Too Trusting
To be fair, Antipaladin was a member of The Evil Party for quite a while. Visits to the Evil Chapel of Evil are a comfortable part of his workday. How is he supposed to know that Demon Queen is possessing his cute and innocent catgirl coworker? No doubt it’s coincidence that tonight is Devil’s Night, which just happens to be the perfect time to recreate the conditions for another interplanar body-swap. You’d have to be some sore of Big Bad Evil Guy mastermind to set that kind of thing in motion!
The game is afoot, and Handbook-World’s sporadic plot is climbing towards its next climax. But while we wait for the inevitable fireworks, let’s pause to consider Antipaladin’s plight more carefully. Imagine that you’ve just failed your check to realize something is wrong. There are two primary ways to play it.
- Scenario 1: Obnoxiously Suspicious — Something about your partymate’s behavior is off. It’s subtle though. A lesser adventurer might have missed it. But a fighting man of your level picked up on the signs straight away! Perhaps it was a small tick of facial expression. Maybe you sensed the the raw hatred wafting off of the thing that wears your companion’s face. Or maybe it’s the fact that your GM passed them a 3×5 index card when they failed that save versus mind control. You’ve got a perfectly respectable +0 to Notice Body Language though, so it’s only fair that you play your hunch. Better grind the game to a halt while you question this impostor like a Law & Order LARPer, hoping to catch them in a lie. Maybe tie them up for good measure. After all, you’ve only survived this long by
metagamingbeing careful! - Scenario 2: Trusting Idiot — You know just how to catch an impostor. All you’ve got to do is stare them in the eye. Watch to see if they blink. Everyone knows that blinking is a sure sign of duplicity. If they can return your, “Hey, you doing alright?” with a steady gaze, then everything is A-OK. I mean sure, you the player know that the roll totally sucked. Your buddy is talking like he’s got a brain slug and looks like he’s wearing an Edgar suit. But as a character, you’ve got to respect the dice. And the dice tell you that you that you’re required to accompany them into that perfectly-innocent abandoned steel works. Any follow-up questions or sensible precautions are tantamount to cheating.
I suspect that we’re working with a false dichotomy here. There’s got to be a middle way between these two extremes, but what exactly does it look like? Tell us how to split the difference between the twin poles of a failed Insight check down in the comments!
ARE YOU AN IMPATIENT GAMER? If so, you should check out the “Henchman” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. For just one buck a month, you can get each and every Handbook of Heroes comic a day earlier than the rest of your party members. That’s bragging rights right there!
I treat this issue a lot like the infamous “Why can’t my violent musclebuond barbarian intimidate anyone?” question. The answer is: they totally can. An intimidate check isn’t necessary to scare someone who has every reason to be scared. It’s a way to scare them OUT OF PROPORTION to the situation.
Similarly, when that one slimy selfish fellow-survivor is suddenly sweating, hiding one hand, and turning faintly greyish-green, you don’t need an insight check to tell that he’s hiding a zombie bite. Perception and insight checks are to pick up clues that anyone else might miss, not to find one’s own arse with both hands.
That said, when a player knows or suspects something OOC that their character is truly unaware of, we expect them to play the character’s knowledge honestly. Metagaming is no fun.
Ah see, I don’t state as “out of proportion to the situation” but rather thusly:
Intimidation is when you want to use scare tactics to get someone to do something useful to you. Try using intimidation to make some one run from a fight and //fail//” They will instead attack out of fear*.
Try to intimidate the merchant into cutting you a deal for the thing you have to have a fail? He closes shop and calls the guards.
Try to use intimidate to start a fight and fail? They are to scared* to fight.
Try using intimidation as interrogation and fail? They lie because they are afraid to say something wrong, or get confused and give the wrong information…
Like you, the intimidation might have still scared them, but they were not frightened in a //useful// manner.
* Or not, maybe they really just are afraid, after all part of intimidation is projecting the resolve that one is willing to use violence, so maybe the “big scary barbarian” ends up looking ridiculous or more like a cuddly-wuddly bear-barian…
Or as I keep suspecting will eventually happen when my scary-as-eff ogress barbarian finally fumbles an Intimidation roll, the character is just too stupid to be effective with the results (in our game we roll, assess the results, then narrate what is said and how, so far she keeps getting the results she wants, but her Will is terrible and that’s what fuels the Intimidation skill in GURPS, so her Intimidation skill is pretty low… I’ve just always rolled really well every time so far).
Oh, we’d definitely play it straight… if the dice say our characters are oblivious, then oblivious they are.
Because that’s just fun to play… knowing that the other PC has been a traitor all along, but stringing it along until the truth is eventually revealed. For about 4-5 sessions, the players all knew that one of the characters was an evil bastard who’d be betraying us at the most convenient opportunity… so our characters went along with it, maybe picking up some suspicions, but not acting on anything they couldn’t know. And when it happened, it was great — his plan almost worked, but fittingly, the dice turned on him as he tried to make his escape.
> if the dice say our characters are oblivious, then oblivious they are.
Maybe that’s part of the problem.
“I think they might be lying to me. Insight check.”
*fail*
The way you frame the response determines a lot. There’s a world of difference between, “You definitely think they’re lying” on the one hand and “They’re hard to read” on the other. I like that the latter leaves you free to act on your suspicions without chaining you to “trusting idiot” status.
The people I play with are, paranoid to the extend that only the knowledge hungry Warlock went to investigate an abandined ship. cue yakety sax as the squishy caster does his best to survive untill help comes, see had they all gone no problem no biggie, the thing is, they are all certain that I have kraken lurking somewhere nearby. I may have to cater to their wishes.
Two ways: if it’s a spur of the moment thing, like being charmed in combat, we just play it like your option 2. Trust until proven otherwise. After all, it’s way more fun to exclaim “You stabbed me! D:” then grind the game to a halt.
The other method is to make sure the party gets separated and charmed by the villains. Upon reuniting, it’s a lot more believable for that one teammate to be charmed, and this raises all sorts of fun questions and grilling. Especially if the teammate is actually innocent.
I’ve always run my tables where players can choose whatever they want to believe, BUT if you roll the dice then you have to abide by the dice outcome.
So if you choose to believe a teammate has been dominated/replaced/whatever that’s fine. But if you decide to roll sense motive to gain more insight in the matter and flub the roll … well, maybe you’re just being paranoid.
Thankfully, I have a group of players that are really good about going with the dice’s results. 🙂
My LARP group from college doubled down on the in-game Big Lie: my character died his final death as a hero, fighting alone against an undead horde (and eventually being turned) just to buy the townsfolk a few more minutes to prepare. Supposedly there was even a statue erected to him for his sacrifice.
Out-of-game, most everyone knew that I had been brain-whammied just a short while into the Halloween event and had spent the rest of the day quietly assassinating my friends, associates, and random townspeople one-by-one until I accidentally chose to attack an NPC necromancer and –well– chose *poorly.*
In-game, though, no PC remembered the last few minutes or so before they woke up in a resurrection circle, so the players continued to play along, even to the point of creating an elaborate (but thoroughly plausible) fiction to explain where I’d been all day and why my zombie-self was among the throng of enemies in the climactic battle.
**To address today’s question, we typically RP the heck out of it and reserve the Skill checks to try to squelch the meta-gamers. (“Sorry, the dice say no.”) I’ve only ever had two or three really problematic players, but –man– they can be a pain in the neck. That’s when I start peppering the adventure with random Perception checks and Save rolls and passed notes that mean absolutely nothing to disguise the moments when they actually mean *something*.
“Have the court assassin put a placebo in his drink as a warning.”
I really like when this sort of thing pops up, because my favorite characters are usually either not the brightest tool in the shed or have their head stuck in the clouds. So when I fail a suspicion check like this, that’s usually my que to ‘accidentally’ drop references or ironic statements about what’s actually going on, and watch the lier squirm while my character looks on in innocent confusion / complete obliviousness. It helps that usually I’m the only one who fails the check, so I often become the Watson to everyone else’s Sherlock Holmes, either occasionally getting a small detail right (allowing other people who know what’s actually going on to agree with what I ‘accidentally’ said, which allows me to participate instead of being locked out of the conversation) or more often to say something that is completely, ironically wrong (which like many ironic things, is usually good for a laugh and allows the players in the know to correct me and thus clue my character in on what’s going on, or build off of it for their own gags or conversational purposes).
For example, if someone poisoned the wine at a dinner and everyone else noticed that they’re now just pretending to drink from it, instead of trying to insist that they seem normal to me or just fading from the conversation entirely, it’s much more funny to take their claim of just savoring the wine at face value and helpfully refill their glass with the poisoned wine.
I don’t really like this situation because of the issues you pointed out above. Invariably, it always seems to me that you can’t even play this one because of the rampant metagaming that goes on around this.
But this is something that virtual tabletops and the distance of a few hundred miles has solved. You can under the table ask for a will save and then issue instructions in DM’s that no one else will know about until *the moment,* which preserves the illusion completely.
That’s the whole point after all. The not knowing. If then, your table starts rolling checks on that person, in theory it’s because they realize these things are out of character for them.
Not sure where the trouble is. Being obnoxiously suspicious when you fail your sense motive check is metagaming, and of course, obnoxious. Of course there are bad players who do it, but that doesn’t mean that we ought accept it as a legitimate course of action.
“This is doppelganger country. We gotta be careful.”
“YeS. LeT uS taKE nECEsssarY pRECauTionS!”
“Why are you talking like that?”
“nO rEAsoN!”
[failed insight check]
“Ah. Then I trust you implicitly and will immediately turn my back upon you as the dice gods demand.”
______________________
It’s a silly example, but surely it’s reasonable to adapt to context clues beyond the dice result? Perhaps keeping the dude in front of the party or watching closely for any other slipups…?
“It’s a silly example, but surely it’s reasonable to adapt to context clues beyond the dice result?”
I’m with Cinnamon, that would be a ‘no’ it’s not perfectly reasonable”. It is in fact Bad Metagaming.
Unless you always treated that PC that way, or always went out of your way to paranoid about everyone, but that’s a whole ‘nother mimic, err, kettle of fish.
It’s perfectly reasonable to enact “doppleganger land” protocols in advance, and if the PC //fails the protocols// but otherwise RNGesus says you “believe them” to then be suspicious regardless of the dice… because at that point you have clear evidence. But that requires preparation and we all know how well “PCs” and “Preparedness” go together.
My husband has proposed an interesting third option that I’ll suggest here:
Refuse to roll insight at all, because you’re already suspicious. His argument is that the insight roll is supposed to aid you in determining what is suspicious, not force you to act like something that is suspicious isn’t suspicious. Once you do roll it, though, you have to play to what you rolled.
Got a typo there in the rant, I think.
“You’ve got a perfection respectable +0 to Notice Body Language though” should be “perfectly”.
I’ve only encountered mind control-adjacent effects in combat, where the affected party member immediately ended up attacking the rest of the party.
Mind control/altering effects beyond that tend to be one of my lines because of a bad RP experience a few years ago.
Fixed. TY for the heads up. 🙂
Sorry to hear that mind control went wrong for ya. It can be a fun twist, but when handled wrong it just murders your agency. :/
This is a tricky one because most of the time I encounter this issue it’s often coupled with the GM asking me to roll Insight (or whatever) instead of just being allowed to be suspicious because I am. Though to be fair I often ask to roll too, mainly to confirm my suspicions, only to get a poor result and be left in that weird situation where I should still be suspicious but not confirmed anything, but the dice are telling me I should be putting those suspicions aside. *shrug*
Think there’s a better way to handle it? Is this a moment where you *shouldn’t* be asked to roll?
Probably shouldn’t be *asked* to roll. But like…. not having the option would also be bad since sometimes you really just can’t get a read on things your character might.
Isn’t that literally how the game works though? I thought the whole point that the dice result and your character’s skills tell you whether they can do something. And that the player has to use that information to decide what the character would reasonably do based on that?
I thought that was the game. Have I been doing it wrong?
See my response to Cinnamon above.
It’s a fundamental question of agency. Same deal as a character saying, “I roll Diplomacy at you, so you have to do what I say.” Those dice roles should inform RP, but I don’t think they should 100% dictate action.
Something tells me this was a comic for the other handbook before a script rewrite.
There’s nothing in the bylaws that saws demonic sacrifice must take place in the nude. That’s traditional, not mandatory.
And that’s the problem with the campaign setting now, the dissolution of traditional values in the demonic sacrifice. Next they’ll be saying that witches no longer have the right to dance around a campfire naked under the full moon.
For some reason, Antipaladin’s smile at being chained up makes me think he believes this will lead to a situation for the other handbook.
—
For the topic, I’m generally a fan of the dice decide. My out of character knowledge of tropes, dice rolls, etc shouldn’t influence my in-character awareness of what is going on. If it was obvious, then it shouldn’t require a dice roll in the first place. Part of why I’ve embraced secret checks as a GM for these types of rolls – player tells their skill modifier and I tell them what their character believes based on the secret roll without them knowing how the roll went. If something else comes up later to indicate something is off, then they can get another roll with a circumstance bonus.
I feel this tension is one of the often overlooked advantages to keeping secrets secret on both an in-character and out-of-character level. (This doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily best for a given group/game/individual-situation, just that it’s one more factor to weigh against each other).
When people talk about doing that, they often either present the advantages somewhat adversarially (i.e. it’s about preventing metagaming), or presents it as a way to allow for being surprised.
But it can also be a way to allow people to figure out the secret, to see through the deception and to take action.
After all, it’s a common human phenomena that once we know something, that thing often seems obvious. This makes it pretty difficult to judge whether it actually is obvious and might instead get people stuck in a situation of either metagaming through excessive suspicion or through excessive naivety.
Another tactic I’ve tried (with varying levels of success) is “confess to a lesser crime to divert suspicion from the greater evil.” Sometimes via player ingenuity, sometimes via a ‘nudge’ note from the DM to help the player come up with a cover story.
-) Ex. 1: Admit that your Rogue found a 500 gp ruby in the stable that you withheld from the party. (True. Produce the gem.) THAT’s why you’ve been out of sorts–bad Bluff skills–and what their Sense Motive has been detecting all along. Sure. It has nothing to do with the fact that you poisoned their wineskins while they slept. (Also true.)
-) Ex. 2: (When the PCs were in danger of stonewalling the entire mission because THAT ONE GUY AT THE TABLE was convinced the innocent innkeeper was somehow nefarious.) Yep, the innkeeper was hiding something: the previous tenants of your room paid for a month’s lodging before they went missing. Since you just paid to rent the same room, technically he’s double-booked it, got paid twice, and could be in legal trouble if the original lodgers ever came back. (By inventing something on the spot for the innkeeper to fess-up to, I could pat the conspiracy nut on the head and say “Good on you! Turns out the innkeeper WAS guilty of something. Well done, those natural instincts paid off!”)
I think this is a sign of a more fundamental problem with how GMs are told to run bluff and sense motive/insight. Most GMs seem to interpret a successful bluff check as “the target believes the thing”. But that kind of thing – forcibly taking away a character’s agency – is normally reserved for explicitly magic effects like charm person, not just a skill roll. And it should be, or you get situations like this when someone tries to use the skill on another player.
The right way to handle bluff and sense motive, in my opinion, is to make it like any other skill roll – they determine what physically happens, and what the character perceives. If your sense motive beats the target’s bluff, then the GM should tell you that you see some sort of tell – the character isn’t looking you in the eyes, or is fidgeting nervously, or whatever. If the bluff roll beats the sense motive, you don’t see any tells to indicate that they’re lying. That’s all. You’re then free to hve your character form any conclusion you like, based on the available data.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F74mBRjwTc
As I’ve played more OSR games I’ve gone more on the end of rolling more sparingly, primarily when there’s risk and/or uncertainty about what happens. For stuff like insight checks (with NPCs) I only call for a roll when the player’s trying to gain more of a read on someone than what I’ve already described to everyone. And if they succeed I just tell them what they notice, not what conclusion they should come to. That’s always up to the player.
PvP situations are different out of necessity because if someone rolls deception then everyone at the table will know they’re lying. I just try to avoid rolls and play things out purely through roleplaying as much as possible, but sometimes players just gotta play dumb.
> And if they succeed I just tell them what they notice, not what conclusion they should come to.
I’m need an example. Do you mean something like, “You notice he’s sweating,” rather than saying, “He’s lying?”
Basically, although I try to be a little less cryptic than that.
So like, looking at insight checks, first I’ll make sure I understand what the player’s goal is. So in this case it would be something like “I want to look for signs that they’re lying”.
Next, I ask them how they’re doing it. I know they’re not psychology experts, I just need a very basic idea of their approach. Ex. “I want to try to read their body language”, or “I want to search for inconsistencies in their story”, or “I want to question them in a way that’ll make them stumble and reveal their lie”.
Since I only roll if the outcome is uncertain, I consider the PC’s and NPC’s capabilities to decide if they even need to roll. Like catching a 5 year old lying wouldn’t take a roll. Trying to read the body language of a trained spy also wouldn’t work, that’s like the first thing they would mask.
But once I decide the outcome is uncertain, we do the roll, and the player succeeds, I tell them what they find. So if they were checking body language for signs of lying, I might say “You see potential signs that they’re hiding something; They’re showing signs of nervousness when recounting their story, and they try to avoid going into details. Also they’re sweating.” Basically, it’s the difference between saying “you find signs that indicate they might be lying” vs “they’re lying”.
Honestly it’s a lot more effort than just “roll insight” followed by “they’re lying”. But IMO it helps avoid players using social rolls as mind reading or mind control, and keeps them more immersed. They’re thinking through to their own conclusion (even if it’s sometimes really obvious), rather than being spoonfed.