Trail of Carcharodon
This won’t make a lot of sense to you if you’re not a GUMSHOE player. This is a bonus article for the collection, “No Clues Without Consequence,” showing one kind of GUMSHOE scenario structure in action through a shared reference that isn’t GUMSHOE at all: the motion picture Jaws.
Spoilers below.
The Hook
In the nighttime waters just off one of Amity Island’s lovely beaches, a woman falls prey to something in the water — something horrible, with a hunger for flesh. If this beast scares the public away from the island’s beaches, Amity’s whole economy collapses, so the Mayor covers up the attack, calling it a “boat accident.” But when a young boy is eaten in a bloody attack on a crowded Amity beach, the search for the killer in the water begins.
This is, in GUMSHOE parlance, “The Hook.”
Entering into this situation are the three players’ characters, each with their own expertise, motivations, and style…
First we meet Martin Brody (Roy Scheider, center), the new police chief on Amity Island. Brody recently arrived with his family from New York, hoping to give his kids a better life than he had by raising them on this idyllic island. He wants to do right and become a part of the island community, but Brody is an outsider, a landlubber, and afraid of the water, so this move to New England costs him — and reveal’s the character’s Drive: to serve and protect, especially his family.
Quint (Robert Shaw, left), professional shark hunter and eccentric captain of the Orca, comes into play once the public learns there’s a shark in the water. He offers to catch and kill the feasting beast for triple the going rate, should Chief Brody or the people of Amity Island want his expertise. Quint’s player reveals this character’s Drive by telling the story of the USS Indianapolis from 1945. That Drive: revenge.
Brody calls for help from professional oceanographers and Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss, right) comes to the island to investigate. Hooper’s youth, money, and book learning make him a dramatic contrast to Quint. Brody and Hooper team up to learn more about the killer shark in Amity’s waters. Hooper wants respect for his work, which means he must do his job well and also get credit for it. His Drive is at the intersection of science and fame.
All three characters have valuable know-how to bring to the scenario but each of them approaches the sea and its mysteries in different ways.
The Spine
Early scenes establish life on Amity Island and the key characters in the story, from the PCs to NPCs like Mayor Vaughn, who can be seen as a GM’s mouthpiece, putting pressure on the PCs and voicing motivations at odds with their own. GUMSHOE plays quickly enough that some of these scenes might take less time to describe than they do to watch, so while the other PCs don’t appear on screen for 20 minutes (Quint) or 28 minutes (Hooper), we can look at the previous scenes as conversations between the players (including the GM), establishing the setting for the adventure and the Hook that activates the PCs.
This goes to highlight the difference in these media: What takes 20 minutes to watch can be dramatized differently at the game table, either through 20 minutes of conversation about character backstory, for example. Maybe Brody’s player explains why Brody trusted the medical examiner and went along with the Mayor after the first attack, which turns into a quick vignette on the ferry in the first Act, even though that scene would be set in the midst of the backstory for the scenario.
During play, everyone has a lot of freedom to shape the pacing of the story and start scenes that captivate the players and give them a chance to introduce, discover, and portray their characters. Brody’s player even employs the Research ability to give us scenes of Brody pouring over horrifying books in search for a beast that he thinks could be thousands of years old…
Quint introduces himself at the Town Hall meeting in what might be the first scene of play that pushes game-time forward. After that we get a scene with shark-hunters on a pier (NPCs) that we can see either as a cutaway told by the GM to convey information to the PCs (since word of the incident gets to Brody) or as a dramatization that is unique to the film. Then Hooper arrives in a rambunctious scene introducing some of his expertise and Brody’s style, leading to Hooper using his Biology and Forensics abilities to investigate the first victim’s remains, proving she was not the victim of a boating accident.
With everyone established, we can interpret several scenes as Brody and Hooper investigating and the GM starting scenes driven by NPCs. The GM introduces elements like the public’s shark hunt and a tiger shark caught and publicized as the killer, which Hooper knows to be unlikely. When the mother of the slain boy confronts Chief Brody, that’s the GM driving Brody to act. The players start a scene over dinner and then move on to applying their skills to the caught tiger shark and then to Ben Gardner’s boat, which the GM suggests in the fictional world is a scene for investigation.
(I picture Quint’s player keeping Quint out of the action to emphasize his mystery and the player’s desire to hunt the beast — or perhaps going to pick up the pizza — during all of this.)
With the clue found at Ben Gardner’s boat (“a tooth the size of a shot glass”), the players are confident that they know what’s in the water: a great white shark.
In GUMSHOE scenarios this is sometimes called “The Horrible Truth” —the truth of what’s really going on underneath the questions, at the heart of the mystery. In this case, the horrible truth is not about what’s out there but, rather, the size of it. Amity Island is the hunting ground for a shark — Carcharodon carcharias: a great white shark. An immense shark. And this one has a monstrous hunger.
While the players send their characters around, investigating the island and its surrounding waters, the NPCs and the monster shark do not wait. The Mayor counteracts. The shark hunts.
In a scene with the GM as Mayor Vaughn, the GM applies pressure to devise new approaches that don’t involve shutting down the beach. We can look at this as the GM trying to extend the second Act, perhaps to get more playtime out of the story or perhaps to dramatize the idea that every scene the players spend gathering information, the shark continues to hunt, eating NPCs. The players, maybe pressing their luck, go along with it.
All of this back-and-forth, impromptu scene building stands atop the GMs preparation and knowledge of the Horrible Truth. This goes beyond playing the Mayor and townsfolk. The GM knows what the shark is, what it wants, and who it can reach. The GM decides when the shark attacks and picks those moments for maximum dramatic impact.
This is sort of, but not quite, like what was happening during the filming of Jaws. As it’s stated on Wikipedia as of this writing:
While the deal was initially for a “one-week dialogue polish”, Gottlieb eventually became the primary screenwriter, rewriting the entire script during a nine-week period of principal photography.[16] The script for each scene was typically finished the night before it was shot, after Gottlieb had dinner with Spielberg and members of the cast and crew to decide what would go into the film. Many pieces of dialogue originated from the actors’ improvisations during these meals; a few were created on set, most notably Roy Scheider’s ad-lib of the line “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
That kind of expensive playing around can work when there’s an overall “shape” to fill in, like if the investigation of shark attacks leading to a hunt at sea is a given, for example. But where a film can careen into disaster by improvising, RPG play is all about this kind of play-as-you-go style, with a bit of structure — whether it’s our three Acts or something else — to provide support along the way.
Back in our pretend play version of the story, things happen when the players and/or their characters are motivated to take action. When Brody’s son (surely a Source of Stability) is nearly attacked, the players finally activate the third Act of the story by switching from investigation to confrontation.
The Confrontation
Once the players believe they have enough information to go on, their characters set out to confront their foe. This is an action-oriented stretch of play, but we don’t abandon the Investigative abilities here for nothing but Piloting and Shooting rolls. Investigation — the movement of information from the GM to the players — happens throughout.
For example, the GM conveys the true size of the shark during a simple search by Chief Brody.
Quint’s barrels and Hooper’s electronic tag reveal the strength of the beast (“He can’t stay down with three barrels on him. Not with three barrels he can’t.”) as well as its incredible speed (“Fast fish.”).
We also learn more about the players’ characters during these scenes, as they compare scars and take very different approaches to shark hunting. When players are into their characters, these kinds of scenes emerge organically through play when the GM gives everyone room to play.
Something vital to keep in mind here, though, is that the end of the story is wonderfully fitting for all three characters but that does not mean it was preordained by the GM. What we see are numerous, feasible attempts to bring down the shark, to end the hunt on various character’s terms, as those attempts meet with failure. Did they fail because of dice rolls, the shark’s formidable statistics, or GM fiat? We don’t know.
What I see are the players vying for endings. Quint wants things to end a certain way thanks to his Drive and Hooper, in a search for respect, goes along with him. When Brody tries to call for help, it’s not the GM who shuts him down — it’s Quint. When Quint’s player is low on points in key abilities, he finally decides it’s time to try things Hooper’s way. And when that fails (because Hooper ends up in a Scuffling match with megalodon’s grandkid), the GM plays the big Antagonist Reaction scene and has the shark deliver the coup de grace to the Orca. Quint’s end could be the result of the dice, a choice by Quint’s player, or both. We don’t know.
Here are a few more ways to look at this sea hunt in GUMSHOE terms:
- The GM mentions, then reminds the players, of the oxygen tanks a few times, either to get them into the water for dramatic effect or to let them know that those things can deal serious damage, as Hooper knows.
- The PCs take turns driving the boat because they don’t have an endless supply of Piloting points between them.
- Maybe Hooper can spend points in Chemistry and Preparedness to deliver a fatal strike to the beast — but first he has to land a good hit. When that fails, and Hooper’s shaken by Stability loss, Hooper hides.
- Brody, as a cop, has points in Shooting. The multiple shots he takes at the shark don’t necessarily represent multiple rolls, they might be a dramatization of a single roll backed by a lot of Shooting points, just to be sure.
- The spends and attacks of the PCs as they try to whittle the shark’s Health down, drag it into the shallow water, and poison it all contribute not only to killing it but to a wonderful story about how they did.
Of course Jaws isn’t actually a depiction of any game session. Of course the language and flow of a game session doesn’t actually result in an experience that maps exactly to cinema. Of course these media tell stories in different ways. But the styles and forms of GUMSHOE can yield all sorts of stories — stories informed by other media, stories that change how we approach other stories — particularly stories about exploring, investigating, and confronting fictional worlds, whether you’re hunting human killers, ancient wizards, or big damn sharks.
Read the whole collection, “No Clues Without Consequence,” right here.
