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D&D 5E Using social skills on other PCs
- Thread starter Bill Zebub
- Start date
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
I do something similar. For every 1 over 10 you roll, you go 1 foot further. That way you aren't guaranteed extra distance.
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
Dude.
"Jeremy Crawford
@JeremyECrawford
· Jun 21, 2016
NPC ability checks can't force a PC to think/feel something, but they can affect how the DM describes the NPC. #DnD"
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
There's no consensus on the 6 stats, hit points or armor class, either. Consensus isn't a valid metric to use.
Bill Zebub
“It’s probably Matt Mercer’s fault.”
Getting back on topic, and setting aside for a moment considerations of both RAW and RAI, I genuinely don't understand why you want to play the game such that the DM would roll dice to see how well an NPC lied, and a player would be expected/required to roleplay believing it.
Yes, it's true that some GMs will not be smooth liars (or their players will know them well enough) such that attempts to actually fool the players will fail. And....so?
My question is: why is it so important for the player to believe the lie? It can't be a realism argument; it's the nature of lies that sometimes people don't believe them. (And the opposite: sometimes people don't believe the truth, either.)
My suspicion is that it's because the DM has set up a plot, and if the players know the NPC is lying, and act on it, then the plot falls apart. And, honestly, that's a terrible reason.
And now getting back to the text, it's my belief that MM and JC and Co. agree with this, and after decades of gaming they said, "You know, this is stupid. Let's stop trying to tightly control social interactions through rules, and just let people roleplay through it. Just let people decide what their own characters do." "I so agree! I'll put that right on page 185, in the section on roleplaying, where nobody will miss it."
Yes, it's true that some GMs will not be smooth liars (or their players will know them well enough) such that attempts to actually fool the players will fail. And....so?
My question is: why is it so important for the player to believe the lie? It can't be a realism argument; it's the nature of lies that sometimes people don't believe them. (And the opposite: sometimes people don't believe the truth, either.)
My suspicion is that it's because the DM has set up a plot, and if the players know the NPC is lying, and act on it, then the plot falls apart. And, honestly, that's a terrible reason.
And now getting back to the text, it's my belief that MM and JC and Co. agree with this, and after decades of gaming they said, "You know, this is stupid. Let's stop trying to tightly control social interactions through rules, and just let people roleplay through it. Just let people decide what their own characters do." "I so agree! I'll put that right on page 185, in the section on roleplaying, where nobody will miss it."
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
The orc could roll a 3 or 22 and intimidate my character. Or roll a 3 or 22 and fail to intimidate my character. Since it's 100% my choice, the outcome is never uncertain no matter what you roll. All you are doing is rolling for yourself to describe the orc, not establish uncertainty. Uncertainty by the way, by RAW must be determined before the roll.
Bill Zebub
“It’s probably Matt Mercer’s fault.”
It kind of amazes me how often this is left out. When somebody "pro-dice" (new term?) is describing a play scenario, they almost invariably leave out the step where auto-success/failure is determined.
When I pushed and pushed and pushed, @clearstream finally acknowledged that if an NPC is lying to a PC, the DM does in fact have the authority to just declare an auto-success, which apparently doesn't simply mean the NPC did a good job lying (which is fine), but that the character believed it. Which blows my mind.
No wonder the certainty step is left out. It's sooooo inconvenient.
yeah... my high school only offered a single physics class and it was for honors students. I took 'science' and 'science 2' and then Biology (did you know the mitochondria is the power house of the cell?)
sounds like he agrees with me...
clearstream
(He, Him)
To avoid the lie automatically succeeding. As I can explain below.
Say an NPC gives the PCs some misinformation, but the PCs don't express any doubt or inquiry. And in this case our DM is not taking an acting approach to their presentation of the game-world, or perhaps they think they gave the right subvocal clues, but failed dismally. To me, the characters inhabit the world... so shouldn't they have some chance of noticing the deception? Just as the characters living in the game world have a chance to notice an NPC sneaking up on them, even though there is no one acting that out at their rl table.
There are many approaches that could work here. One is that a DM tells the players that they might be being lied to. Another is the DM decides to make a check for the NPC - CHA (Deception) against passive WIS (Insight). That comports well with other cases covered under RAW (such as where an NPC attempts to be stealthy).
Put simply, a DM can always rule something is uncertain, and are encouraged and endorsed under RAW to do so. The alternative is that in the case at hand, the NPC automatically succeeds.
The PCs don't have to believe the lie. What I'm saying though is that it shouldn't automatically succeed against them.
My take is that as in many places in the PHB, they're offering guidance. It's not a rule. That's simplest. We don't then need carve outs anywhere. The only change to the order of operations is to remove any assumption of prior certainty. The RAI is much as you say, but the RAW is more successful this way.
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