this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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Be careful with red herrings and other false clues and leads. Most parties will make their own false leads and other conclusions without any prompting based on something completely random or unnecessary. So limit this as much as possible and make it obvious when investigating why someone is innocent if they are. The investigation is part of the fun.
Also try to make sure there are multiple ways to get an important piece of information with the general recommendation to be three different ways. These should involve the players special skills / spells /etc. to encourage and not penalize people who doing what they do best. These channels should be flexible as well because the party may do something you didn't expect such as interviewing the mice in the castle to see what they heard that night. So if they do anything they should get some information even if its a duplicate of something they already found out.
When I was doing my most recent adventure there was a ballroom scene where the party was trying to find out something suspicious. There was two mysteries going on: a secret fey run raucous boozed filled Mirror Ball and some extradimensional horrors had body snatched people to eat their brains. So I had some set DCs for various secrets they could learn from automatic to DC 35. So when they did something that might get some information I picked one and they learned it. Some of these secrets were given multiple times from multiple sources. They ended up getting all of them except who is the extradimensional horrors by befriending and raising the social standing of the busty redhead wallflower who was secretly the queen of gossip by some massive performance and persuasions checks. So be flexible about how they end up learning the secrets because they can and should all be given as information to the party even if it makes the killer obvious.