Poker Face
Well, well, well. Looks like we have a not-mutiny on our hands! But more importantly, we have a big fat lie.
It’s been 2,618 days since we last talked about “the RPG lie.” Saying ridiculous and implausible shit remains very much a part of the hobby. But if you’re going to make your career winking at the truth, applying creative embellishment to reality, or otherwise engaging in acts of bald-faced chicanery, you’ve got to do more than board the The U.S.S. Make Sh*t Up. You’ve got to stick to that lie. That is a lesson that our robotic peacenik seems to be lacking.
Just because you failed your Deception/Bluff/Make-Shit-Up check, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve failed. After all, one bad check is rarely the end of a social encounter Here’s an illustrative example for your consideration.
“But your majesty! Sir Sanctimonious didn’t slay the wicked puke monster! Our brave band of unlikely but loveable ne’er-do-wells did the deed!”
“Hmmm… Based upon eyewitness accounts, and the fact that you had the temerity to roll a Natural 1 in my court, I find myself unconvinced.”
If you stop there and admit your lie, there are only so many ways the fiction can go. Telling the world that, “Yeah, you’re right. I’m full of it,” is never a winning legal strategy.
If you stick to your guns, the fiction can adapt. Perhaps Sir Sanctimonious has enemies at court, and they would back your claim despite His Majesty’s doubts. Perhaps you can follow up with an amendment: “It may be Mr. Goodygood who delivered the killing blow. But only because he stole the Sword of Puke Monster Slaying from our MacGuffin locker!” You might even angle for a trial by combat, allowing your barbarian buddy to participate in diplomacy for once.
My advice is simply this: Never admit that you are lying. Because if you do, you’ve just cut yourself off from access to The Good Ending. And there are a lot of good endings available when you’re allowed to make shit up.
So here’s the discussion question for today’s comments section. What is the best con you’ve pulled in a game? What was your big fat lie, and how did you get your patsy to believe it? Hit us with all your finest falsehoods and most perfect prevarications down in the comments!
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No matter if you’re lying or not, never change your story. As soon as you do then there’s doubt, as long as you stick to it then there’s the chance it might be true.
“That’s my story and I’m sticking to it”
Valid in interrogations as in con jobs!
For best con, I had a thief who passed himself off as a mighty wizard for thirteen levels, using scrolls/wands/potions/rings and always ‘saving’ his own spells for emergencies because ‘they take so long ti memorize ones of this power’ 🙂
Heh. Always love that biz. Paladins who pretend to be rogues, barbarians who “cast fist,” etc.
I consider deception the overall weakest of the 3 talky skills for three reasons: Hierarchy progression, failure consequences, and points of failure.
Hierarchy progression: Generally failing deception locks you out of persuasion because they won’t trust you, failing intimidation locks you out of persuasion or deception because they’re pissed off. So it’s always best to open with persuasion, and worst comes to worst you can always default to intimidation as a last resort.
Consequences: Getting caught in a lie is a major loss of face. Failing to persuade someone usually means they just won’t do it.
Points of failure: There are a lot of ways to fail deception. If you roll above their insight but below the DC set based on what you’re trying to convince them of it’s the same as failing a persuasion. If you roll below their insight you get caught in a lie. If your lie is implausible it fails the smell-test no matter what you roll, and there are hidden variables like you not realizing they would know information that would make you auto-fail the smell test: If you’re lying your way into a secure facility by claiming to be Jim, then it doesn’t matter what you roll when you bump into the person it turns out is Jim’s spouse.
What’s this business about below DC but above Insight. Not familiar with that rule.
Their insight isn’t the DC to convince them to act upon your lie, merely the DC to convince them that they believe you. All skills have a DC based on what you’re trying to do. Backflipping across the widest part of the chasm is a higher DC than polevaulting the narrowest even though it’s the overall same task because how you attempt to complete the task contributes a lot to the DC.
So if I tell Steve that Mike plans to betray him (a lie) there’s the DC to convince him to act, and his insight to convince him I believe what I’m saying. Two points of failure. Plus the potential point of failure that I tell Steve that Mike is working with a group that Steve knows Mike hates I fail the smell test which is another point of failure.
Nothing huge and campaign-spanning, but selling the PCs and their *players* that the trap that detonated (destroying the treasure we were sent to retrieve) was the result of an accident (a golem trod on it during combat), rather than my rogue failing an ill-advised Disable Device check during said combat, is my ultimate moment of chicanery.
Admittedly, I had the DM’s tacit (and silent) approval, since he knew the truth and didn’t contradict me.
Heh. I remember that story. Nothing better than playing your rogue so good that you fool PCs AND players. I feel like a friggin’ champ whenever I pull it off. See my “slow burn curse for comparison:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/curses
Less of a con, more of a battle strategy. It was early in the campaign (same one with the wizard I’ve talked about earlier), and the party was in the middle of a fight against these shape shifting clay mannequins. The mannequins had shifted to look like the druid and the ranger, and due to heavy magical smoke we couldn’t tell who was the real ones and who was the fakes when it cleared.
Enter my enchanter.
This guy was was meant to embody the persuasive bullshitter aspect of the enchantment school, and so ended up with a +4 or so to both persuasion and deception at level 3. I had my wizard look at both sets of druids and rangers, and decided that if we couldn’t tell by perception, trickery would have to do. So he just looked at them and went, “I know who the fakes are, give yourselves up.” He rolled well enough that the fakes did reveal themselves, which made the fight go a lot smoother.
Then the mannequin who was copying the druid torched him with Burning Hands and nearly killed him. After the fight, he actually admitted to the party that he had no idea who was fake, and definitely had no idea the lie would even work. Out of character, there’s an in joke between me and the druid’s player that my enchanter now holds the title “Master of Bullshittery” for this feat. I’ve yet to beat my own record, but I have hope.
Nicely done! I feel like “make an in-combat bluff check” straddles this weird line between “get an extra action for free” and “smart play.” I tend to think it falls into the latter, but I’ve seen GMs saying, “Do you want that to be your action this round?”
Our party rogue wears her heart on her sleeve and is seemingly incapable of not revealing the party’s plans to evil wizards. It’s as though the less trustworthy someone is, the more likely the rogue is to casually reveal the party’s plans and history. Hence one of my favourite quotes from the campaign: “When I said lie, I meant lie, not do not lie. Sweet goddess…”
The infamous double bluff! XD
The late, great, Burn Notice taught us some wise wisdom:
“Inexperienced operatives abandon a cover ID under pressure; experienced ones just play their roles harder.”
Honestly, the entirety of the voiceover dialogue from that show is fantastic advice for any would-be spy, rogue, or bard. Thank goodness someone made an entire archive of it and organized it by subject!
(https://burn-notice.djmed.net/summaries/voiceTag.html)
Damn. That is a REALLY good pull quote for today’s comic. Excuse me while I read that mess in full. 🙂
I’ve watched that show more or less fully 7 times, it’s just so freaking good. It always makes me get a hankering for a modern spy TTRPG game or a fantasy courtly intrigue game… but then I remember how much more intensive running/playing sessions like that would be. Who has the time?
I’m reminded of one of my own games, the universe traveling, multi-GM one.
So, I’m currently the GM and per the nature of this game, have my own character. Now, I don’t want to dominate the game because I’ve learned the hard way that running a scene ruled entirely by NPCs is fun for nobody, least of all myself, so I try to find ways for my players to have things to do.
Now for the story: the party is trying to fake a gift for the queen in the hopes of increasing diplomacy to a village that’s on the verge of dying. The gift in question is a big old statue meant to play to her ego. My character wheels it in, covered by a tarp, says “there’s a package for you” and then I roll Guile, which is the equivalent to Deception in the system I’m using.
I roll a THREE (before modifier) so I write my character out as having immediately died of embarassment. Of all the ways to solve that problem, that’s certainly one of them.
“I blush as a free action.”
Sad times, dude. SMH.
I think you’re missing the part where I’m trying to give my players something to do. But yes, fair point.
So if I’m hearing you right, you’re happy you failed so hard because the rest of the party got to scramble to save the situation? Was that the outcome your were shooting for, or just a serendipitous outcome?
Serendipity. If I hadn’t rolled that three, I might have tried a bit harder.
“It was a soliloquy” 😛
What are you referencing? I don’t know that one.
It is POSSIBLE to alter your story, but it requires everyone going all-in on the second one. It’s called the PIVOT
“Ah, I apologize for not speaking up earlier, but I have only just now ascertained the truth of this matter. In fact both sides of this story may be mistaken due to their own limited perspective, and the truth can be found to lie somewhere in the middle…”
It doesn’t actually have to lie in the middle, but limited perspective always breeds room for error and doubt, while simultaneously relieving both sides of the onus of “intentional deception”
Certainly if the same person adjusts their story, it becomes harder and harder to believe them, but just because one person in the party is prone to errors doesn’t mean EVERYONE is.
Also, I find the best way to handle things is Persuasion->Deception->Intimidation. Anyone can shift from a failed persuasion into a deception, or from a failed deception into an intimidation, but trying to go from a failed intimidation to deception or failed deception to persuasion is going to be rough, and failed intimidation to persuasion is practically impossible.
One small correction. You missed the last step of the chain which goes Persuasion -> Deception -> Intimidation -> Initiative. 😉
You’re the second person to reference the order of operations in this thread: Persuasion->Deception->Intimidation. Is this from something (blog article?) or is it just a common experience?
Just common experience I suppose. I’ve had many a party member go straight to deception or intimidation, and it invariably wound up making things more difficult for us, because when they failed, we had nothing else to fall back on (other than initiative)
The greatest lie I never told in a game was the great “30 Miles West” lie.
We were playing Vampire the Masquerade 1e, and I was a Malkavian. First vampire PC I’d ever made and the GM was adamant that we use Natures from The Book. So I picked the one that was basically “convince others a lie is true”†. Our group was off in some wilderness deep in a foreign country, we’d ahhh, ‘crash landed’ there because I was the pilot‡, and I was also the local “guide” for this group of foreigners (they’d been playing a few sessions I was knew to the ‘coterie’ but not the group of Players, we’d played for years in other systems). So there we were hunting for the baddies and our scout Garou* (who’d been taken aside for a solo run for a few minutes) said he’d sniffed out the baddie, and a few nearby towns. I knew the towns around the area we were in and I knew where we were, and I knew which one the baddie they were chasing was likely to go to… and also of another town roughly as far away from us (about 50 miles) that had enemies of my peeps (political rivals to the Malkavians), but not the enemy coterie the group was specifically hunting. Conversation went like this:
Garou: “Yeah so the spirits tell me there’s a really Evil town where So-and-So is hiding, about 30 miles-”
Me: “west”
G: “-of here.”
Gangrel gives me a look, like “WTF are talking about?”
Brief discussion about getting more info, I quietly pipe up and say I know stuff about the town, the people, who’s in charge, etc. Every time they ask about specifics I get a little vague, whenever they want general answers, I go deep on specifics, but nothing which is actually helpful or in anyway answers the questions they have.
The whole time the GM keeps giving me side-eye, and every time the Garou repeats where the town is, I say “west” right after he says “30 miles”. After a few of these, the other PCs are are all saying “30 miles west” every time they mention it’s direction.
So we go there, get into some epic fights with the local vamps, absolutely wipe them out, but there is no evidence at all fo the baddie the coterie was hunting. They ask me “I thought you said So-and-So was here?”
Me: “Oh, you’re hunting So-and-So? Yeah, he’s not here. He’s probably hold up in [opposite direction other town] which is his clan’s stronghold in this region.”
Then, and I shite you not, the coterie leader turns to his blood-bound Garou* and says “I though you said this town was where So-and-So was? 30 miles west, you kept saying 30 miles west! We traveled almost 60 miles and So-and-So wasn’t even here!”
The Garou Player looks right at me and OOC says, “You little shit!” and burst out laughing. The GM loved… the other Players ehhh… some (like the Garou Player) thought it was hilarious, a few others were not as pleased.
We did hunt down thev baddie next, they did eventually learn to find my “lying little shite” PC super useful, but they always had to be careful with what they believed I was saying, what they told me do, what I agreed to go do, and what nonsense I’d just “do on my own”.
. † In that entire first campaign, I was the only PC who routinely earned Willpower from playing my Nature… and I probably had the hardest nature to play. That original system was kinda garbage in that way.
. ‡ The GM had me introduce my PC, basically the group was flying in and he said “Okay, you can either be the pilot or a local guide they meet when they land” and I said, “Can I be both? Pilot and guide?” He was all, sure, why not. So I made the PC during the week before game, a Malkavian plagued by gremlins (technology broke down around her) with Fairy Friends as an ally, strong mechanics, lots of languages, piloting, driving, etc, and //all// the Stealth. Oh, she was also Social first, Mental second, despite none of the power set being social based (but it was for the lying).
So there we were in the air and GM tells me to “introduce yourself, so I took over the narrative: “The cockpit door opens, and the pilot your people hired comes out. You immediately noticed two things, she’s wearing a parachute and in her hands are a piece of the dashboard and a black box. She walks to the door near the tail section, stoops down next to it, pops it open, steadies herself against the sudden gale and says in a soft voice barely discernible over the rushing wind, “We’re here” and steps out of the plane…”
I looked at the GM whose mouth was hanging open, “That okay?” He clapped and said “Perfect! Perfect! Okay, so the pilot just abandoned you midair, what are the rest of you doing?”
Cue a mad scramble and everyone giving me the stink-eye… like usual.
. * There was a lot of ‘nonsense’ in that game, like one player playing a 6th gen with a blood-bound Garou bodyguard… le sigh. But then again, I got away with most of my nonsense as well, so it all came out in the wash.
You need to commission some “30 Miles West” shirts for that group. Make it an airline logo or something.
Also, this is why Social challenges should never come down to a single roll. Does combat have a single roll? No, it’s a lot of rolls, a veritable back and forth of rolling. So social combat should be the same way, the parry-thrust of social interaction, slowly wearing down the enemy’s Social HP, until you win or lose the “conflict”.
In this I think FATE (and systems like it) are slightly better designed for Social and Mental conflicts.
Also, just because the other party becomes suspicious you’re dissembling, doesn’t mean you can’t pass it off as “just being cagey about something” and even bring up other issues to pass the ‘lie’ off on. This is why you should never just be talking about one thing. Have other things to discuss, other issues to interrupt with, have other party members interject with their BS just to draw the heat away. The king’s advisor starts giving you ‘ye olde side-eye’ like he’s not buying your story, subtly poke the Barbarian and have them make some horrible prearranged faux pas so you can cringe up and then pass your nervousness off as “I knew he’d say something stupid”. This is why everyone should invest something itno social skills… and every GM should make Social encounters just as important as combat…
This is why I prefer hidden information games. Give the GM your modifier, let them roll, and then tell you what you know. It’s a bit of a feels-bad to take the dice out of the player’s hands, but it does work around the metagame element.
Ran a 3.5 game many years ago. Every PC invested in Bluff. No one had Diplomacy. No one had Sense Motive. It made social encounters very interesting.
Not going to lie. I kind of love that.
Were you a Thieves guild?
Which is funnier: 2 Rogues with max Bluff and no Sense Motive; or 2 Rogues with max Hide/Stealth and no Spot/Perception?
Definitely the first one. Cons getting conned is a fun trope. Always makes me think of the end of Maverick.
I’m reminded of one of those “terrible table” stories where as an offhand mention, it’s said that there was a pair of players where one had great Charisma and one had rock-bottom Charisma.
They would tell the same story, but because one passed the Bluff check and one didn’t, it was impossible to tell whether or not the story was at all true.
Oh no, you’re making me reach back almost 20 years! It’s all so hazy!
IIRC, that group was hired by the town mayor to investigate reports of strange animals that were attacking merchant caravans. They tracked the animals and found a “Totally not a stargate”. Going through the gate led them to a map room with different addresses. The party was then commissioned by the League of Boot and Trail to travel to each address and file reports on what they found.
This allowed me as a burned out, sleepless, and stressed out college student to basically run a dungeon of the week campaign. Some of the shenanigans the party got up:
1) Found a town that was “Definitely not Sesame Street”.
2) Set up trade relations with a town on the edge of the Randomly Exploding Swamp. (Flammable gas would bubble up from the swamp muck and form large floating bubbles. When the bubbles popped they would explode.)
3) Assassinated a corrupt and evil politician by summoning a tiger, a rhino, and a bear into his bedroom.
4) Found out one of the party members was a noble whose family was deposed. They found forces loyal to his family and used the “Totally Not a Stargate” to blitzkrieg the usurpers.
5) Dinosaurs. Because you just gotta have them.
I also remember the rogue always getting into a “fight” with the monk over the smallest things. The rogue also never spent any of her gold. At one point, I remember looking at her sheet and realizing how much money she had on her and just handing her the DMG and helping her upgrade everything. (I think she bought herself an iron golem!)
No one in that group ever really talked to each other during character creation, but they were a blast to game with and hang out with. I even wound up marrying one of them!
I once played a 5e rogue in gritty low fantasy that was entirely focused around bluffing with the actor feat. What you must keep in mind about every described situation is that the person making these statements was a pale, scrawny rogue named Pangur Ban with a heavy Irish accent:
Session 1, he claimed he was actually a legendary paladin to scare off a group of raiders. The raiders believed him, but challenged him to trial by combat. He ran away while the rest of the party fought them.
Later, he teamed up with the dwarf paladin to attempt to scare off some bandits by riding on the paladin’s shoulders wearing a coat and making spooky ghost sounds. The bandits didn’t buy it, but they turned out to be friendly.
In setting, druids were considered nobility for the region of the world we were in. Pangur, a rogue, stole a druid’s clothes and claimed he was a druid against all evidence to the contrary for most of the campaign to acquire free stuff from the townspeople. This was complicated somewhat when the group was helping a fugitive escape and was confronted by a real druid. Who was holding a wanted poster for the fugitive we were fleeing with. Pangur rolled with disadvantage, the druid rolled with advantage. The druid walked away commenting about the polite young druid and his strange friend. The DM later told me that he wanted us to have a combat encounter because there hadn’t been one in a while, and that he was shocked that the standoff hadn’t ended in combat.
Still one of my fav characters of all time. So much so that I brought him back in another campaign, this time as an actual druid.
It was a Delta Green CoC campaign, my mob cleaner and the FBI agent PC were interrogating a janitor to get an id card we could use to get into the target building. We leave the guy tied to a chair and head back to the rest of the group. I tell the FBI agent “I need to pick up some smokes you want anything?” She declines and we separate. It is important to note that this campaign had a *lot* of ‘PC handles something alone with the GM for a minute’ so this was not unusual. My guy circles back around to the house, tells the janitor “Nothing personal”, and puts two shots through the back of his head. Then I grab cigarettes from a convenence store and meet the group.
After the mission was over (an absolute disaster that left one PC dead and inadvertantly triggered an unnatural blizzard over a major city that killed millions, great times) the FBI agent went back to the janitor’s house and was very displeased at what she found. But on the bright side there was no one to identify us.