector we'll call him for now, idly agrees to this.

....However.

There's a problem.

Remember how I said that Malinois, my character, was the one who found the particular evidence of Victim's missing wedding ring...?

Yeah.

I think to myself that I must have missed something in the sometimes fast-moving OOC chatter, or that maybe Beloved's player or Victim's spoke with Binch in DMs rather than the group chat. I'm trying to be generous here, not assume things immediately in bad faith, you know?

So I ask in the group chat, "Hey, how did Husky find out about Victim's missing ring?" Because again, this guy hasn't really had any interaction with his wife that I could see, so I was pretty confused and, admittedly, mildly pissed, because I had plans to act on that bit of evidence with Malinois.

...Binch immediately DMs me.

I'll be real, I don't want to look back at the whole conversation, because it was such a frustrating mess to experience that I know I will just get really aggravated all over again. The long and short of it is:

- because I was "too slow" (I'd literally just stepped away from my computer after asking my question in group chat, and then was trying to reread group chat to see if I missed something)
- and not immediately agreeing that Binch was right

Binch got aggravated at me and scheduled a meeting for us to talk about this.

Again, because I just asked in group chat "Hey, how did Husky know about the Victim's wedding ring".

It was such a frustrating discussion that I could tell immediately, right away, that I would likely be dropping out of the event. There's some conversations where you can just tell that the follow up will be just as trash, you know? And that's not counting the clear vibes of everything prior that indicated that only Dude and Binch's characters could get to do anything. I don't know about you, but that's not really a fun time for me.

And you know what?

I was so fucking right.

Some of the Greatest Hits from those two conversations:
✦ "oh ok. cool. what.... does asking Metal Detector to look for it ruin for you? cuz he's not gonna find it"
✦ claiming the evidence list was public, despite there being absolutely no indication of that anywhere in the entire event (or else what was the point of the town meeting?)
✦ "I would like to understand the source of confusion, cuz your teammate, unless she indicated to you and not me, did not seem bothered by this"
✦ "Or did you want characters to act OOCly and not notice things they might notice?" (reminder: this was about the wedding ring of the woman Husky neglected FOR LITERAL MONTHS, AND DID NOT SPEAK TO EVEN AFTER SHE WAS KILLED)

Note that's just a snippet of the things he said to me, and which I shared with friends because they were the most egregious samplings of bullshit.

Also, fun fact, he was a mod.

Needless to say, I had no interest in continuing with the event if my clues were going to be poached from me and, frankly, and attempts at solving this were going to be dismissed unless you were Dude and Binch. So I sat down and tried to calm myself, so that I could message the head mod (Victim's player) to drop the news.

It should be noted that I vented a lot during this entire thing, to my castmates. It's as I'm sitting there, trying to calm down, that one of those castmates suddenly yells out:

METAL DETECTOR DIDN'T EVEN KNOW ABOUT THE WEDDING RING

You see, when Binch had randomly pinged Metal Detector, MD didn't even know the wider context. When Binch said that his character could find anything, he just assumed it was a vague request to do with the gag. He didn't realize that Binch was not only talking about Victim's wedding ring, but that it was a kind of vital clue.

MD is now pissed because he was given no context in someone else's bid to use him to screw over another player. My castmate, and another player separate from all this, are also pissed. Friend and the rest of my cast are pissed.

And, as it turns out, head mod is pissed too! He was having conversations with Binch, as it turns out, and they weren't great (although I don't know wholly in specifics). So he was quite understanding and unsurprising that I was dipping from the event.

Then again, I guess all his surprised had to be used up from when he talked with Dude, and got to learn that apparently Dude had decided that nothing was going to happen to Wolf even if he was decided on as the murderer.

...Which I guess is why Binch had Husky be so surprised at the suggestion of jail.

Needless to say, Head Mod decided to remove Binch as a mod - this wasn't the only reason but it was certainly the tipping point. Eventually, he and Dude were both removed from the game.

...But only until after the RP-RL boundary was crossed in unacceptable ways. I won't go too much into details since it is wholly not my story to tell, I only heard about it secondhand, but Binch did know other players IRL and he is now banned from someone's actual house.

All from someone asking "Hey, how does your character know about this ring?"