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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest 6801328" data-source="post: 7000226">Oops I left out the 'or' to the 'either': the second part was "...or be really good at improv."E.g., my players are talking to a guard and one of them says he is going to start looking for signs that the guard is lying.  And I think, "ok, how do I give a hint such that this person who has been playing with me for 3 years isn't going to immediately see through."Oh, that's a great question, and the answer for many people might very well be "I don't".The reason I want uncertainty in some situations is that it's what my character would be experiencing, and I feel more immersed if I'm feeling the same thing.  Do I know if I climbed the wall successfully?  Yes...I'm standing on the top.  But do I know for sure whether the guard is lying?  No.  My character might be very insightful, but he doesn't know with 100% certainty.  And if my subsequent decisions depend very much on whether or not he's lying, I want that decision to contain at least some amount of worry.  I want the decision to be interesting.  If, however you choose to implement it, the result of a skill test is that the DM tells me he's lying, then there's no interesting subsequent decision.Conversely, if the DM doesn't give me a yes/no answer but only gives me hints to interpret, the usefulness of the clues is going to be effectively arbitrary.  Let's say my character has high Insight and high Wisdom and gets a good roll.  So the DM gives me some clues that he thinks are appropriate.  But are they?  Chances are they are either a dead giveaway (again, the "gosh I rolled high and the DM is telling me he looks nervous" scenario) or the DM actually tries to make it an interesting decision so that it's interesting decision.  But I find it implausible that any DM can reliably tune such hints to give a probability that from the player's point of view is distinguishable from 50/50 odds...which is the same as just guessing.Does any of that make sense?Iserith, I almost always agree with you 100% about these sorts of things.  But there's a nugget of something important here, and I hope you turn it around in your mind and consider it.Oh, and to the point about telling players what they think...I 99% agree.  But when dealing with knowledge that includes uncertainty (such as 'knowing' if somebody is lying) if the DM presents only sensory evidence, without interpretation, then you may as well not have mental stats and skills, because at that point it is the player interacting with the DM, not the character interacting with the environment.  So in those cases I have no problem with, "It seems to you that..."Do I really have to develop a schematic for a device that will appropriately challenge the human player, such that it will accurately represent his character's ability to defuse a bomb?  I mean, really, even if I put all that time into developing such a puzzle, what are the odds that it will be of just the right difficulty?  I'd much rather just let the player roll a skill check and say, "You figure out that it's almost definitely the red wire."</blockquote>

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