The investigation scene

I've been thinking about my games and how much investigation plays a part in them. And since I try to emulate the "feel" of movies and television shows in a lot of my games, I find myself comparing our investigations to how it goes on TV.

So I'm thinking specifically of Dark Angel right now. Often our heroine goes to the "scene," pokes around for thirty seconds and finds some interesting gizmo or bit, and then leaves. Sneak, forced-entry, poke about, leave... thirty seconds or less. Don't want to bore the audience by lots of prowling and poking that doesn't turn up anything interesting. And when that interesting thing is found, that's usually it... one clue per story location. Even CSI doesn't spend vast amounts of time combing for clues... the scene is condensed to make it fit the TV show length.

Now turn to my game, where the clue-finding takes twenty minutes. I have some general information for them, and two simple clues, which are found in the same location... some sticky strands and an unused auto-injecting hypodermic on the skylight of the museum. Of course, there is inspection of locks, inspection of security system, inspection of video system, inspection of the floor, walls, ceilings, roof, exact details of the skylight, etc, etc. And I think this is pretty normal... I'm not knocking how my players conducted the investigation.

But it's kind of frustrating, because the way players normally go about this kind of thing and my desire for how clue-finding scenes ought to operate don't match up. This was the kick-off of this sub-plot, and there wasn't any need to dwell on it... the characters needed to know only what was stolen, that there were sticky strands on the skylight (the obvious point of entry), and an unused injector of some unknown substance labelled "Biotechnica C792". These provide character impetus, foreshadowing, and a clue leading to the next scene. This was the "teaser" shown before the show's opening credits, and for pacing purposes, it shouldn't drag out.

In a TV show, nothing is wasted... every bit of action and dialog reveals something about the characters, the setting or the plot. In a roleplaying game, there can be a lot of "thrashing about," trying to sift the important details from the unimportant surroundings. What I'm wondering is how can I reduce this "thrashing about" and streamline scenes like this so that they don't take up a big chunk of my game time?

My big concern is the role of player creativity. I don't think the players want to be "handed" clues, but expect it to be more like an easter-egg hunt. They want to have to be clever to find the clues. The problem with that is when the clues are necessary to further the plot... and if the players aren't clever enough to find the hidden clues, the plot stalls. Maybe they go back and look again and then find them, but the pacing suffers even more.

My philosophy on clue-driven plots is that the characters must find the clues, even if I hand them to them on a silver platter, because the game cannot advance if the characters are stuck at some stage without the right puzzle pieces to move on to the next stage. (I consider redundant clues all pointing to the same thing to be essentially the same as making sure the characters find your "one" clue.) I don't believe in letting a story end anti-climatically because the characters got stuck. (Others may choose differently, I just find it dissatisfying.)

So what to do? I really don't know at this point. Maybe I'll bring it up at the next Wichita_Roleplayers meet-up and see if I can drum up a discussion there.