It's not working. It seems to be heavily dependent on investigation and intrigue while our party is as follows
Me: Due to character restrictions, cannot function when lies are involved, which is almost always. For example, right now I cannot talk to Claire because for some reason we are still lying to her about her father and cannot talk to Bungou because we are lying to him about Claire. Even if I can speak to them I am breaking character by doing investigative work because I am a dumbass, barely acted in character last session.
Ali: Will not talk to people if it's not for the express purpose of wasting time.
Nour: Will try to run away from the story when not sure.
Danna: His attention is on and off, so when he comes back on he is lost on what's happening, cannot join and just spends his time trying to catch up.
Earl: I'm not sure about him, he was not there last time and this time he was really on and off due to connection issues, so he hasn't been doing much and had a similar problem with danna.
RD: While he tries to tackle the story, due to his suspiciousness he will continue poking at subjects he has already received an answer on.
It's not working, our party cannot do this.
As for the DM side of things, I obviously don't know the answer to this whole thing or any thing for that matter (any single thing. we do not have an answer on any single thing so it's impossible to judge anything) so I cannot be sure how it was handled to give a complete response, but I guess I can talk about how it seems.
It seems like we are on one of two modes. Either "As obscured as possible" or "Here's everything" when we eventually fail to find anything. I feel that we need a middle ground if it's evident we are not getting somewhere for a long period of time instead of flipping the plot switch. To elaborate on what 'obscurity' refers to.
I could be reading this wrong, but it feels like on any given conversation we are only ever going 2 levels in, while the important ones require us to go 8 levels in. We ask someone a couple of questions, but to get what we want we need to ask 3 more subjects and get 2 contextual investigations in. I understand why, no one is just going to spill their guts just by poking them, I honestly appreciate the sentiment of keeping the integrity of the rp, but here's the problem: It is never going to happen. This party will never, ever do those 8 levels of investigation on that one person that matters if we are not certain that's our guy. In fact we still may not do it if we know that's our guy.
One example is Tish. Ali takes on the task of talking to her, goes a long way in negotiating with her, then simply refuses to check if she is telling the truth (similar to what happened to Bungou, the guy placed at the port just so we could talk to him).
Another example is the little girl. The thing happens, we take the little girl with us, we try to find stuff about her, but then we have to solve the problem that she is crying, then we have to agree on something to tell her about her dad. I understand why, obviously the girl is shook and needs to know that. But here's the thing, we really, really do not need that. We were 6 hours into the session, confused about pretty much everything and then the girl throws 2 road blocks into the investigation. There is only one possible response at that time from everyone involved, stepping away and not talking to her again because it's an annoying task and chances are she is clear anyways, it is very much predictable that this would be the response of everyone involved. Heck, I'd wager that would be the response even if it's not 6 hours into a session.
Then there is the dead man. There is no universe where any of us questions the accuracy of the words of the guy who died for what he said.
A lot of it is a matter of compatibility, we are simply not the party for the job, it has to be different. I am not saying to just have everyone spill everything 2 questions in, but we need some sort of contextual signal to tell us we are on the right track. Prompting us to do a check on something they said, telling us they look suspicious, something a little bit more obvious than what we have been getting, because otherwise we are just going to follow the algorithm
[look for things]->[find nothing for a long period of time]->[get the answer handed to us]->[get asked to do something else]->[return to beginning]
and that's if things go well, because eventually it will be nour's turn to call the shots and we will just start running away from the story as fast as we can until we find a secluded forest to spend the rest of our lives in.