D&D 5E Persuade, Intimidate, and Deceive used vs. PCs

[c0wfunk]

First, I wouldn't use an adventure module as proof of anything about the actual rules of the game, especially modules that were written early on in the design process.

Odd, since they continue to market it to new players as the best entry point for learning the game.

As for the rest I’m very clear on where you, in particular, stand on this point.

It stood out to me that this very clear, iconic instance was not brought up in what seemed like an otherwise very thorough discussion. Perhaps because the starter set was still new when this zombie thread originated.

I’m with those who have a hard time believing the designers would add such an action to a creature that they never expect used on PCs as well as those who point out that your way relies on the dms lying skills and charisma, rather than the creature. If the doppleganger was doing the lying, id put the uncertainty there - how well did he lie in this case? and call for the insight check and go from there.

Seriously you do t have to post again about what you’d do. I got it.

 

[c0wfunk]

I was actually thinking on this thread a few days ago as I was writing how much my opinions on gaming have shifted recently. I largely disagree with the positions I took in this thread, now, and align much more closely with @iserith. It's interesting to me the difference three short years makes, and speaks to power of reading and trying to grasp different points of view with regards to gaming to actually change opinions. I don't think anyone that does make checks against players is wrong, there are many ways to play after all, I just no longer agree that such is right for me.

Please pardon this quick introspective.

this is actually quite interesting to me as I’m pretty new (and stumbling into this hornet’s nest probably makes that quite clear). I’ve played for 3 years and dmd for about 1 now. One thing I’ve noticed is that this intense concern about agency and railroading that pervades online discourse is completely absent among the new players ive met and dealt with. Even those who played older editions and are picking it back up.

in fact, my wizard, who played a lot in the 80s but not since, told me a few sessions ago, when presented with an option that was contrary to the main story arc and their current path “choice is great, but you can just tell us where to go”

if I waited for this group to create the story through actions Itd be a long, quiet night. So perhaps this notion of pc autonomy and agency is something grown into because the fever with which everyone defended the fact that they did no such thing under any circumstance was notable to me reading through this thread.

so as always ymmv, and I have to apologize for having brought this one back to life, but really it was a great discussion and probably the de facto authority on the internet on this subject so I thought the doppelgänger needed some love.

cheers

 

[Ovinomancer]

this is actually quite interesting to me as I’m pretty new (and stumbling into this hornet’s nest probably makes that quite clear). I’ve played for 3 years and dmd for about 1 now. One thing I’ve noticed is that this intense concern about agency and railroading that pervades online discourse is completely absent among the new players ive met and dealt with. Even those who played older editions and are picking it back up.

in fact, my wizard, who played a lot in the 80s but not since, told me a few sessions ago, when presented with an option that was contrary to the main story arc and their current path “choice is great, but you can just tell us where to go”

if I waited for this group to create the story through actions Itd be a long, quiet night. So perhaps this notion of pc autonomy and agency is something grown into because the fever with which everyone defended the fact that they did no such thing under any circumstance was notable to me reading through this thread.

so as always ymmv, and I have to apologize for having brought this one back to life, but really it was a great discussion and probably the de facto authority on the internet on this subject so I thought the doppelgänger needed some love.

cheers

There are some techniques that you can use. Frame scenes that require action, for one. If you say, "You've entered the town, what do you do," you'll get blank looks. If you instead just frame, "As you enter town, you see a female elf being dragged off down an alleyway by some black masked thugs, what do you do?" you'll get a more involved response.

5e as a system fights pretty hard against more player focused techniques. It lacks a general resolution system for conflicts, instead using a process-sim approach of using resolution for the atomic actions instead of the situation. This isn't bad -- I'm running 5e right now and having a blast. But it does mean that it doesn't really work as well as other systems for a tightly interlocked player-agenda-driven game where the GM puts the players' agendas in constant danger. Again, not a dig, just a truth. 5e does other things really, really well, hence why it's the 8,000 pound (sic) gorilla on the game market.

You can do some things that are more player driven, though it requires the GM to shoulder even more burden due to the system mastery it requires to be able to improvise challenges quickly. There's some things that can help, like adopting a Skill Challenge framework, but you need to get buy-in from players for these kinds of things. I have a recent bit of play I posted in another thread that shows how I ran a recent 5e game in a more open style, but, as my party levels, that will become increasingly difficult to do as prep becomes more complex. Still, the advice to frame scenes that require action rather than bland scenes with nothing obvious is a good one to start moving towards getting players to engage with declared actions rather than waiting for things to happen to them.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Ah, here it is:

Just a quick bit of play that happened my last 5e session:

One of the characters has entered into the pit-fighting arena to earn a bit of money and fame, and because he's a dwarven battle-rager. Over the past few sessions, he's made a small name for himself in the amateur leagues, having won a district amateur championship tourney. He's also spent his winnings buying up minor magical enhancements to his armor, so that now it smokes on command and the eyes of his helmet glow red. Nifty effect, been fun so far, and the player is, obviously, loving this downtime sideline for his character. The character had just been invited to the pro-circuit as an opening act (ie, undercard), and the character hopes to earn a spot at the top of the card. Really, at this point, this is the WWE of pit-fighting, with characters and everything. It's been a hoot.

So, then, last session, another character tried to improve his status with one of the city Factions (this is a Sigil based game), the Fraternity of Order, but was stymied by a previous association with the Xaosects (imagine trying to get in good with the DA while having a record with some radical terrorists and you won't be far off). Some rolls were failed, so the Fraternity wasn't very friendly and set a task of bringing a notorious criminal to justice. Some more investigation, and the party heads off to apprehend a foul murderer hiding in the Hive (very bad neighborhood) with his gang.

Things go very, very, badly for the party. On them, they split up and ran all over the place, alerting the entire gang almost at once while being unable to provide support. Sigh. But, one of the things that the gang had was a pro-level pit-fighter named Maul, known for his, wait for it, use of a maul. Hey, I'm not winning awards, here. So, as soon as he was woken up by the commotion, and after hearing the barbarian character's warcry he's popularized with his pit-fighting persona ("TIME FOR HUGS!!!" -- he wears spiked armor, so...), Maul ran out and issued a challenge. Well, the barbarian failed to overcome Maul (he was already beat up by a group of thugs), and the entire party also went down with him (he was already the last one standing, did I mention they split up going four separate ways?).

Enter one of my few houserules of this game -- your character can only die if you say so. No one said so, so the second half of that comes in which is "I get to do something bad to you in exchange." So, what I did to the barbarian player was to have Maul take the barbarian's magical greataxe, which will now be used in the pit as a prop. The barbarian's player is over-the-moon about this. Sure, he's lost a nice magic item, and his character's reputation has suffered a bad blow (and also he was generally robbed by the gang), but he now has a full up WWE style nemesis. I've actually never once had a player so damn happy he lost a fight (and gear, and rep). This outcome alone has made this experimental houserule worth it's metaphorical weight in gold.

The other characters have similar bad things -- the ex-Illithid-thrall will be finding out he volunteered to become a thrall (I don't know why, but that's something the player will really chew on), the Grave cleric has become haunted, and the Warforged rogue has... met his maker.

And the amount of this planned before the game? None. Well, I had a few good city-slums maps and it was a simple matter to build up a criminal gang from stock NPCs (some bandits, some thugs, an assassin for the murder, a few scouts for lookouts, and a gladiator for the, well, gladiator). I let the players lead with ideas and used checks to determine outcomes. I did set DCs, but I have a handly, public chart for DCs for dealing with NPCs of various dispositions, and the player looking to get in with the Fraternity knew they were unfriendly (due to the outcome of a failed roll to improve relations with the Xaosects leading to a bender and a vague recollection that something went very badly wrong), so he knew going in it would be a uphill battle.

So, for me, I've tried to use say yes or roll the dice a bit (it's still 5e, so it will fight you if you go too far with this) for the player's downtime* goals. I'm also using fail-forward techniques to generate new circumstances. Another example for this was the barbarian's attempt to find out more about his out-of-the-ring nemesis, the man(?) who had his clan and his mentor slaughtered. I introduced a complication in a previous mission (the party recovers things as a means of making money) as being caused by his nemesis, so he was looking for him. Three checks were made, two failed, so I introduced that the nemesis was no longer in Sigil, that people were scared of crossing him, and that the nemesis was looking for information about an artifact that the party was also tracking. None of this was anything the player really wanted to hear, but it was useful information nonetheless.

/ramble



*I'm using a downtime phase of 1 game week with a few very broad activities that I have some general rules for adjudication, in this case the player attempted to Improve Relations with a faction, which is set of three checks depending on what's being specifically attempted. There's results for failing none, one, or two or more checks (essentially, you get everything you wanted, you get some of what you wanted but at a cost, and things don't go your way and you've made it worse). I'm trying sets of three checks for things to generate a more granular outcome than a single pass/fail check.

 

[S'mon]

this is actually quite interesting to me as I’m pretty new (and stumbling into this hornet’s nest probably makes that quite clear). I’ve played for 3 years and dmd for about 1 now. One thing I’ve noticed is that this intense concern about agency and railroading that pervades online discourse is completely absent among the new players ive met and dealt with. Even those who played older editions and are picking it back up.

in fact, my wizard, who played a lot in the 80s but not since, told me a few sessions ago, when presented with an option that was contrary to the main story arc and their current path “choice is great, but you can just tell us where to go”

Heh, yeah, as a player who enjoys sandboxing, I quite often want to tell the GM "Just tell us where to go!!"

Conversely there are cases where the GM has boo-booed and set things up so we really don't want to go where she/he thinks we should, like the GM who presented our 1st level 3e PCs with an ogre-filled castle and expected us to attack it... We turned and walked away. The GM should be willing to accept that kind of thing.

 

[c0wfunk]

"As you enter town, you see a female elf being dragged off down an alleyway by some black masked thugs, what do you do?" you'll get a more involved response.

Oh yeah, I learned that one pretty quickly on. I quite often will narrate transitions as well to get us to that point where things will actually happen. They are quite often unsure how to respond even when presented with a bunch of options.. ie. a couple of sessions ago we were wrapping up in town before heading off to the final dungeon of the module. I told them we could do some final things in town and gave them some ideas of what we could do and had planned a shopping / info gathering montage before we headed out. They were like "let's take a long rest and go". /shrug

At this stage I can't imagine an unplanned session and how that would go. But as we move forward I plan to head into Storm King's Thunder with a little Dungeon of the Mad Mage mixed in (I"ve made a map they may find soon...) so things will get quite a bit more open moving forward. It will be interesting to see how they grow as players and I grow as a DM when the world opens up for us as it does in SKT.

The reason I found this thread is I'm planning a big final encounter of the adventure where the BBEG is going to try to coerce them into helping him open a portal to the shadowfell and then escorting him through (yeah I"ve modded LMOP a little and I was looking for strategies for that encounter. My bad guy is a high level warlock with mass suggestion as his mystic arcanum so he's going to use that if the conversation doesn't go his way. Suffice it to say they have various reasons and motivations to want to go along with him and I"m quite curious to see how it turns out.

 

[Guest 6801328]

On my phone so this will be brief, but instead of having the BBEG coerce them with game mechanics, try to set up a dilemma so that the players feel some actual, real-life motivation to help. Try to make it so tempting to help him that they actually feel torn, even though they know the consequences.

 

[Iry]

I split the difference. Rolls happen to PCs, and they determine some of the emotions the PC is experiencing. But the players are free to add additional emotions and make the final choice about what to do.

For example, "The aged monk sounds pretty convincing, and your black heart feels a rare twinge of sorrow at the plight this poor man has been through." Then I leave it up to the player to decide how she reacts to these stimulus. That might include lashing out at the man just for making her feel bad, or showing a rare moment of compassion and deciding to help him. I accept the outcome either way.

 

[c0wfunk]

On my phone so this will be brief, but instead of having the BBEG coerce them with game mechanics, try to set up a dilemma so that the players feel some actual, real-life motivation to help. Try to make it so tempting to help him that they actually feel torn, even though they know the consequences.

I've got a few ideas and am going to attempt what you suggest for sure. I have mechanics as a fallback - and they have saves as a defense. I am fairly certain none of them will take issue with it at all and we all quite enjoy rolling dice and using the mechanics to help us create a scene.

 

[Guest 6801328]

I've got a few ideas and am going to attempt what you suggest for sure. I have mechanics as a fallback - and they have saves as a defense. I am fairly certain none of them will take issue with it at all and we all quite enjoy rolling dice and using the mechanics to help us create a scene.

If it works for you, you should run with it.

Now that I'm on a keyboard, though, I want to expand on my earlier post.

I can think of three broad categories of ways to play this:

1) Use the mechanics, and play out how they fall. The BBEG's Deception roll beats the player's Insight roll, so the player is deceived, and your job is now to "roleplay" being deceived. Some posters here will insist this is the very definition of roleplaying, but I would call this "play acting" and, valid though it may be, it holds little interest for me.

2) Another approach is to actually try to deceive/persuade the players. The evil BBEG is in disguise as a charming/bumbling old sage who asks for help with an important ritual. If he fails some rolls, then leave more hints for the players about the truth. This is awesome if you can pull it off, but unfortunately it depends more on the DM's Persuade/Deceive skills than the BBEGs, and if you are bad at it the players are going to know what you're up to and the whole thing kind of falls apart.

3) So I think the best bet is to try #2, but instead of relying on it just do it for flavor and assume your players are going to figure out truth, and use that to force some really hard decisions on them. They guess that the sweet old man is really something evil, and that if they help with the ritual bad stuff is going to happen, BUT: 1) if they don't help, something else bad is going to happen, like a beloved NPC dying 2) If they do help they are going to get a sweeeeeeet magic item, and 3) the beloved NPC shares with them a plan for how they can complete the ritual, save said NPC from dying, get the sweet magic item, and THEN still thwart the demon, getting their cake and eating it, too.

So they do it, but then the brilliant plan fails and the demon gets away, after all.

That's when they find out the beloved NPC is actually in league with the demon. And the magic item is a fake.

The moral of the story is: DON'T HELP DEMONS COMPLETE RITUALS.

Sheesh.