How do you counter someone gather info?

[Stalker0]

Alright, I have a player whose an investigator type, and he's looking into the political affliliations and the like of an NPC. What skill would you use for the NPC to "hide" his involvement in said affiliations?

 

[Shin Okada]

Profession (Member of Conspiracy)?

 

[Zeit]

Bluff, I would say. Is good for hiding stuff.

 

[lukelightning]

Bluff. And perhaps your own "gather info" check; I'd adapt it to allow you to find out who's been asking who and try and put a stop to it...possibly through bribes/payoffs.

 

[Oryan77]

Yeah bluff, you could roll the PC's Gather Information skill vs the NPC's Bluff check. If the PC beats the NPC, he might not know the facts but he could assume the guy isn't telling all he knows.

 

[atom crash]

I remember reading in a book an idea for using Gather Information to seed the area with misinformation. Someone looking for info about you? Just start spreading rumors and lies around the neighborhood.

 

[Lobo Lurker]

By behaving yourself and not breaking any laws or attracting any sort of attention to yourself.


Or by killing everyone who knows you or has ever heard of you.

 

[Slobber Monster]

I'd just set an appropriately high DC for the gather information check. To justify this I might give the NPC appropriately high ranks in one or more of Bluff, Disguise, and Forgery. Those are the skills he could use to deal with middle-men and lackeys without allowing his involvement to become common knowledge.

The other approach is to give the NPC Diplomacy or Intimidate in order to inspire loyalty in his associates. Try using some of the guidelines from Rich Burlew's Diplomacy Rules to determine how tight-lipped everyone is in the face of any given proposal.

 

[werk]

A gather info check isn't opposed by anything other than what the DM decides the difficulty is...it's all up to the DM..."If you want to find out about a specific rumor, or a specific item, or obtain a map, or do something else along those lines, the DC for the check is 15 to 25, or even higher. "

IMC, I set up a gather information list of informational tidbits that can be gathered, with easy secrets having a low DC (10-15) and super hard secrets a very high (outside of character ability) DC (up to 50+). This also accounts for the quality of the information. If I say "super-secret" is a DC20, if the player gets a 20, they will only get the information kernal (the king sleeps around), not the whole story with dates, details, names, addresses, implications, etc.

As the DM, you must decide how well the NPC hid the information and/or how sensitive the information is. I think it's totally arbitrary and up to the DM, not the skill of the NPC directly.

 

[Mark Chance]

There is no reason Gather Information couldn't be used as an opposed skill. Consider: Conspiracy NPC has been actively disseminating false information in order to throw people off his trail. He hits the taverns, markets, et cetera, spinning his bogus tale. The NPC makes a Gather Information (or Bluff or whatever) check to set the DC for the Investigator PC to piece through the bogus information to the truth.

Of course, that's the dice-rolling method. Another method is to simply have Investigator PC uncover bogus data via Gather Information. With Gather Information, people merely repeat what they've heard or think they've seen. Spin out two or three conflicting versions of the truth, and the let the player go from there.