I am planning a set piece that involves some NPCs deceiving my players. The short version is that my players will meet some simple farmers trying to bring their crops to market, only to find that they’re actually smugglers in a Hatfields and McCoy’s type feud, which the party then gets messily swept up into. I generally don’t trick my players; I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it but I imagine some tables would take to it more than others. Do you trick your players? Are there some tricks you find acceptable and others that are unacceptable? For me, I have no qualm getting my players swept up into the seedy underworld of drug or artifacts smuggling, but I don’t think I would run a plotline on human trafficking. That I think would be difficult in an unpleasant way for everyone involved.
it’s whatever they’re comfortable with. i think withholding information in some ways is key to being a DM. i love a good mystery, and the insight check exists to interact with that system.
i personally find it much more challenging when i’m trying to trick them and they hit me with a nat 20 insight.
Oh, the characters get duped constantly, 9 out of 10 thatch roof fires are the direct result of characters being thick, but if the character fails an INT roll the player is in on the joke. I mean like, getting the players themselves to fall for a gag.
Oh god … Years and years ago, we played every weekend in college. We had this one DM who’s campaign ran for … I dunno, at least a couple years. Anyway, we found this wand, lightweight metal, red with white swirls on the side and some strange lettering. We used a spell to read the lettering, which said “Bottled at the Coca-Cola Company Bottling Plant, Philadelphia, PA”. We had no idea what that meant, though.
None of the spells available at the time helped identifying what the wand did, so we went through our standard tests to figure out what it was. Nothing we tried worked. We were like, well, it doesn’t weigh much and maybe it’s important or we’ll find out what it does later on.
So, we carry this damned rod around for a fucking year and a half. Every so often we remember it and try again, but the only information we ever get “Coca-cola Bottling Plant”. The campaign finally ends (our DM was graduating) and we go over the campaign and one of the questions we ask is, wtf was that rod? And he says, “Oh, it was a rod of resurrection.” And we’re like, wtf? And he laughs and says, yeah, 'cause this.
Damn near lynched him.
Most players are only half paying attention, and are badly trained by video games to assume every NPC is telling them the truth.
I had a player once I think of as the worst player I’ve ever had. Easily confused, impulsive, and very bad at sticking to a coherent character. They’d be all “I’m a soldier I follow orders!” in one scene, and “fuck what my commander said I’m going awol” the next.
I think a lot about one time I had an NPC lie to her PC’s face. The NPC was in faction mildly unfriendly towards the PC’s faction, and the PC was looking for one of theirs. The NPC told a mildly implausible lie about the guy’s whereabouts, and the player’s brain just ground to a halt when following up on it was a dead end.
“So no one here has heard of the guy?”
“Seems so.”
“But other-guy said he was here.”
“He did.”
“So where is he?”
“Not here, so far as you can tell.”
“But he said he would be.”
“He did.”
“And no one here has heard of him?”
“Seems so.”
The other players lost their patience and pointed out that maybe the NPC was lying, and it wasn’t the GM making a mistake or misunderstanding.
I don’t think it was especially worth it, but maybe lying would work better with a better player.
Anyway. You also don’t want to train your players to go “INSIGHT CHECK” during every interaction, and if you have someone lie once they’ll probably be paranoid for years. Same problem with traps, once. You burn them with a floor trap once, and then they’re all 10’ poles and chickens
If a player asks if they can use a skill to solve a problem I almost always roll with it, but my rule is that dice rolls are only binding if the DM asked for them. but there are some situations where the roll wouldn’t impact the game (e.g. trying to jump to the moon). I think being suspicious of NPCs is reasonable, and I think it’s good for the story if some characters are good at sniffing out lies and some trusting souls are just as pure as the driven snow.
As for the players not paying attention, I have been on both sides of the screen and sometimes, though I am trying really hard to pick up what the DM is putting down, the plot is just impenetrable. Still fun, but I have no idea what’s going on despite the world-shaking consequences of our actions. Effectively telling a story is hard at the best of times and making it collaborative doesn’t do anything to make it easier. If I spin a sprawling epic and the players miss 90% of it, I think that’s just the result of a bunch of folks just trying to relax and play a fun game. And if you want your players to remember something, you better be prepared to repeat it a few times.
It’s been a while since I DMed, but my players definitely developed trust issues with my NPCs. 😂
It’s not paranoia if everyone in the world is actually conspiring against you.
In one of my random tables is a shady dealer selling “death sticks” which are actually just cigarettes made with dried grass. It’s yet to come up tho.
Oh, of course!
I had a necromancer NPC sell the party a llife insurance policy. They bought it and never saw him again. Lesson learned, I hope.
The traveling huckster that the party meets on the road is one of my favorite stock characters. They bring the characters macguffins that may or may not be real, they send them on fetch quests, they drop gossip that the party needs to know, I get to do a skeazy voice. So versatile 😌
but I don’t think I would run a plotline on human trafficking.
What about elf trafficking?
Or goblin trafficking?
I wouldn’t say never, but it seems like the kind of story that would kill the buzz. I like playing silly campaigns and it’s hard to be silly about such things. I have run stories where the party finds captive people and busts them out, but it usually isn’t a core component of the campaign plot. I have a storyline in the backlog that I’ve never used about sentient stones. Basically, magical crystals in the rock form neural networks. Some of them can think, some of them can communicate, but they are immobile and defenseless. they are routinely harvested for their magic crystals, and sometimes trafficked great distances. One of the campaign hooks centers around a stone that was used to prop up a table right next to a mill, close enough that it could hear the rocks scream as they slowly grind down to dust, every day, for years. It gets grim. I might run that one with the right table.
Make it a rescue mission.
From a candy factory.
Manned with rock gnomes with green hair.
Oh my god. If the rocks are ground up and mixed into candy, because the magic makes the candy pleasantly tingly…
Blatantly call it rock candy. Make them roll perception to see if they notice the actual ground up rock.
I imagine whether or not you can taste the rock depends on how well the candy is made. Cheaper rock is coarser and contains more regular rock grit, the more expensive stuff is milled finer and is almost pure magic crystal.
I imagine it would be kind of a touristy thing, like there might be street vendors selling rock candy in a town market, and some fancier confectioners that all claim to have the finest rock candy in the whole region.
The final insult to the rocks is the the candy is mostly sold to travelers because most people agree that it’s not that good. kinda like licorice, or salt water taffy. Some people love it, and it’s a kind-of interesting feeling to have the crystals dissolve in your mouth, but most people would just as soon pass after they’ve had it once.
I draw the line at dwarf trafficking.
I’m with you on dwarf trafficking. I don’t understand how some people stoop so low.
It depends on how inquisitive your players are. I had an NPC trick them into a heist from an orphanage, but they never investigated the building, or questioned how organized everything was, and once they were paid at the end they never questioned anything and moved on
I love the orphanage 😂 I have played a few campaigns where the main conceit is “we’re an adventuring guild, we send you out on missions and if you live you get paid” and I’ve always wanted to run one where the Adventurer’s Guild is literally the mafia that controls a major city, and the players get sent on increasingly shady missions until they cotton on to what’s happening. I love the idea of the penny dropping mid-orphanage robbery.
“Why are there kids here?”
“I thought we were here to clean out a vault”
“Of course there’s a vault. You think they can just leave the money they need to buy food over the winter lying around? These little guttersnipes will steal anything that isn’t nailed down”
“It’s their food money?”
“…are we the bad guys?”
The Group’s motto “We’re paid to do a job. Not ask questions.”
“We’re here to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and in this campaign bubble gum’s not a thing”
I trick and scam my players pretty much constantly. The enemies, the neutrals, and even people on the side of good are always pulling something. But then, my campaign is more of a mystery campaign masquerading as a fantasy adventure campaign. My players have come to expect it.
In essence, I think this is the line I take: if you’re going to pull a trick, you can’t fake it. The trick HAS to be fair. The pieces should all be there for the players to put together, a bit of logic can be necessary but ideally no leaps of logic required, and if you hand the players all the pieces and they STILL fall for it, that’s on them. You can’t blatantly lie with the DM voice or conveniently leave out information any reasonable person would notice. That’s unfair. As I tell my players, the DM voice will never lie to you, it will always tell you exactly what you can sense. The NPCs can lie to you, and many will. It has served them well so far once they got the hang of it.
I think that’s a good take. The puzzle can be fiendish, but it should be solvable.
Oh hell yeah! NPCs trick my players all the time. Commanders, strangers, witnesses, priests, anybody might have an ulterior motive or secret agenda.
Best advice I have is just trust. Player characters don’t need to trust every non-player character but the human players at the table absolutely have to know they can trust you the human GM.
When my NPCs pull some shady stuff, like the reveal last session that leader of the crusade has been plotting to betray the PC crusaders for the entire campaign, that reveal always comes with a huge smile from me. “Yeah y’all, this dude is terrible! But now your characters are on to him and I can’t wait to see how they take him down!”
I’m not pulling one over on my players, I’m inviting them to a party I’ve been planning for ages and now we all get to find out what happens next.
I had them serve a dickhead ‘emperor’ in my Adventure Time campaign. I just kept having him ask them to do ridiculous or silly tasks until it culminated in an unfair arena battle. I made up some magic crystal that takes their physical traits and attributes and gives it to the emperor. That was honestly a fun fight and a good time. Plus I really liked improving as the emperor.
Is there anything magic crystals can’t do? I love a good doppelganger fight. I’ve wanted to do a campaign where, by some magic bullshit, a bizzaro world version of the party shows up that all have different facial and color palettes , but they’re actually competent, like they save towns and revitalize economies and are heroes, meanwhile my players are bumbling around like the gang from It’s Always Sunny.
This sounds like a really fun campaign! Who says you HAVE to be heroic?
I don’t know what it says about my friends but their highest fantasy aspirations appear to revolve mostly around two things: petty larceny and profound larceny.
Profound larceny sounds like some fun fae shit. Like stealing someone’s ability to desire material things, or their ability to speak the letter H.
Funny you should mention it, because one of my campaigns involves stealing, and destroying, a Platonic Ideal. if the ideal is destroyed, that concept ceases to exist in reality. No one knows if it’s ever been done, because no one would be able to remember the concept after a successful heist.
But with the right team and a portal to the realm of Pure Thought, it could be done.
