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ShortQuests -- Pocket Sized Adventures! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed for 1-2 game sessions.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Synchronicity" data-source="post: 1523794" data-attributes="member: 10070">Generally, I treat it as a passive skill. Sense Motive is supposed to be the character's ability to pick up on subtle nuances of conversation, nervous tics, voice tremors and whatever that tell you something's off about what the other person is doing or saying. *However.* If the person they're talking to *is* lying, but the players have no reason to suspect that they're lying, I generally give the NPC a bonus on their Bluff check *unless* the players specifically ask for Sense Motive checks. For me, the effective penalty to the player's roll represents that the character isn't 'on guard' and so isn't carefully scrutinising everything the NPC does: he's just getting a roll for his natural gut instinct. However, if the player asks for a roll,  then I assume his character is more 'on the ball' than he is normally, and so the NPC gets no bonus. An example of this: The players go to an audience with the mayor of a town. They've never been in this town before, and they don't know the mayor. When they go to his house, a man stops them in the entrance hall, states that he's the mayor's secretary, and that due to important business coming up, the meeting will have to be rescheduled for tomorrow. The man's an assassin, who doesn't want them wandering into the study and discovering the mayor's freshly-dead body. However, since this is a plausible occurence and the players aren't expecting any foul play, the assassin gets a bonus on his Bluff check because the players aren't trying to actively detect if he's lying. Any player asking for a Sense Motive check in this situation negates the bonus. If, on the other hand, they'd gone to the mayor's house expecting trouble, the assassin wouldn't get the bonus in the first place. Needless to say, the most important thing about this particular house rule is that you don't tell the players about it. This prevents them asking for Sense Motive on *everyone* they meet, but makes sure that there's a difference between 'passive' and 'active' Sense Motive.</blockquote>

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