NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9543055" data-attributes="member: 4937">From my perspective, I think ultimately your complaint resolves down to how bad most social resolution systems are and how little attention they play to real world nuance - like getting someone to fall for a lie depends not just on how charming you are but also how good the lie is.   The vast majority of cons depend not just on getting someone to believe a lie, but on exploiting weaknesses in the character of the mark - typically their greed.   A lot of cons rely on getting the mark to believe they are the one tricking and exploiting you, which of course isn't going to work with someone who doesn't want to exploit or trick someone.  So the character of the person you are trying to manipulate matters.  It might be hard to exploit the greed of an honorable person, but easy to exploit their pity - for example.  This is why I'm always taking the conversation and making a judgement about what circumstance modifiers apply to the particular conversation we've had when trying to figure out how difficult the social test is.I liken this to a room with many walls of differing height and smoothness, and the player is choosing implicitly or explicitly which that they want to try to climb, knowing that some walls are more difficult than others and others lead to falls on more dangerous of surfaces.  The conversational strategy is effectively trying to figure out which wall is easiest and less risky.  You don't necessarily automatically succeed just because you have a great strategy - charisma isn't a dump stat - but a great strategy does help.But, more than that, I would like to direct everyone's attention to what you call the "other reasons".  Because the real reason that an NPC doesn't roll to convince or deceive a PC isn't volition and player agency, but rather because again - the mind of the player is always present in the game universe.   There can be no consistent or effective or reasonable rules around the idea of "don't metagame".   I have come to the conclusion that asking a player to not metagame is really impossible, since the player is asked to imagine what they would do if they didn't know something, and that is impossible to know.  If you are presented with a puzzle or a riddle, but you have been told the answer to a puzzle or riddle, there is no way to approach that puzzle or riddle as if you didn't know the answer.  Everything you do in that circumstance, whether solving the riddle or not solving the riddle is still metagaming.  So instead of trying to force the players to not metagame and try to force the players to act out as if they have been deceived when they haven't, I simply deceive them myself and don't leave it up to a die role.  Their character may not be deceived, and if they are wise and fortunate I may tell them, "No, you are pretty sure the NPC is lying."  But the reverse isn't really possible.  I can't tell them, "No, your character believes them" if in fact the player doesn't, because then they have to metagame what their character would do and that's not really possible because in reality even if deceived they might take "trust but verify" steps or blindly do things that would reveal the deceit.   After all, when the players themselves are deceived that is how they behave.  So why should I ask them to try to imagine how they'd behave in the absence of knowing the answer to the riddle?  They can't.  It's not fair and it's really impossible.   Ultimately that would end up being based on my opinion of how they would behave, and why should that rule the day? So I don't have any "no metagaming" rules generally, not just in this situation.</blockquote>

Verification