In the last Rulings in Practice I mentioned that the techniques used for resolving perception tests can be contentious and result in a surprising amount of rancor and anger.
But social skills are where the long knives come out.
There are three main reasons for this:
- Social skills can be used to take control of a player’s character away from them. Players tend not to like this, and it’s particularly disruptive for any players with a strong sense of character ownership and immersion. The mechanics can actually violate such characters, having a permanent negative impact that lasts long after the immediate interaction has been resolved.
- Many players put a very high premium on playing out high quality social interactions as their characters. They often come to not only associate but to equate these social interactions with roleplaying (leading, for example, to memes like “roleplaying vs. rollplaying”), and because it can often be hard to find groups that truly commit to these interactions, players who value them can be very protective of them. Social skill tests can be used to bypass these imaginary social interactions.
- Many published games are very bad at handling social skills, contributing to the belief that social skills not only CAN be used in these ways, but MUST be used in these ways. Ironically, it has often been the case that the more a game system attempted to focus on social skill resolution, the worse its actual handling of those social skills would be (because, apparently, attempting to codify the complexities of human social interactions with a couple of polyhedral dice is a tricky proposition).
Generally speaking, I’m of the opinion that social skills (and other social mechanics) can be used well. I’m also of the opinion that, when used appropriately, social skills can actually enhance and improve the aspects of the game that they so often harm instead.
THE SECRET OF SOCIAL SKILLS
The secret to handling social skills is to treat them exactly like any other skill:
- State intention
- Make the check.
- Narrate result.
For example, you would never do this:
Player: I jump up, grab a branch, and quickly make my way to the top of the tree. Once there, I leap to the balcony, pick the lock on the door, slip inside, find the secret papers in the lockbox on the princess’ dressing table, and sneak back out without being noticed.
GM: Make a Climb check. (it fails) Okay, I guess you didn’t actually do any of that stuff.
So don’t do it with social skills, either. Don’t play out an entire conversation and then say, “Okay, let’s go back to step one and see if any of this actually happened.”
Instead:
Player: I want to convince this guy to spill his guts.
GM: Make an Intimidate check. (it succeeds)
Player: “SWEAR TO ME!”
GM: “I don’t know! I never knew! Never! They went to some guy for a couple of days before they went to the dealer. There was something else in the drugs. Something hidden!”
Or:
Player: I want to convince this guy to spill his guts.
GM: Make an Intimidate check. (it fails)
Player: “SWEAR TO ME!”
GM: The guy chuckles. “Nobody’s going to tell you nothing. They’re wise to your act. You’ve got rules. The Joker… he’s got no rules. Nobody’s going to cross him for you.”
Note that the out of character declaration of intention isn’t essential here. This would be an equally valid declaration of intention:
Player: “SWEAR TO ME!”
GM: Make an Intimidate check.
Or this one, if the player and GM aren’t on the same wavelength:
Player: “SWEAR TO ME!”
GM: What reaction are you looking for here?
Player: I’m trying to convince this guy to spill his guts.
GM: Make an Intimidate check.
What you’re actually looking to avoid here is mistaking the declaration of intention as a fictional truth: “I stab the orc with my sword!” is a statement of intention, not truth, and no one gets confused if the attack roll fails and it turns out that, no, you didn’t stab the orc with your sword. With social skills, on the other hand, people often move past the intention or interpret intentions as fictional truths; and then they get dissonance when the mechanical resolution is out of line with their intention.
The classic archetype of this is playing out a long, dramatic, and beautifully delivered speech and then rolling a 1 on the Oration check.
ROLEPLAY THE OUTCOME
A major stumbling block you can run into at this point is to come out of the mechanical resolution and remain generic or general in the narration of outcome. Instead of shifting into roleplaying, you just broadly describe the result. Like this:
GM: Make an Intimidate check. (it fails) It’s clear he’s more afraid of the Joker than he is of you and he refuses to tell you anything.
This can be okay in some situations, but it’s usually preferable to actually roleplay through the outcome.
One of the reasons players can fall into this bad habit is because it’s fairly typical for narrating outcome to be the GM’s responsibility. So a mechanical check is made, the outcome of the interaction is determined, and the GM falls into the default pattern of describing that outcome. But since the GM can’t put words into the PC’s mouth, they’re sort of “forced” into describing that outcome in a general and non-specific way.
Once you recognize the unintended consequence of following familiar patterns, it’s fairly easy to break yourself of the habit and frame the outcome in terms of strong NPC dialogue.
MECHANICS AS ROLEPLAYING PROMPT
When the player and GM both understand this paradigm, however, they can push the technique to even greater effect by using the mechanics as an improvisational cue:
GM: Okay, you find him shaking down a falafel dealer.
Player: Great. I’m going to wait until he’s a little isolated, then batarang his leg, haul him up to the roof, dangle him over the edge, and scare the shit out of him.
GM: Great. He cuts down an alley towards 6th Street. Make an Intimidate check. (it succeeds)
Player: “WHERE WERE THE OTHER DRUGS GOING?”
GM: “I never knew. I don’t know. I swear to God—”
Player: “SWEAR TO ME!” I release him and stop him just before he splatters on the ground. Then I haul him back up.
GM: “I don’t know! I never knew! Never! They went to some guy for a couple of days before they went to the dealer.”
Player: “Why?”
GM: “There was something… something else in the drugs. Something hidden!”
The GM doesn’t have to try to bundle the entire resolution into a single line of NPC dialogue (and maybe a short summary). Instead, the GM and player can both key off the mechanical outcome and roleplay out the rest of the scene consistent with that result. This basically extends the narration of outcome and turns it into a collaboration between everyone participating in the conversation. The above example also shows how you can also think of this as a form of letting it ride: The check determined that the NPC is intimidated and will spill his guts, and that remains true as the PC continues to ask questions.
This technique isn’t appropriate for every situation, but can be very powerful in practice and result in roleplaying that’s more daring, interesting, and definitive than would otherwise be possible.
Once an entire group gets into sync with a technique like this, you may discover that mechanics-first declarations – which some would consider anathema to immersive play – can actually end up being incredibly effective at creating powerful, unexpected, and memorable moments for exploring character.
On an abstract level, what you’re doing is declaring intention, making a mechanical check, looking at the result, and then figuring out what your method is through play as a result of the check you made. It can push characters (PCs and NPCs alike) in completely unexpected directions and give space for strong, bold choices in how you play your character.
SOCIAL VECTORS & MULTI-STEP RESOLUTION
Although letting it ride is one option for a social encounter, you can also use multi-step action resolution. As with any other multi-step resolution, there are a few good practices to observe. Most notably, you want to make sure that each additional resolution point is landing at the point of a meaningful choice, a meaningful consequence, or both. Don’t just make another Diplomacy check; make another Diplomacy check because the conversation has reached some crucial moment.
For example, you should probably avoid making a new Intimidate check for every single question you ask the informer you’ve got strung up by their ankle. But it might be appropriate to make another check to convince them not to tell anybody about your conversation with them.
Similarly, during tense negotiations each point of contention in the final agreement might be determined by a different skill check. As you play through these negotiations, this also allows you to change your methods: You might use a Diplomacy check for certain points, but then let the barbarian come in with a strong Intimidation routine to close the deal.
Although they can be less clear-cut, social interactions can also be structured as vectors. Vectors, if you recall, are about figuring out how to establish a “line of sight” to your objective: You need to do X before you can do Y before you can do Z. You need to sneak up to the door before you can pick the lock before you can open it. You need to convince the frightened barkeep to let you in before you can convince the frightened villagers to evacuate because time is running out.
(One of the cool things about thinking in terms of vectors is that you can freely swap in non-social solutions or vice versa: Maybe instead of persuading the barkeep to open the door, you just kick it open. Or instead of picking the lock you convince the security guard on duty that you left your badge up on the 6th floor and it’ll just take a minute to go grab it. As the GM you can just say, “There’s a thing in your way,” and then let the players figure out how they want to vector around – or through! – that thing.)
Because social situations tend to be less easily quantifiable and, as a result, more malleable, they work really well with abstract vector depth: You can go into a social interaction without really knowing how many obstacles might exist between the PCs and the goal they want to achieve or what exactly those obstacles are.
What I refer to as complex skill checks, therefore, often work well for social interactions that you want to give some heft to. (These mechanics are stuff like “X successes before Y failures” or, in many dice pool systems, “continue making checks until you achieve X successes.”) Each mechanical resolution can be framed as an obstacle and the players determine how they want to deal with that obstacle, prompting the next skill check. Exactly what the obstacles are along the way (i.e., what objections the person they’re talking to has to their plan ) and how they’re dealt with will depend heavily on context and will naturally evolve as the conversation continues. (It’s not unusual to discover that a conversation you thought was about one thing suddenly becomes about something else entirely.)
The Psywar system I designed for the Infinity RPG was built on similar principles: You could influence people to do what you wanted by inflicting Metanoia on them (using the same mechanical systems that inflicted Wounds in combat and Breaches when hacking; Metanoia meaning literally “the changing of one’s mind”). The amount of Metanoia you needed to inflict was dependent on the Intransigence of the target, and that was determined by their unwillingness to do the particular thing you wanted them to do.
SOCIAL SKILLS COMPELLING PCs
Intransigence in Infinity also gave me a mechanism for giving players flexible control over how their characters would be impacted by the Psywar mechanics. As I wrote in the rulebook:
PCs can also be targeted by Psywar attacks. This means that they can suffer Metanoia Effects and, as a result, have their beliefs or actions altered.
For some players, this can be problematic because their enjoyment of the game depends (for one reason or another) on having complete control over their character. The line between what’s acceptable and unacceptable for these players can be a fuzzy one and it can also vary significantly. Some players, for example, will be okay with their characters panicking against their will and fleeing from the scene of a battle, but will not be comfortable if they are “forced” to trust someone or to agree to a particular course of action.
If your group has concerns about using Metanoia Effects on the PCs, we recommend having a frank discussion and figuring out where to draw the line. However, we also recommend that what is good for the goose is good for the gander: If, for example, NPCs cannot force the PCs to retreat, then PCs cannot do the that to NPCs, either. Keep the playing field level.
Another possible compromise is to allow players to set the Intransigence scores for their own PCs, the same way that the GM sets them for the NPCs. (These can, of course, vary based on circumstance and the Metanoia Effect being attempted.) This only works if the numbers are set in good faith, of course, but it empowers the players to make sure that the system is reflecting their sense of who their characters truly are.
Broadly speaking, this passage covers most of my thoughts on this topic.
First, social skills that compel behavior create more friction when they aren’t modeling character behavior “correctly,” particularly from the point of view of the player controlling that character. (Allowing players to set their own characters Intransigence value was a really good way of empowering them: If they felt their character would be strongly opposed to X, they could express that without vetoing the mechanic entirely.)
Second, RPGs are fundamentally about making choices as if you were your character. Therefore, a mechanic which effectively “plays the game for you” can be very problematic if it’s not handled correctly.
(The reverse argument I’ve often heard is that being forced to believe a lie against your will, for example, is not fundamentally different than being stabbed through your kidney with three feet of steel against your will. Both will remove character agency and there’s really no reason to distinguish between the two.
A more revealing example, however, is the distinction between dominate person being used to force your character to do something and a Persuasion skill doing the same thing. Why do the same people who readily accept the former object to the latter? Because one of these things is removing the character’s ability to control their actions and the other one is removing the player’s ability to control their character. That distinction doesn’t matter to some people, but it matters intensely to others.)
That’s why, when you do have a mechanic that compels PC behavior, I generally prefer a mechanic that gives a prompt to the player and then allows the player to determine what that means for their character and how it plays out. This is how I handle the Sanity mechanic in Call of Cthulhu, for example: The mechanic provides a “you’re broken now” prompt and then the player decides whether that means they’re running away screaming, breaking down into uncontrollable sobbing, fainting dead away, regressing into a non-responsive catatonia, etc.
SOCIAL SKILLS AS INFORMATION
For similar reasons, I tend to like social skills that give the PCs information rather than dictating their behavior.
For example, should the outcome of a Bluff check be “you believe the lie and you have to act as if you are completely gulled and have no doubts whatsoever” or should the outcome of a successful Bluff check be “he looks like he’s telling the truth / you don’t see any reason not to believe what he’s saying?”
To put this in perspective, imagine that this was a poker game: Someone makes a Bluff check and succeeds against your Sense Motive check. Should the mechanics force the PC to call his bet without having any choice in the matter? Or should the mechanics simply report “you think he’s got the better hand” and then let you make the decision?
(In the presence of meta-knowledge this can potentially lead to abuse, but that’s really a completely different situation that’s only tangentially related to the social skill resolution itself.)
If you’re feeling resistance to this idea, consider that it’s not really limited to social skills. For example, a PC makes a Spot check to see someone hiding in the room. The successful check doesn’t compel them to immediately attack: The Spot check provides them with information (“there’s a dude hiding there” or “you don’t see anybody hiding there”) and then you make a decision about what to do with that information. Similarly, a Sense Motive check provides you with information (“you think he’s in love with Sarah” or “you don’t think he’s lying”) and it’s still up to you to make a decision about what to do with that information.
SOCIAL SKILLS WITH MECHANICAL CONSEQUENCES
Social skills can similarly apply mechanical consequences without compelling character behavior (once again leaving the ultimate choice of how to respond to that mechanical stimulus up to the player).
For example, instead of forcing a character to retreat, a successful Intimidate check might apply a morale penalty to the affected character’s actions. The ultimate decision of whether to drop their sword and run away screaming in response to that stimulus is left up to the player.
SOCIAL SKILLS AS SOCIAL CLUE
As social skills provide information, they can create fortune in the middle resolutions: The initial social skill resolution provides clues about what approaches might (or might not) work with the targeted character: Are they susceptible to bribes? A coward who can be intimidated? Maybe you realize that they’re secretly in love with Teodora… is there a way you can use that information (or do you just tuck it away for later)?
Many social skill resolutions can actually be systemically broken down into this two-stage approach to good effect.
Flubbing the initial check, of course, is also likely to have an impact on how the conversation plays out. For example, consider what happens in X-Men: First Class when Charles Xavier – who can read minds and, therefore, has never put a single goddamn skill point into his Sense Motive skill – is suddenly faced with the need to figure out the best argument to use with a Holocaust-survivor wearing a telepathy-blocking helmet:
Charles: Erik, you said it yourself. We’re better men. This is the time to prove it. There are thousands of men on those ships. Good, honest, innocent men. They’re just following orders.
Erik: I’ve been at the mercy of men just following orders. Never again.
Wow that was great insight.
Interesting post at an interesting moment. I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing a lot, recently, because of, A) a YouTube video that argued we resolve Charisma checks backwards compared to everything else, and, B) the RPG Forthright, which has a passage that basically says it’s up to the player if their character believes something or not (so there’s no Bluff mechanic, for instance).
[…] Reader BubbaDave pointed me at Justin Alexander’s post from just a couple days ago titled Rulings in Practice: Social Skills. It’s a pretty insightful post and I feel like I have a lot to react to, so please go give it […]
Regarding the use of social skills against the players, what I did in my game was remove Sense Motive and make things like intimidate, diplomacy and deception player-only skills, due to what I call “information asymmetry”. As in: if the player is trying to pass false information, I need to know this to call for a Deception check, so the GM, as a person, never have to guess if the player is telling the truth or not, while the players need a skill check to have a chance. By removing the skill, the players now have to make important decisions about who and what to trust, and since this is a game about making choices, this gives it much more weight.
Thanks for this post, social interactions are nearly always one of the most difficult components to master in the art of rulings…
I’ve always been bothered by the conflict between player skill and character skill in this field. It’s usually with social interactions that player expertise manifests the most. No one has ever swung a sword at a dragon, so everyone trusts the die to tell them what to do (“It’s a 19! I hit the weak spot between the beast’s scales”). By contrast, everyone can make an argument, but people aren’t equally gifted at that. Which results in the following problems…
If player expertise trumps character expertise, then a smart player who plays a gruff, sullen and socially awkward character (the stereotypical Dwarf) may come up with good lines of speech and clever cases… which don’t fit their character. Hence a conflict between playing a role (because delivering an improvised speech in a fiction world definitely is playing a role), and playing THEIR role (because that’s not what their character is supposed to do). Meanwhile, a shy or otherwise awkward player won’t be able to shine in social interactions even though they play a silver-tongued character. If the former player eclipses the latter, then escapism is negatively affected.
Conversely, if character expertise trumps player expertise, the eloquent player may feel frustrated if the dice (modified by character expertise) says they need to artificially botch their speech. When using fortune at the end (rolling dice after speaking) it’s even worse: a very convincing speech just falls flat, it feels so dissociated. Meanwhile, the socially awkward player in command of the silver-tongue character tends to treat successful rolls as Jedi mind tricks: “20! [success] The guard lets us in when I ask”.
Here a possible solution is to let the die roll shape the world, the way you described in your “Narrating Outcomes” article. The roll encompasses not just internal factor (how good the player/character is at offering a bribe, for example) but external factors (how prone to corruption the guard actually is). That, however, works best when the context still has enough room for development. It becomes much harder to use in heavily detailed situations, such as when dealing with a major NPC whose history and personality are already established.
Another solution is to let players brainstorm speech ideas in advance, and then have the character who’s best at negotiating deliver the speech in-game. This way, the eloquent player gets to formulate their ideas and, in some way, train the more awkward player, who’s going to deliver the speech once the arguments have been laid out. If you can make this work it’s also a great opportunity for the awkward player to practice and improve. Meanwhile, you can still reward player expertise in minor ways (an Inspiration die in D&D 5, for instance) that incentivize coming up with good ideas and nice wording, without re-enacting in-game the real-world hierarchy of oration skills.
I also forgot to mention that what you say about “social skills as social clues” also helps mending the divorce between player expertise and character expertise. If the awkward guy playing the charismatic character rolls well, you can give him information before role-playing: “while talking to the guard you remember seeing him leave the poker game with an angry look”. You give the player ammunition to make a better case. You wouldn’t have given that information to the eloquent player rolling poorly.
Good point about letting the group brainstorm ideas in the metagame and then collate them together into a single character who is most skilled in the game world. There’s probably whole articles that can be written about the social contracts for that! But it is a good way to buttress mismatches between character and player competency.
It’s the player equivalent of the GM technique for modeling genius (where you can have genius characters drawing conclusions you’re not capable of because you have access to metagame information the genius NPC doesn’t).
One other thing to keep in mind is that “trump” does not always equate to “automatic success.” If you choose a good line of argument that appeals to the person you’re trying to convince, you’re going to have an easier Diplomacy DC than someone who doesn’t choose a particularly appropriate argument. But if their still is 15 points higher than yours, the +2 bonus you’re getting from player expertise won’t completely close that gap.
Looking to combat, this is like the guy who has the better build but worse tactical sense having a tougher time in fights than the guy whose player expertise is letting him make best use of his abilities.
For example: In one group I had a player who was not great at synergizing their combat actions with the rest of the group. After some coaching, that player started making it a point to, for example, always set up flanking with the guy who had the feat giving a +4 bonus when providing flanking. Which also let the rogue who had the “get sneak attack damage with a ranged weapon when your allies are flanking the target” feat start unleashing massive damage a lot more frequently. Suddenly the whole group was performing better in combat as a result of player expertise.
Now that’s one player getting better. But it’s easy to imagine a similar divide across two different players with different levels of expertise when it comes to maximizing their combat builds. Just taking advantage of flanking in D&D3, for examples, is a 10% swing in effectiveness compared to not doing that. In Trail of Cthulhu there’s a really significant difference in survivability between characters who routinely seek cover and those who don’t. And so forth.
Then, there’s the general issue that recently came up in one of the games I play in: PCs attempting to seduce each other.
It’s creepy and inappropriate, as far as I’m concerned; but it did come up as an issue, and I know this isn’t the only game where it has.
The ruling was that a PC could not actually force another PC to give in to physical seduction with a successful roll. The interpretation of the successful roll might be that the target was aroused, or flustered, or what have you; but that physical seduction could not occur unless the PC chose it, on the grounds that it’s a personal and moral choice that can be very important to a character. So no matter how successful the roll, it’s still up to the individual to decide whether his or her character would cheat on a spouse or violate an oath of chastity, for example.
In this particular case I think that makes sense;and in an out-of-game sense, it’s the only acceptable option. I’m still squicked that it came up at all. :-/
FWIW, the Angry GM has an article (the first one I ever read, and one of his best IMO) that makes some of the same points: http://theangrygm.com/help-my-players-are-talking-to-things/
The Angry GM’s framing of social interactions is a really good complement to this. Understanding the NPC’s objection to cooperating helps inform the GM’s roleplayed response, even if it’s not a complex skill check and you’re letting one roll ride.
If the PC’s roll has succeeded, but they haven’t implicitly offered the NPC an incentive to override the objection, the NPC can raise the objection or ask for an incentive in their response. The success establishes a precedent that they will believe whatever reasonable thing the PC offers.
Angry does raise an interesting point about some methods having no realistic chance of success (being analogous to going east when the only door is to the west). Should the PC have to choose an angle that would work at the outset?
On the one hand, it’s useful to separate broad approaches (intimidation/argumentation/charm) so that these can have different risks and benefits and inform the player’s choice.
On the other, this could hinder mechanics-first declarations (which he seriously dislikes). I think these declarations are useful, especially when players aren’t as savvy as their characters. And a failed roll offers them the freedom to say something stupid, whereas fiction-first declarations incent them to always say something clever.
My current view is that as long as objections/incentives come up at some point, then the order shouldn’t matter. Sometimes these will be self-evident, and need no subsequent accounting. The fearful response to SWEAR TO ME establishes that the incentive of “More afraid of Batman than the people that guy’s informing on” has been created.
It seems like we can layer social challenges in this way. Sense Motive type skills reveal the best broad approach, then manipulative social skills establish success or failure, then the narrated result highlights objections and incentives, which the PC can address if they have not already done so.
A couple questions just came to mind:
First, how much specificity do you typically require for activating social skills? What’s the threshold for that? If a PC wants to question a witness about a crime and they resist talking, is it enough for the player to say “I want to Persuade him to talk” or should they have to offer a compelling reason as part of their declaration of intent? If the witness is uncooperative because they fear retaliation, should the PC have to address that or provide a countervailing incentive?
Second, how do you handle “impossible to convince this person to do X” in a way that doesn’t feel arbitrary? This another popular objection to social skills in RPGs. They can act like an implausible “I win button” in ways that don’t make conversational sense. While in principle telling the player “No” is no different from saying they can’t walk through walls, social interactions are nebulous enough that it’s hard to do that without it seeming like the GM is just being obstructionist for railroading’s sake.
I mention these together because it seems like having to present a reason makes telling players “No” more palatable. It’s really a form of saying “Tell me how you’re going to do that” when both you and the players know there’s nothing they could say or do to make the target cooperate.
On the other hand, selectively requiring specificity makes social skills more involved than most other skills. You don’t need to specify your search pattern when you toss a house, for example. You just say “I want to search the house”.
Another question occurred to me as I was mulling this over:
“Once an entire group gets into sync with a technique like this, you may discover that mechanics-first declarations – which some would consider anathema to immersive play – can actually end up being incredibly effective at creating powerful, unexpected, and memorable moments for exploring character.”
How do you allow player expertise to trump or buttress character expertise when applying mechanics-first declarations? The mechanical result is informing what you choose to say, rather than your choice of words biasing the mechanical result.
There’s certainly a lot of advantages to this. Players don’t always feel obliged to say something clever. If they fail, they feel like they have “permission” to say something obviously wrong, but more narratively interesting.
At the same time, it does mean that success or failure almost always come down to the dice, sacrificing some sense of “tactical” engagement in interactions that really benefit from that feeling.
My “Drunken behaviour” mechanic could be useful here. When PCs get drunk and then try to do something meaningful, I ask them to declare what they intend to do, and then what they would do if the “drink wins out”. Then they make a save vs their level of intoxication and perform one or the other.
This has resulted in some great party scenes where some players drink to excess to be sociable and then end up insulting the hosts or revealing secrets etc. all with players driving the actual actions.
I’m looking for using something similar when characters become possessed but still have the will to fight their possession. They choose a somewhat less cooperative and a somewhat more cooperative action, given the intent of the possessor, and save to decide which they do. The saves can also lead to a tightening or weakening of the possessor’s grip.
I think part of the issue that players can have with social mechanics compelling the PCs is that it produces a disassociative effect, just like Perception-type tests can if badly executed. For example, if an NPC rolls Bluff against the PC’s Sense Motive and succeeds, then the player now has knowledge the character does not have (that the NPC is probably lying), and so is incapable of fully identifying with his character. Or a Persuasion check, if sloppily executed, can easily mean that the character is convinced while the player is not, disassociating the two and impeding roleplaying.
@Aeshdan
I’ve thought about that issue myself. There are a couple techniques I employ to try and mitigate that.
Typically I keep the opponent’s result hidden, so that the player can’t be sure if they’ve succeeded or not. They can only guess with varying degrees of confidence, based on their own result (eg 2 vs 19).
To keep that result associated with the character, you can suggest to players that this confidence is exactly how their character feels as well. They are either confident they have a good read on the NPC and would have spotted a lie, or can’t get a read at all.
This character-confidence maps pretty well to the visceral reaction players have when the dice land (eg “A 2? Shit, I have no idea.” vs “There’s no way this guy beat a 19!”).
Like you mention, you still have the general problem that calling for Sense Motive rolls only when someone is lying automatically signals to the player that there’s a ruse, even if their character doesn’t spot it.
To obscure that, I will also periodically call for Sense Motive checks even if an NPC is not lying, to make it harder to identify the moments when they are.
Justin talks about using similar techniques for Perception checks. I think the same techniques work just as well for Sense Motive type checks.
https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/40318/roleplaying-games/rulings-in-practice-perception-type-tests-part-2-the-perception-tapestry
Do you have particular advice for determining the results of Insight/Sense Motive checks? I feel they can be dealt with similarly to Perception checks, but I also think the “Uncertain Checks” technique can be employed. Thoughts?
As a person that has low social skills, and has consistently been hampered by GM’s that insist on “roleplay your interactions, this is a roleplaying game”, and either determine success/failure, or bonus/penalty based on my personal social skills, this is a **WONDERFUL** article.
It is *painful* to never be able to play a socially successful character. And I’ve never had the words to properly explain this to GM’s before. And today?
I find Two! Two! Two articles on this! One full of ExclamationPOINTS! And the other full of good, insightful points.
Thank you for this. Now, if only I had found this a year ago.