Should Insightful players have an advantage?

[S'mon]

Following on from 'should charismatic players have an advantage?' - I happen to have a player who is incredibly insightful, and always picks up on NPC motivations, plots etc very quickly - she can read characters like a book. But in 4e D&D there is an Insight skill which is supposed to deal with this stuff, right? And a lot of people think that charismatic players should not be allowed to have an advantage on charisma-related stuff, where eg Diplomacy rolls could be used.

So, how does that relate to Insight? Is the player playing her PC wrong when she plays her insightfully? I actually let/encouraged her to swap out a skill for Insight, which AIR is not a class skill for Rangers, more to let her take full advantage of her ooc insightfulness than because I thought she was doing it wrong. I think I'd do the same would go for a particularly (eg) diplomatic player.

 

[olshanski]

{EDITED THREADCRAP}
My point was that I believe players with natural talents should be able to take advantage of them regardless of the situation. We don't make Aaron Rodgers or David Beckham play football with a ball-and-chain strapped on their ankle.

I also prefer to play a version of D&D where diplomacy, and insight are determined by player skill an not by stats, so these questions are moot. Also, even where charisma is on a sheet, I tend to use that to determine NPC reactions prior to an encounter and numbers of henchmen/hirelings... I don't use it to guide in-chaacter interactions. A CHA3 character is exactly as persuasive in-game as his player pretends to be in real life.

 

[fuzzlewump]

I think insightful players... should be allowed to be insightful. An advantage? That depends. If she doesn't have the insight skill, there are times when she's going to be wrong and have no way of knowing it. I think such a thing can certainly be done if the motivations of NPC's, or their secrets, are left to the dice to determine. This player might just have you pegged as far as the kind of plots you run, and picks up on the patterns. Maybe some random determination would spice things up.

This can be something like, having a list of 4 suspects, and they each have a plausible reason for murdering a guy. Then determine randomly which one actually is the murderer. It can end up being the guy you originally wanted to be the red herring, or it could be the person everyone leasts suspects, etc. It will be random each time. In this case, skills might be more useful, and player knowledge less so.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

The player being insightful just means that the character will be able to roll on Sense Motive, since the player has remembered to ask.

Way back when I had a player that would pretty much ignored botches on such things (Storyteller system) - if he got a botch he would ignore what I told him, knowing that it was false. So, once in a while I told him the exact truth, he ignored it and was surprised to find out that his botch had gotten him the right information, which he had then ignored. When he got upset I told him that his disregarding what I had told him was the botch.

The Auld Grump

 

[ComradeGnull]

Sense Motive for me always made more sense as an NPC skill, or for PC's to use in defending against feints, or when they have no other opportunity to figure out if someone is lying (it simulates 'intuition' and reading of body language, neither of which are necessarily reproducible in a gaming situation).

If a player can figure out from context that an NPC is lying, it seems reasonable that most people of average human intelligence would have a good chance to be able to do the same.

I think mostly when we talk about differences between PC intelligence and player intelligence, we are talking about 'figuring things out', given that most of the knowledge that a smart player would have (other than meta game knowledge) is inapplicable to most game worlds. In my mind, anyone of reasonably average intelligence has a pretty good chance of 'figuring out' connections between A and B and why people might or might not be lying. I really don't see calling for 'roll to see if you comprehend the villains motivation' as really necessary as long as someone is playing a PC within the range of normal human intelligence. There is a reason certain things are called common sense; you need not be particularly smart nor particularly insightful to exhibit it.

If you have a player with a 3 Int PC who consistently remembers metagame knowledge (like weaknesses of monsters never encountered before or setting-specific information or something), I think it makes sense to require rolls or somehow penalize that- feeding bad information intentionally, or changing monster abilities behind the scenes to keep them guessing.

 

[KidSnide]

I don't think this is the right way to look at it. Figuring out what's going on is part of what makes the game fun, and a major aspect of that is getting a read on NPCs. If a player is insightful, then they will simply be better at that aspect of the game. Although the Insight skill is a useful tool for allowing less insightful players to play more insightful characters, it is not a substitute for the players interacting with the gameworld world as directly as they can.

Because interacting directly with the gameworld (or as directly as possible) is actively fun, for most groups (many groups?) it's a bad idea to remove that fun aspect of the game just to generate a completely level playing field among the players. If a group interacts directly with the game, intelligent, insightful and charismatic players will have an advantage. It's not a goal to give them an advantage. It's simply not worth the cost to remove it.

Of course, skilled players will also sometimes decide to not to use their full advantage. A good charismatic player, playing an uncharismatic character will provide a great (i.e. entertaining for all) performance of ineffective persuasion. That same player, playing a charismatic character, would likely be more effective than his less charismatic party-mate.

The key is that -- when players play characters who are less effective socially or mentally than they are -- it is up to the player to "play down" to the character. Such a player's obligation to play down is best enforced with good example and social guidance than by game rules.

-KS

 

[Argyle King]

No, but insightful characters should.




Does a strong player automatically break free of grapples?

...a player with strong Willpower succeed on Will saves more often?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

bennie1saldana
has no status.

Registered User

Join Date: Dec 2011
Posts: 7
Novice (Lvl 1)

Insightfully reported.

 

[Mort]

Following on from 'should charismatic players have an advantage?' - I happen to have a player who is incredibly insightful, and always picks up on NPC motivations, plots etc very quickly - she can read characters like a book. But in 4e D&D there is an Insight skill which is supposed to deal with this stuff, right? And a lot of people think that charismatic players should not be allowed to have an advantage on charisma-related stuff, where eg Diplomacy rolls could be used.

So, how does that relate to Insight? Is the player playing her PC wrong when she plays her insightfully? I actually let/encouraged her to swap out a skill for Insight, which AIR is not a class skill for Rangers, more to let her take full advantage of her ooc insightfulness than because I thought she was doing it wrong. I think I'd do the same would go for a particularly (eg) diplomatic player.

As in the Charisma thread, insightful players do have an advantage. They will be able to put threads together faster, ferret out motivations better, know when the NPC is lying regardless of roll and be able to influence the party accordingly (say by making sure the guy with the high insight skill is alerted and using it accordingly) etc.

The real question, is should they essentially have a mechanical advantage on top of that (by being able to ignore insight rolls etc.) and beyond a certain point (+2 to skill checks for particularly astute observations etc.) I think the answer should be no, unless the DM takes out insight as a skill entirely and leaves it up to player skill alone (If you're going to ignore it, why have it).

This does not mean insightful players are left out in the cold. They can take the insight skill and use it well along with any natural talent (this is one reason I give an extra free skill to the players, both in 3e and 4e - regardless of class or race), they can guide another player who has a good insight. Or, they can take a roleplaying challenge and play a low insight character - where the Player knows exactly what's going on but the character doesn't and the player has to react accordingly; leading to all sorts of interesting situations (people always talk about roleplaying the character - well this is a way to put up or shut up).

 

[Mort]

No, but insightful characters should.




Does a strong player automatically break free of grapples?

...a player with strong Willpower succeed on Will saves more often?

I take this position in every thread - but it never seems to make any headway.

Many people just treat the mental skills differently from the physical ones, even though "on paper" they should be given the same weight.

Part of this is the perception that physical skills are easy to quantify and mental skills are not. I don't really agree with this, but it sure seems a prominant view.