gamerprinter
Mapper/Publisher
Yes, we keep it honest. I don't care for GMs making secret rolls, as they can usually fudge things if they do - and most players don't care for fudged rolls. Keeping the rolls in the open prevents this.
How do you handle social skills in D&D?
Yes, we keep it honest. I don't care for GMs making secret rolls, as they can usually fudge things if they do - and most players don't care for fudged rolls. Keeping the rolls in the open prevents this.
Wow. That is certainly not how I would do it. After the GM put words in my mouth like that, I'd probably quit the game.
As player, iIf I give a good speech, it should at very least be a bonus on my Bluff check. As GM, I want to encourage good roleplaying, not squelch it.
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him)
If the skill imposes a mechanical effect on the target (like intimidation in combat), then I impose it based on the check. I consider those involuntary reactions to the external stimulus. But any other result of intimidation or diplomacy is up to the players to play out as they see fit.
In the case of lying between PCs, I'll have opposed bluff and sense motive roles made. I may make them myself behind the screen too.
See above with mechanical effects. And if an NPC is particularly good with his skill, I'll tell the players that the NPC might wax eloquent, uses all the correct forms of address, seems highly passionate about his case, etc.
With respect to bluff and sense motive, I'll roll bluff any time the PCs try to sense motive, even if the NPC is telling the truth. If the sense motive fails to beat the bluff, or if the NPC wasn't bluffing, I'll tell the player that the NPC seems to be sincere about what he says and pretty much leave it at that.
Oddly, this is an area where, if the player sees the roll, the player can fudge. If the player knows they roll well, they will tend to believe the result, where if they roll poorly, they will tend to distrust the result, and hedge their bets.
i can't speak for Umbran, but I agree with his premise that the skills are for detecting NPC lies and for manipulating NPCs.
So if the NPC lies, the player might doubt it and want to check. If he says he doubts it, I roll a check. If he doesn't say a word and believes him, the PC has voluntarily failed his save.
If I was on the ball, I could always roll a Sense Motive check on every statement I narrate, and give the NPC's statement followed by a "you think he's lying" whenever the roll suceeds and the NPC is lying.
For PCs, because people have a tendency to secretly resist against any decision they did not win, it's safer to not use a die roll (the decider) to force a PC to believe a lie that the player knows is false.
So when an NPC lies to a player, the player can decide to believe it or not, and the player has a safety net of the skill check. But the player is still free to decide to believe it or not (even if the check says "it sounds true").
When a player lies to an NPC, I can just roll a Sense Motive for the NPC and let that validate if he believes it. I don't have to get involved as the GM except in abjudicating it and applying modifiers for good or crappy lies.
When a player lies to another player, you have a new level of deciept and belief going on. If the PC tells a lie that the target player knows is false, he's not going to believe it. And he's going to rebel in small ways with his PC that he has to "accept" this fact if we enforce a dice roll check that says the PC is gullible enough to believe it.
So, I feel we're better off letting the player decide if he believes the statement, and playing his PC to match his decision.
As far as role playing it, I prefer the player to make the statement in character. A high CHA character will be charming. A low CHA character will be blunt. Then I roll the NPCs reaction behind the screen. If the PC succeeds, I play out a favorable response. If it fails, I play out an believable negative response. I don't mangle a player's speech from a high CHA character that was well delivered but rolled poorly. It is still quite plausible for the NPC to say "I hear your proposal, but I'm still not inclined to agree."
Generally, my group does not handle a social skill check without a role-playing statement. "I bluff the guard to let us in" is not sufficient for me to grant a check or permit access. The player will have to at least explain what he's going to say, if not actually say what the PC would say.
For a less important social skill check, like buying some supplies as part of the pre-quest stock-up, and hoping to get a discount through social skill haggling, I might just roll the skill check and apply a discount (or penalty if the PC rolled bad) as part of the take the price from the PH policy for shopping without wasting the GMs time.
Janx got the gist of it.
Characters typically have a skill for such a situation. In D&D 3.x, it's Sense Motive. In my Deadlands game, it is "Scrutinize".
The players are free to ask if they can tell if the guy is lying, and then we can roll the check. In many instances (especially when I know the PC is really good at the skill) I may prompt them to roll.
Off the result, I can say, "He's sweating and shifty-eyed - pretty obviously lying," "He seems a little twitchy and nervous to you," "You see no signs of him lying," "He actually seems pretty open and honest," and so on.
The player is still free to make up their own mind.
gamerprinter
Mapper/Publisher
Which does happen, but then with a bad roll, (though it's metagaming) the other PCs will try to make their own roll. Once somebody rolls a decent roll, when I give them the same answer as to the PC with the first bad roll, then they accept it as probably true.
Really though, if the players do not trust a given NPC, there's not much I can do, I won't force a 'truth' onto the PCs. They accept it or they don't, it doesn't change the circumstances.
LostSoul
Adventurer
In my 4E hack it works like this:
1. There aren't really "social skills", though some skills lend themselves to social situations. (One PC made good use of "Upper Middle Class" and "Snooty" in social situations.) What happens is that one PC tries to get another PC to do or believe something that he doesn't want to do or believe; there's a conflict there, so we go to the dice to resolve the action.
I'm not sure if I spell out who has the authority to say if there's a conflict or not. That should probably be the DM's job.
Once the action has been resolved, the player has to decide if his PC goes with that or against; that is, if he's been "successfully" convinced of something - a specific course of action or statement - the player can decide not to take that action or believe that statement. If that decision goes against the result of the die roll then modifiers get applied to the next actions that are relevant to the situation. This allows the roll to matter while still allowing players agency over their characters.
There are some other fine points to be made here. I specifically allow metagame decisions to be made. If one PC is lying to another, then the roll needs to be secret - both the result of the check and the fact that a roll is made! (I make a lot of secret rolls because of this so it's usually not a problem.) This could get complicated but I've never seen it be a problem.
2. NPC vs. PC basically works the same way, though in game play the players are less likely to go along with what an NPC has proposed. Using modifiers if the PC goes against the result of the die makes it work out rather well.
In most cases, though, this doesn't come up; usually I run a social skill challenge for social conflicts, and in those NPCs don't make any rolls. Modifiers do get added based on what the characters are doing/saying, but usually it's to the defence of the NPC in question.
This usually comes up in combat; the NPCs try to intimidate the PCs or something like that. Players don't usually want to surrender, which means that the NPCs get a bonus on their next attack.
I'm playing in a 3.5 game now and this is how it works:
1. I don't think we've ever made checks against each other. I could see using Intimidate to impose the "Shaken" condition, but that's about it.
2. NPCs have lied to us before and we've fallen for it. The DM makes a check behind the screen for the NPC and for us. Then she plays it out. I don't think the NPCs have ever made an Intimidate check against us; maybe once? I don't know what would happen if the NPCs would succeed on their check.
Yes, but that process ("since I, the player, saw a bad roll, I'll make an attempt myself") is a little meta-gamey for my tastes. The player shouldn't be looking at the individual die roll to tell him if he trusts his teammate's judgement.
No express agreement - more a series of understandings that have emerged over the years.
As a GM, I'm pretty forward in encouraging the players to use their metagame knowledge to push their PCs in the direction they want to (ie adopt Author rather than Actor stance). Some of my players are more hesitant, preferring a purer Actor stance - that's fine for them, and the other players will recognise when this is happening and work around it (in effect it's a shifting of the metagame burden to those who are comfortable to bear it).
I also wanted to say - skill challenges are a different beast. If a player fails a check in a skill challenge, then I might indicate that this consists in his/her PC being persuaded to do something, or being influenced in a certain way, as part of my general handling of the complications that failed checks introduce into that sort of complex action resolution system. Because that is moving a bit away from traditional RPG expectations (unless magic is involved) I handle it with care!
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