The false negatives (where you find some proof but are told it’s nothing) seem very harsh here, to the point where I think everyone would choose to become Observant to avoid this. “Verify your clues” is exhausting if you have to verify all the disproofs.

Well, some basic statistics changes all the verifying. Almost all red herring are proofs rather than disproofs, whereas almost all clues are disproofs rather than proofs. So you really need to verify proofs rather than all clues (about 1 in three “proofs” will turn out to be true).

The “observant” quality might be a little too good in this situation though, as it makes you immune to red herring. applying the herring before the roll is modified may be desirable, to not overly punish alcoholics or reward observants.

this really hampers my plans to become an Alcoholic. I bought the flask and everything

[derrick] If the goal of the dynasty is “pinpoint the murder details”, missing a genuine Proof is a big deal and hard to recover from, because it’s lost among your many Disproofs.

Perhaps by definition a “red herring” should only ever be something that looks like the thing you’re hunting, but isn’t - never the other way around.

In an information theory sense this more than halves the value, as measured by mutual information between the Quality and the Clue, of a Clue; being an Alcoholic more than halves it again.

I like the idea but I think it needs to be implemented differently.

Lets move on, and I’ll try again sometime.