NPC Deception/Persuasion and player agency

[Crimson Longinus]

• All that aside, I'm certainly not claiming that I feel everything my character supposedly feels, just that, for me, this is my goal. If a session has a couple of moments where "I am my character and my character is me", emotionally, then I call it a success.

Right. And if we decide that this is the goal and try to facilitate it then it is likely to happen more. But if we just say it is impossible and do not even bother then it probably is not going to happen much.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Well, it's a little boring to have such things just be a binary based on a single die roll. Discourages you from having any NPC ever lie if it's that easy to call them out. Same as dealing with a PC with crazy high passive Perception (and there's always one): now you essentially can't hide stuff because there's virtually no chance it won't be found. Both things harm realism IMO.

That's a big part of the reason I personally don't use it as a lie detector.

But, again, I'm not arguing that's how other people should play, if they like the way they're doing it.

 

[Umbran]

So why do they bother with this indirect language of “determine a creature’s true intentions” and “gleaming clues”? Why not just say “…whether a creature is lying”?

It isn't indirect at all. It is just written to be more than just detecting lies.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Well, it's a little boring to have such things just be a binary based on a single die roll. Discourages you from having any NPC ever lie if it's that easy to call them out. Same as dealing with a PC with crazy high passive Perception (and there's always one): now you essentially can't hide stuff because there's virtually no chance it won't be found. Both things harm realism IMO.

Well, given bounded accuracy, I don't think constant success is guaranteed in 5e. But I certainly endeavour to describe results of insight in more nuanced manner, and it can provide a lot of information besides whether someone is lying.

 

[Bill Zebub]

It isn't indirect at all. It is just written to be more than just detecting lies.

And apparently several people here agree with you.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Well, given bounded accuracy, I don't think constant success is guaranteed in 5e.

"Can I roll, too?"

But I certainly endeavour to describe results of insight in more nuanced manner, and it can provide a lot of information besides whether someone is lying.

Same.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Right. And if we decide that this is the goal and try to facilitate it then it is likely to happen more. But if we just say it is impossible and do not even bother then it probably is not going to happen much.

An example I've offered before is that I personally don't enjoy pretending to not know about trolls & fire, but if there are new players at the table and they are freaking out because the trolls are regenerating, I'm not going to rob them of that experience (oh how I wish I could be a new player again!) by blurting out the solution.

 

[TwoSix]

I don't know what "properly" means here - as if there is some Platonic standard of roleplaying? As opposed to a variety of different RPGs which establish different parameters for what sorts of choices players are expected to make in their play of their PCs.

Since @Crimson Longinus seems to be fairly embedded in the Hickman Revolution-trad agenda of play, I would assume "properly" means with the player deciding on a character's action purely from their concept of the character's personality, with zero recourse to mechanics.

The goal of trad generally seems to be divorcing your intent as a player from mechanics as much as possible, and have most session time be a conversation between players and the DM as to what happens next, with the DM taking the lead in deciding what aspect of the pre-generated environment is framed next. Invocation of mechanics is generally only begrudingly done, and usually viewed as an imposition on "pure" play.

 

[TwoSix]

Yeah, I generally prefer and think about myself in terms of game immersion. Am I immersed in the play of the game? Because I think that immersion in and out of the character can be incredibly fluid and it's not necessarily consistent with the game processes or mechanics being performed. For example, my character immersion in one time may be broken as easily as the GM asking for a d20 roll without necessarily breaking my game immersion. However in another time that won't be the case. My character immersion may even be broken by how another immersed player roleplays their character!

I mean, I can just as easily be immersed in a novel, or movie, or TV show, and I have zero authorial agency there.

That's why I don't play TTRPGs to be immersed, I play them to exercise agency over a defined rule space while also getting to flex some thespian/performative desires.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Well, given bounded accuracy, I don't think constant success is guaranteed in 5e. But I certainly endeavour to describe results of insight in more nuanced manner, and it can provide a lot of information besides whether someone is lying.

It functionally is with all the ways passive Perception can be boosted (and the rules exist to goose that modifier for any attribute roll), unless you want to set the DC to unrealistically high levels. Specialization is the bane of bounded accuracy, which as a concept seems to apply more to the DM than the players anyway.