I'm not sure that I insulted you, and certainly didn't do so on purpose, but if you feel insulted I apologize. You are correct that I made assumptions about your process of play that may not be true, and I know how annoying it is to be misunderstood. It's a particular peeve of mine, so I apologize for any misreading of your statement.
No problem. Thanks.
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Ok, so the way knowledge skills are written in 5e is forcing some degree of incoherence on your procedures of play because you don't think they work according to the pattern the other skills are designed with, namely that the other skills assume active, goal oriented, tangible activity? Is that a fairer summation of the situation in your opinion? Because, I agree that that is true, though in my case that wouldn't bother me.
I certainly do most of that with Int based 3e skills and would consider that valid things to be doing with even 3e skills, with the exception of not feeling the need to allow non-clerics to hallow ground because I'm ok with my game world having a lot of clerics but that's more of a setting decision than a process of play.
I don't however have any problem reconciling "I remember stuff" because as far as I'm concerned all fortune rolls are just resolving a doubtful proposition, and "I might already know something about this before..." is a both a plausible (not 0% chance) but doubtful proposition (not 100% chance). The rest for me is just details needed only to make the fortune check and its resolution model more closely the thing being contested. I have on one hand no problem demanding the PC phrase things in an active use (approach and goal) when the intention of the proposition or contest demands it, or clarifying a vague proposition with a more active and specific wording, or forcing him to give a proposition rather than just asking if he can make a check, and I also have no problem with the proposition, "I might already know something about this because I'm educated..." For me, unity of mechanics is not really even an important goal, and indeed is something that I tend to think is self-defeating. For me, what is important about mechanics is that they model something, and since in the real world different things are well, different, that the mechanics that model them be different is desirable.
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Yes, the way the knowledge skills are designed and predominately used isn’t in line with the other skills. They usually don’t follow the ‘state a goal and approach’ format of action declaration. I dislike this. I’ve gravitated to not using rolls for recollection and instead just check proficiency. If yes, then I give the info, if no, they don’t know. This requires a change in how information works in game – ie, knowing things doesn’t solve problems, it provides avenues of approach. To me, knowing that trolls need fire to stop regeneration isn’t the critical part of that puzzle, it’s the application of fire. Granted, in 5e, that’s largely trivial with many classes, but that’s not a good reason for me to gate information.
If the information is really obscure, then proficiency doesn’t cut it – if you couldn’t have been taught it, you don’t know it, and no amount of luck will change this. This kind of information needs to be found through overcoming other challenges.
In short, I’m changing how information flow works from the ‘traditional’ methods. This leaves knowledge skills still a bit at loose ends, because finding good applications of those skills with approach/goal action declarations is a bit harder that the other skills, still.
Well, first of all, you responded to me; I didn't respond to you. In the post you were quoting, I had responded to the OP's concerns by way of MarkB, concerning the questions and concerns the OP had raised (and MarkB had re-emphasized) which were about detecting deception. At no point should you have thought that was a response to anything you had said, so your example regarding discovering the source of nervousness where ever the heck that occurs in this thread is not particularly germane either to my post that you quoted or to how I answered you, because I was going on the apparently erroneous assumption that what you said actually followed logically from what I had said and not in fact on some other conversation you were having that I was not a part of.
However, misunderstandings aside, now that I'm more caught up, I am immensely curious as to how you actually would run that, even though it as far as I can tell irrelevant to how you would run the scenario the OP was talking about. I am still also quite willing to hear you explain your thoughts on a deception vs. insight contest, simply because I enjoy hearing about approaches that are wildly different than my own.
Mea culpa, this is true.
As for how I run the contest, the bottom line is that I will never tell the players that they believe an NPC – that’s the player’s choice. I don’t have a contest where PCs use a lie detector to be sure of their own interpretation of the issue. To that end, though, I overtell – if an NPC is lying, I give very strong clues as to this in the setup. To me, fooling the players isn’t the objective, it’s what the players do with the cues. I’ve found I can outright tell the players that an NPC is hiding things and not being fully honest and they’ll still go along with it. An insight check to get this same information doesn’t seem to really alter the game much, so I don’t bother.
What does interest me is if the players decide to contest the lying NPC and expose them. That contest is still insight vs deception, with a success meaning you’ve exposes the NPC’s lies and a failure meaning appropriate consequences given the scene. For instance, trying to get the King’s advisor to admit to plotting against the kingdom in court would have strong negative consequences for a failure (and, for clarity, I wouldn’t hinge this scene on one roll, either) whereas confronting a lying shopkeeper with no witnesses may just get you thrown out of the shop.
My apparently erroneous assumption that you used 'success with consequence' techniques or 'partial success' techniques to invent complications for a scene not based on the stakes of the proposition was based on my faulty assumption that when you replied to me you were discussing the original poster's 'insight' versus 'deception' contest where the conventional interpretation is a hearer was attempting to decide whether the speaker was lying. I therefore assumed when you said that a consequence of failure might be that the speaker realizes you were suspicious, that you were saying that the speaker could detect that the hearer had failed to realize that they were lying. I have only just now in going back through the thread to try to figure out what you are talking about discovered the post on the thread where you explained that you'd adopted novel house rules with respect to how you apply and interpret the 'insight' skill, and while that's illuminating regarding where you are coming from, I certainly wasn't paying any attention to you or that at the time I originally posted.
Well, even using the traditional approach, I strongly encourage having the speaker tell the listener is suspicious on a failure. If there’s no consequence to failure, I don’t believe in rolling. Since the roll is to tell if the speaker is lying because you don’t know, and a failure is no change in state, then don’t roll. Either say you can’t tell or add a consequence (clearly communicated prior to the roll).
When I said that "If testing perception the only possible failure is of your perception." I was assuming that we were talking about "insight" as written as a passive perception skill, and not insight as a skill of active interrogation, innuendo, or rhetoric - approaches that would have me calling for some other skill than insight - because that is what the OP was talking about and what I was talking about. So that is the source of my confusion.
Once again, you quoted me; I didn't quote you. I didn't enter into your conversation. I don't see how I'm supposed to know what thread of conversation you are continuing or why the burden of figuring out that you were talking about something quite tangential to what I was talking about falls on me. If I'm guilty of making assumptions, the chief of those is that your reply had something to do with what I was talking about, which it apparently it either did not or was only tangentially related to my comment.
And frankly, I'm still confused because you've gotten very upset that I suggested that you impose failure on players arbitrarily, and yet you have also suggested as a consequence of asking a penetrating question that the result of failure be, "...those around now firmly believe the lie" Now, that is an example that would be classified by me as a consequence that doesn't logically follow on failure to ask a penetrating question and which is arbitrarily imposed, as surely those hearing the conversation are allowed to still keep their own judgements regarding the truthfulness of the target, despite your embarrassing ineptitude? After all, they have their own insight skills and draw their own conclusions. They might have detected a falsehood you failed to. They may think you are very rude and socially awkward or that you were very stupid to have challenged your target in public so ineptly on the basis of the evidence at hand (what you've just done), but the failure of your insight doesn't make people around you less insightful, I would think.
NPCs listening. Again, I don’t tell players what their PCs think. NPCs are manipulated by skill checks, players aren’t. This result was to say that other NPCs listening are convinced that the liar is telling the truth. After all, he just defended his statements against questioning, yeah?
For my part, I try to role-play NPCs and unless the NPC is a very good liar indeed, I try to roleplay someone who is lying or nervous or trying to avoid a subject according to the NPCs motivations, so that quite often the 'sense motive' check to determine if an NPC is lying is only of a help to players who themselves aren't very perceptive (or when I do a poor job acting). That 'sense motives' only confirm what the players already have good reason to suspect has become so prevalent in the campaign as to be a running gag. And as for me, I'd tend to actually run a piercing question by the PC as actual role-play with an actual piercing question (or two or three), and as a conversation and only after the conversation has run a while would skill checks to gain insights about the NPC's motives or truthfulness happen, or social skill checks to see if the NPC was swayed, intimidated or tricked into something be called for depending on the players agenda and the exact form the conversation had taken. In my case, "the approach" is an actual in character statement given in the form of dialogue, and players must do that before they earn a skill call. So, as you might expect from that process of play, since I'm always acting out NPCs, players try to guess whether I'm lying all the time. It was not intended as an insult, and further I'm not sure where you got the idea that I thought you had your players guess if you were lying, since nothing like that had entered my mind at the time of my prior post - interesting though the topic is.
Yes, I absolutely provide information. I also act, and enjoy it, but I’ve gotten into the habit of providing a narration alongside it. For instance, in the case of the nervous NPC example above, I’d likely say:
“Okay, you’re talking to Bob the Smith and asking him if he’s heard anything about the murders. Bob looks very nervous, and is constantly looking over your shoulders and out the door as if checking to make sure no one else is there. ‘N-n-no. No. No I haven’t. I-I-I don’t meddle and I won’t see anything. Don’t see anything. I mean, didn’t see anything.’ He glances at the door again.”
I tell and act. Heck, I overtell.
I understand the whole process of play that involves never hiding the facts from the players but instead assuming that the players will get the facts, and making the whole challenge not uncovering secrets but rather figuring out how to act on them. GUMSHOE and Trail of Cthulhu for example are games that write that process of play into the rules as an assumption of play. And I know where that is coming from because I know how a game can stagnant if you aren't careful when it so happens that the players can't get the facts. But I'm a pretty hard core simulationist, and my experience of real life is that we don't always have the facts to act on and we are often mistaken in our facts and beliefs, and I don't want to forgo that in my play and there are other techniques you can use to jump start the action when you have a plot stall.
I’m honestly no longer sure what simulationist means, in any real sense. I’m aware of the Forge meaning, which isn’t what most people are trying to say (like all Forge definitions), so I’m going with a default of ‘I like my worlds to seem real.’ I like that, as well. There’s a few approaches that can do this, though, and I’ve found I’m drifting more and more away from a hard-sim approach and still getting that lived-in and real world for my players. As a player, I’ve finding I’m more and more annoyed by gating knowledge behind rolls, as when a failure is rolled the game grinds to a halt. As a DM, I became equally tired of this – calling for a roll because a roll could be made and then having a failure derail things. So, I’ve stopped. I overtell, now, and it hasn’t ruined my game. My current mantra is that if you give the players perfect knowledge, they’ll still screw it up by the numbers. I don’t have to hide things to create drama, I just have to engage the players and work their motivations and the drama inevitably follows.
Now, I’m not in the ‘searching for a secret door creates one’ space for D&D (it works when I’m running Blades in the Dark, but that’s a very different system), but I push for approach and goal in action declarations and work everything off of that. If the player declares they’re going to get the advisor to admit their plot in the King’s court by questioning him, well, unless they’ve done the work to get evidence to back up their claims and unless they’ve done some work to gain favor in the court so they have standing to bring the charges, that’s just going to fail. But, if they do those things, the insight vs the advisor’s deception (probably with advantage for having favor and the advisor at disadvantage due to presented evidence) will reveal the subterfuge to the whole court on a success. On a failure, the PCs will be embarrassed and the court will not hear these charges again and the advisor will not be under suspicion – until something changes. But, this is a high risk/high reward setup, and I’m going to be fine running a failure where the players have to come up with a new plan. Now, if the evidence is slam-dunk, there’s no roll, the advisor is exposed and has to flee. The above assumes the outcome is uncertain (evidence is circumstantial, etc).
Thanks for the discussion!
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