Do your NPCs ever sucker the PCs?

[ThoughtBubble]

What a horribly bad idea. Are you running a children's game?


PCs should be suckered on a regular basis. That's what skills like Sense Motive are for.

Power (political or otherwise) is often about manipulating others.

Less of a bad idea than you may think. I believe that it's one of the factors contributing to this game being one of the best I've run.

And no, I'm not running a children's game. Though it does feel like it, on occasion.

Let's start on some of the reasons. Two of my players have problems seeing NPCs as much more than objects, and often have difficulty assigning motivation to them. The player who does tend to treat NPCs like people is only paying attention to the game about half the time. The remaining player is good about it, but tends to obsess about random details and miss much of the things that seem obvious.

Also, I can be pretty manipulative. I can generally out plan, out plot, and prepare for whatever they've got. Being nerds, they can have problems communicating amongst themselves. So the sides are un-balanced there.

And frankly, it makes manipulation a lot more fun when they know the truth of what's going on. They're being used, but they're benifiting too. And when someone says something ambiguous, it becomes more of a flag.

It also emulates a lot more of books and movies, they rarely say un-true things, just hide information for a while.

Finally, it's just not really necessary to the game's feel. Hiding things is easy. It's when they come out that things get interesting.

In essence, it just lets us worry about one less thing to get to the parts of the game that everyone can agree on being fun. Besides, do we really need a circumstance where my players feel that I'm just excersizing power over them via manipulation?

 

[painandgreed]

Sometimes the PCs get suckerd for no good reason by lies (or truths) that you'd never thought they'd fall for and others they are suspicious and research everything they are told even by the safest sources. It has a lot to do with telling them what they want/expect to hear. I am not above exploiting the "surely we can believe them because they are a reoccuring, named NPC who is offering us a plot hook". Although, I have always warned players against such at the beging of the campaign. I've had an NPC show up and direct the players to a dungeon several levels too high for them in an effort to get them killed and they marched off without question.

 

[Zephrin the Lost]

Our DM once scammed one of our players once with a NPC who was selling 'trained' rats. The NPC had a rat familiar or a animal companion perform a bunch of tricks for thr Barbarian PC -- including untying a knot, which the PC thought would be very handy if he was every tied up. Then, with a little slieght of hand, the NPC collected the barbarian's cash and left him with a very UNTRAINED, but lightly drugged sewer rat aleep in a bag. You cannot imagine the chaos that rat caused when it woke up while the team was interviewing with a wizard for a job.

This was a long time ago--before 3.0, so there was no sense motive. The DM ran it as a straight con.

Good times.

 

[francisca]

When do my NPCs *not* sucker the PCs?

 

[Kid Socrates]

I try to, but they normally figure it out through some investigation and covering their tracks. It doesn't help things that they have a "Never trust anyone with a name" policy. So now they're on a train with THIRTY named NPCs! You've never seen such panic...

So far everyone that's suckered them they've figured out was up to something. What I live for is that moment when they find out what's going on, but are powerless to stop the first part of the villain's plan -- so they get downright analytical to stop his next step. I -love- that. I also love when my NPCs get foiled thanks to quick thinking by the PCs. I get more enjoyment out of them foiling plans than I do actually having the plans be successful.

 

[Mercule]

My last game session, a black dragon used polymorph to assume the form of a brass dragon

Ah, speaking of "posing as", I ran a one shot that started off with an Erinyes posing as an angel to get the help of the PCs. Funny thing was that one player said, "This just seems off. I want to try Detect Evil on her." The rest of the PCs all jumped on him and said, "No, you fool! That's incredibly rude, and we don't want to tick off the nice angel."

 

[The Thayan Menace]

You Don't Mess With Thay

Does this count?

One of my recent villains was red wizard / spectral mage.

He began his showdown with the PCs, by punking the party's main tank with a sudden-maximized enervation and paralyzing him.

Then, the party responded with some ineffectual attacks (thanks to his incorporeality).

Shortly thereafter, the spectral mage cast lesser geas on the party's Thayan knight and said, "Kill your entire party."

She automatically failed her save ....

After this, the mage drifted through the ceiling to buff up and await the fratricidal outcome ... only to come back later, after the tank was beheaded, the Thayan knight was dead, and the party wizard was out of spells.

In the end, two of the smarter PCs managed to run away ... everyone else died.