Sense Motive vs Bluff

[Greenfield]

If I am a player, and my DM says "You feel like he is hiding something" then I know I just rolled a sense motive higher than his bluff check. Right?

This means that there was a bluff check.

So I know he was bluffing.

Yes and no.

In that example, yes, but in the general sense it's more complicated.

You're laughing, gossiping, buying a few drinks and losing a few coppers in a card game. In short, you're using Gather Information. (It isn't always direct questioning, you know.)

You notice that the bartender is spending a lot of time in a whispered conversation with a one-handed man at the far end of the bar. You get a bad feeling.

Or perhaps you get the creeps when he brings you a drink that you didn't order, and decide that it's better to spill a lot more than you consume.

Was he Bluffing you? No.

Was he doing things that made you feel like something was up? Like he wasn't a man to be trusted? Absolutely.

Like I said, it's a far more general skill than some would play it, and absolutely is applicable to situations other than detecting Bluff checks.

 

[Dozen]

In a nutshell, assuming the bartender is an assassin:


Scenario A: Bartender is lying.
You roll an opposed Sense Motive against his Bluff. You either find out he's lying(by passing the check by 11 or more), notice something fishy(by simply passing it) or don't find out anything at all. Later, if you pass a Hunch check, you may notice something was fishy, which may or may not have been a lie.

Scenario B: Bartender is avoiding the question or misleading you.
You roll a Hunch check. Should you pass, you may find him shady, but that doesn't tell you anything - you'll have to figure the details out yourself. If you fail, you pick up nothing.

 

[Greenfield]

Sense Motive will never tell you that someone lied. Not specifically.

The Paladin asks the Bartender, "Are you the Assassin?"

The Bartender, who doesn't like where this conversation is going at all, asks, "What are you talking about?"

The Paladin senses that the man is uneasy and concealing something, says, "You're under arrest". And perhaps arrests the wrong man.

If the Bartender had made the positive statement, "I don't know what you're talking about", he'd still trip a Sense Motive if he did know that there was an Assassin in the area, or even if he simply knew that the authorities were looking for one, even if he himself wasn't the Assassin.

Stop thinking of it as Detect Lie. It isn't, not only because you can't fool it with evasive answers or half truths, but also because you can trigger it for reasons completely unrelated to the direct question.

All it tells you is that person has an ulterior motive, one they're trying to hide. That can be a lot, but it's not a precision tool and shouldn't be treated like one.

 

[Dozen]

I don't think it is. You're confusing me with Sekhmet. But a high enough Sense Motive lets you see through a lie. From the SRD:

"For instance, if the target gets a +10 bonus on its Sense Motive check because the bluff demands something risky, and the Sense Motive check succeeds by 10 or less, then the target didn’t so much see through the bluff as prove reluctant to go along with it. A target that succeeds by 11 or more has seen through the bluff."

I'll admit I didn't know the specifics until I looked it up just now tho.

 

[Sekhmet]

Again, [MENTION=6669384]Greenfield[/MENTION], I'm very aware that Sense Motive is not a lie detector. You, however, have failed to recognize the syntax of the skill in question. Only when used to react to a Bluff check is the skill not a minute action.

Reading the Bluff skill is also important in determining when Sense Motive can be used as a standard action instead of a minute action. Any time the player makes a Bluff check, his opponent makes a Sense Motive check.
When a player wants to make a Sense Motive check independent of a Bluff check, he must take a minute action.
Hunch is outside of the reactive requirement to make a standard check, so it takes a minute.

You're playing Sense Motive up to be much more impressive than it actually is. RAW does not state that you become fully aware of the opponent's deception, it states that you can feel "something odd is going on" or if a person is trustworthy.
Trustworthiness is a direct factor of being honest or being dishonest.
"Something odd" can be absolutely anything. Perhaps Bartender's son just died, and his heart just isn't in it that day. He's off, he's acting strangely, and your Paladin won't know if he's being dishonest, deceptive, or secretive. Just that he is off.

So, in the given situation where the Bartender is an Assassin, and a Paladin is harassing him:
Paladin: "Do you know where the Assassin is?"
Bartender: "I don't know what you're talking about."
No Sense Motive can be used. This is a five second conversation. (I encourage you to walk up to a stranger and say "Do you know where the Assassin is?", and try to gauge their innermost thoughts and secrets (related to the question, of course) by their first response.)

If it were to go on:
Paladin: "I heard this bar was the place people came to for that sort of work. Know anything about that?"
Bartender: "I told you, I don't know what you're talking about. "
Paladin: "How is it that the proprietor and barkeep of such a small tavern doesn't know everything that goes on in it? "
Bartender: "Look, holy man. I told you I don't know anything, and I'm not going to change my story."
(Paladin now gets to roll his Sense Motive check, having spoken with and studied the Barkeep's agitation over the simple question)
Paladin: "I might not be clear enough, either you tell me what you know about the Assassin or I'm bringing in the clergy to cleanse this den of harlots and alcoholics."

So, here we have a little dialogue that likely takes up the span of about a minute or two. The Paladin has interacted with the Barkeep, and he made his check toward the end there right before his threat.
This is a perfectly valid use of Sense Motive, where your previous examples were not.

 

[Nezkrul]

trustworthiness = honesty/dishonesty?

so what you are saying is that you can't trust a dishonest person? Are you sure? can't you trust him to be dishonest?

 

[Greenfield]

Small note: You changed your phraseology from the question, "What are you talking about?", to the statement, "I don't know what you're talking about."

As written his statement was a flat lie, and yes, a Bluff check is called for. So I'll presume that you mis-typed.

That being said, the implicit denial still calls for a Bluff check. It's an active attempt to deceive.

Just as Sense Motive isn't Detect Lie, so Bluff isn't just used for direct lies.

To quote the skill itself:

You can make the outrageous or the untrue seem plausible, or use doublespeak or inuendo to deliver a secret message to another character. The skill encompasses acting, conning,, fast talking, misdirection, prevarication and misleading body language. Use Bluff to sew temporary confusion, get someone to turn and look the other way, or to simply look innocuous.

Several of the uses described there have nothing to do with making strictly false statements. Misdirection, for example, would include non-answers and half truths such as "What are you talking about?"

Prevarication covers more than simply making false statements.

pre·var·i·cate   [pri-var-i-keyt] Show IPA
verb used without object), pre·var·i·cat·ed, pre·var·i·cat·ing. to speak falsely or mislead; deliberately misstate or create an incorrect impression; lie.

So any attempt to mislead, whether by evading the truth through a question or to otherwise create a false impression is a prevarication, and that falls under Bluff.

 

[Dozen]

Huh. That'd mean that all examples of misleading brought up earlier do require a Bluff check. Good find.

 

[Sekhmet]

[MENTION=6669384]Greenfield[/MENTION]

You're correct, I had meant to write "What are you talking about?" instead of "I have no idea what you're talking about."

Misdrection: Incorrect directions or instructions, inaccurate aim, management that is careless or inefficient, drawing attention away from.
Mislead: to cause (someone) to have a wrong idea or impression.

Saying "What are you talking about?!" is not misdirection or misleading.
Saying "I haven't seen him today" is not misdirection or misleading.
They aren't misleading, they aren't false, they aren't giving incorrect impressions of, they are not prevarication.

Under your idea of what Sense Motive does, answering questions with questions is also a Bluff and should be Sense Motive'd.
"Have you seen the Assassin?"
"Do you think I have?"
"Aren't you the man I was supposed to talk to?"
"What have you heard?"

This isn't misdirection. This isn't a Bluff. This isn't something you can Sense Motive. It's annoying as being a midget in a town full of halflings, but it isn't misdirection.
This is artful sidestepping.

 

[Greenfield]

When someone asks where John is, and you know but choose to evade the point by saying, "I haven't seen him today.", how is that not an attempt to mislead, to give a false impression?

That is, you're trying to convince the person asking that you don't know, when in fact you do.

The essence is in the intent, not the mechanism with which that intent is carried out.

Now you can argue, "He didn't intend to deceive, he just wanted a way to answer without telling the truth", but that's just a long winded way of describing the misleading statement.

So when the bartender asks what the Paladin is talking about, he isn't asking because he needs an explanation. He's asking because he wants to create the false impression that he needs an explanation, that he doesn't already know about the assassin. He is, in effect, trying to look innocuous.

Trying to create a false impression is a "prevarication", exactly as described in the dictionary.

Now said Bartender might honestly answer, "Look, if I talk to you, I'm as good as dead.". It's still a prevarication, of course, in that it's an attempt to make the Paladin thing the Bartender's life is in danger from the Assassin, when in fact it's the Paladin himself who's the threat. But now we're just discussion how to tell a better lie, which is kinda' off topic.

Of course, the Paladin could just do a Detect Evil and watch the Bartender light up like a Christmas tree. You have to be Evil to be an Assassin, after all.

Sadly, the people I've met who were the most adept at arguing the technicalities of truth were the most likely to stray from it.

"Technically I don't know where John is, not exactly. I'd need to be looking right at him to know that. I may believe that he's out of town on a trip, but he could have been lying. Or something could have gone wrong with his car. I mean, he said he was going to be out of town and asked me to cover for him, but he might be at home, just taking a day off, or he might be at the beach, or the Circus, or in court, or...". See what I mean?

The guy who can rationalize like that has had a lot of practice at rationalizing his lies, and should set off Sense Motive like a fireworks show on the "trustworthy" scale. He'd also probably be a good candidate for law school.