DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 31C: The Obstinate Prisoner
“It’s been two days since I had a drink,” the orc said. “Are you planning to kill me?”
“What are you talking about?” Tee said. “I just poured water over you head.”
“Maybe if we tried a nicer approach?” Ranthir said. “Tell us what we want to know and we’ll give you some food.”
“You tore off my ear and killed my friends and you think I’m going to talk for a little bit of food?”
They shut the closet door and withdrew a little.
A bad habit for a GM is to just keep constantly re-making the same check until the outcome swaps. That might be calling for Stealth check after Stealth check until the PCs finally fail a check and the whole compound goes on high alert. Or it might be letting the PCs make Interrogation after Interrogation check until they finally get a success and crack their target.
That’s obviously not how I handled the interrogation in this session. (The orc prisoner remains uncracked.) Instead, I’m using a Let It Ride technique. In its most basic form this boils down to treating the initial check to resolve a situation as a binding result. For example, you can’t just keep making Pick Locks checks until you pick the lock: Your initial check determines whether or not this is a lock that you can pick at this time. (For a detailed example of what this can look like in practice, check out Letting It Ride on the Death Star.)
In this case, the binding check actually took place in the previous session when the PCs first attempted to interrogate their prisoner. I did allow a couple of different checks before “locking” things in, basically modeling your typical good cop/bad cop situation. (These were, in my opinion, sufficiently different approaches that different checks were merited. Similar to how you could still try to kick down the door even if your Pick Locks check failed.)
Players, of course, will continue to push for more checks if they’re trying to escape a failure. That’s good! The key thing, though, is that you want them to be creative. Not just, “I do it again.” (“I pick the lock again.” “I threaten the orc again.”) But creating some new way of thinking about or approaching or solving or overcoming the obstacle. As the GM, you want to hold the line – particularly in muddy social situations – because it will push play forward in interesting ways.
The last thing to note about letting it ride in a social scene, like this interrogation, is that you can – and almost certainly should! – play through the scene. The check determines outcome, but it’s still worthwhile to roleplay through the actual interaction. (And, through that interaction, the players may end up identifying the alternative approach that will allow them to forge a new path.)
With that being said, don’t let the players’ desire to escape failure allow the scene to drag out. If a social scene starts to spin its wheels, you need to wrap it up:
- Is there anything else you want to say here?
- It doesn’t look like she’s going to budge. What do you want to do next?
- You keep at her for another thirty minutes, but she refuses to crack. Now what?
Or, frankly, just cut to the next scene.
Campaign Journal: Session 31D – Running the Campaign: Roleplaying NPC Scenes
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index
I definitely have found in my running of RPGs that Social Scenes can grind to a halt very fast, mostly because players and probably GM aren’t actually that understanding of what actually does work socially but also because of this “I want to convince them…fail…can we convince them again?” kind of stuff. And unlike the pick lock scenario I do feel a lot of players don’t see a lot of other options available to them.
@Xercies, there are games that provide somewhat more structure for social “combat”. Technoir, maybe. You can steal the basic framework on a half-page DM cheat sheet, and use it to structure a D&D interaction also.
In Technoir, social conflict works by exactly the same mechanics as physical combat: you roll skill-vs-skill, and on success you “push” an “adjective” on your opponent. Succeed with a punch? Now they’re “bruised”. Succeed with fast talk? Now they’re “confused”. Then the GM decides if “confused” is sufficient for them to let you do what you want.
I’m not saying you need to import the whole system into D&D, just that it’s a good way of thinking about social interactions. As GM, you can explicitly tell the players that success on this roll will make the target *trusting*, or you can keep that informal and just say, “Oh, you failed. They’re *suspicious* now. You’ll have to find a different approach to get anywhere.” Where a different approach means going for a different descriptor, like “scared” or “distracted” or “drunk”.