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What do you do when players refuse to believe your lies?

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What do you do when players refuse to believe your lies?

Unread postby icycalm » 20 Jun 2021 22:46

What do you do when players refuse to believe your lies?
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs43ek7?What ... to-believe

Fascinating discussion with many great posts. I’ll just quote some.

You will never see such level discussion in a videogame forum because the games are too simple to engender it.

Recently had a strange encounter in which a succubus lied to the party, saying that she was a simple human researcher that had been held captive by the other monsters in the dungeon for her knowledge.

She crit succeeded her Deception check against the party, and so I told the players that she seemed absolutely sincere when they asked if she were lying.

Even so, the players were extremely skeptical because she was found tied up in an opulent chamber, whereas even the monster's apparent leaders slept on straw beds elsewhere in the dungeon. It just didn't add up. So, despite her lie that the monsters had attempted to bribe her initially with the gifts, the player characters kept asking over and over again who she really was even though--as far as their characters should have been concerned--that had already been established.

Eventually, I realized that we weren't going to get anywhere and so broke disguise and initiated combat.

I'd very much like for this to go differently in the future though. The whole situation felt very meta to me, as though one or more of the players might have known the truth (perhaps by reading the adventure themselves) and were attempting to force the issue even though their characters had no reason to disbelieve her.

What could I have done to make this go more smoothly? What would be some good advice for similar situations in the future, in which an NPC lies to the party?


This guy has the best response:

You can't use social skills on the party and expect it to work. At best, a successful deception check means they told a good lie, but PCs are suspicious people by nature. A player is under no obligation to believe anything an NPC tells them, just like a real person is under no obligation to believe anything anyone tells them.

The scenario, as you have described it here, is super shady. The party is adventuring in a dungeon and comes across a solitary person in an opulent chamber? "oh I've been held prisoner" doesn't fly. And PCs in a dangerous place have no incentive to trust anyone they come across. You can't tell players to ignore something in front of them because you rolled a dice. Well, there might be a spell or mechanic for that, but generally speaking.

Trust is something built up over time. Strangers met in hostile areas are not afforded any trust, especially in a world where the table can open its mouth and eat you. Think of all the decapitated statuary left in the wake of paranoid adventurers. Not trusting people keeps the party alive. It is a foolish decision to trust anyone in a TTRPG and its similarly foolish to ask a player to put their character's best interests aside so you can stab them in the back even though they can see it coming.

If you want to successfully lie to the PCs, you need to successfully lie to the players. The NPC's story and situation need to be believable to the players. And players are genre savvy.

Instead of claiming that she is a prisoner, a better lie might have been "I came here to explore this ruin and since they wanted to know the same thing I did, I saw no reason not to work together."

This plays into 'absent minded academic' stereotypes. PCs might try to explain what's really going on and then the NPC can act surprised, and appear contrite. They might want to arrest the human collaborator, but escaping a prison is super easy for a succubus, so its not like she cares so long as they believe she is human. If they're going to murder, well its what PCs do best.

The lie has to be believable within the context of the encounter. If you don't have that, it doesn't matter what you roll.

Another way to play it would have been to let the players think they solved it. "Okay, I'm not a researcher. I'm actually a X." Where X is something more believable to the PCs. I like to use table talk to fill in these blanks. Usually players will talk amongst themselves over what the person 'could really be'. Pick one of those.

The succubus presumably wants to either not fight the PCs or gain some advantage. So if a story isn't working they need to ditch it for one that will. Once someone thinks they spotted the lie, they usually won't look for a second one--because they don't expect NPCs in TTRPGS to be two or three lies deep.


This guy is spot-on too:

There is no such thing as metagaming. What GMs mean when they ask players to stop metagaming is 'Please be stupid for me against your best interests.'

Players come loaded with knowledge about fantasy stories and maybe even specific monsters. Asking them to ignore that is silly. That knowledge is earned by them over time playing games and consuming pop culture. If you don't want them to spot your obvious trap, don't make the trap obvious.


This guy goes a bit deeper than the others:

1. I as a GM would usually not roll any social skills versus the party, but just tell them the truth or the lies I have prepared. Instead I would have the player(s) roll Perception versus Deception/Diplomacy/Intimidate DC if the player is stating that his character is trying to gauge what is going on while not forgetting to incoporate appropriate modifiers for easy to believe lies, hard evidence and so on.

And while this is not in the description of Deception per se it runs along the line of "no one can ever change the attitude of a player character with these skills. You can roleplay interactions with player characters, and even use Diplomacy results if the player wants a mechanical sense of how convincing or charming a character is, but players make the ultimate decisions about how their characters respond", which is mentioned for Diplomacy and Intimidate.

2. Our gaming group is all for the separation of player and character knowledge, so I see the following player options, which however are strongly depending on table ettiquette. In the given scenario and assuming that nobody was able to discern the lie by hard evidence or made a suitably high Sense Motive roll we would usually do the following.

2.1 The players play their characters as fully believing the lie, cooperating normally with the NPC including acting surprised even when they really aren't.

2.2 The players play their characters as believing the lie but due to the special circumstances stay on their toes throughout, cooperating only in save ways, always double checking any of the NPCs statments and actions and closely watching their backs.


Eventually, the thread becomes about metagaming versus cheating, among other things.

Players come loaded with knowledge about fantasy stories and maybe even specific monsters. Asking them to ignore that is silly.


No, asking them to ignore that is part of the rules of the game.

Sometimes the player knows more than the character; sometimes the character knows more than the player. If you can't put the former aside, don't expect the latter.

I as a player have no idea how to load a crossbow or pick a lock or conjure a firebalk. My characters do, though. And in turn I know things like "the GM has Bestiary 2 book open to one of the middle pages" and "that pawn is a green dragon and not a jungle drake" that my characters don't know.

Separating those two is roleplaying, deliberately mixing the two is metagaming.

It doesn't matter whether the obvious trap was obvious to the players. It wasn't an obvious trap to the characters, and if the players can't deal with that, then I don't really know what to do other than sit down and have a conversation about it.

It'd be super funny to flip the script - change the adventure so that the woman really is a woman, and the PCs' refusal to believe her causes her death and opens the PCs to a surprise attack from the real succubus hiding in a secret passage behind them. But long term that's not really helpful to the campaign and kind of dark to boot. And short term that's hard to do on the fly.

If players want to play "I'm Smarter Than the GM" instead of Pathfinder, that's fine too (especially if it's a paid gig). Either up the ante with more and more elaborate ruses, or put up with this nonsense for a paycheck.

Some players can't emotionally deal with their characters failing at something, you just have to decide whether you want to cater to them or not. (And there are legitimate answers both ways.)


There seem to be many more interesting posts, it’s a large thread and I haven’t read all of it yet.

This is way more interesting discussion than I have seen in any type of gaming forum in over a decade. You have to understand that these people are all GMs, so even within the TTRPG community—which has the smartest people in gaming—these people are the smartest of the smartest, especially also since you see them posting about published adventures on the best contemporary company’s forum. They are not generic dipshit “homebrew” GMs, they know what’s up. It’s a delight to read the Paizo forums (though if you’re a player in my group I advise against it because of rife spoilers: just read whatever I give you here).

I will be discussing player vs. character knowledge in an upcoming chapter of my Ultimate Edition. It’s a very important topic in Battlegrounds where each group can spectate the exploits of the others.
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icycalm
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