Editing Unwritten: System Reference Document/Discovery and Investigation (section)

===Asking Questions===

As part of the Discover action, you will be asking the GM questions to tease out information. You want to make your questions count, so keep the following principles in mind.

Your question should be rooted in what your character is capable of doing. If your character is an engineering expert, asking a question that involves mechanical details of a machine makes sense. It will not make sense if their expertise is in linguistics and not in any way mechanical.

Refer to the skill you used, as well as relevant aspects or stunts, when you ask your question in order to frame the context of the question and tune the information you will get.

Explain your intent with the question. Don’t assume that the GM is following your specific train of thought. You are more likely to get a useful answer if the GM knows what you are aiming for.

Don’t ask questions for which there is an obvious answer. You want questions to reveal new information whenever possible.

====What if I don’t know what to ask?====

Even the cleverest people draw a blank sometimes. So when you don’t know what questions to ask, try one of the following strategies.

* Open it up to the others at the table for suggestions.
* Ask for more information on an aspect or existing detail.
* Pick a question from the suggestions under each skill description.
* Force a hint.

====Forcing a Hint====

Excelling on a discover action allows you to request the GM reveal an important bit of information, so if you are ever stuck, this is your out. You just have to engineer a situation where you excel. The easiest way to do this is to use Advantage actions to create situation aspects and build free invokes up until you can ensure that you excel at the action. The teamwork rules may help as well.

====Uncovering Aspects====

Generally speaking, we assume that most of the aspects in play are public knowledge for the players. The PCs’ character sheets are sitting on the table, and probably the main and supporting NPCs are as well. That doesn’t always mean the characters know about those aspects, but that’s one of the reasons why the create an advantage action exists—to help you justify how a character learns about other characters.

However, GMs, we know that sometimes you’re going to want to keep an NPC’s aspects secret, or not reveal certain situation aspects right away, because you’re trying to build tension in the story. Questions can reveal aspects as answers reveal information. 

Known aspects can change as a result of the questions you ask as well. If there is an aspect on the scene of Signs of Forced Entry, for example, and questions reveal that the doors bear the marks of D’ni stone sculpting devices, change the aspect to Telltale Marks of D’ni Sculpting Devices or something similar.

You should never have to use a question to ask “Is this an aspect?”; the GM should just tell you.