Back to Blog
Pitfall trap pathfinder5/28/2023 ![]() For a case where someone's trying to tell the truth but it's hard to believe, you can have the speaker roll a Diplomacy check (if the speaker is trying to be persuasive and logical) or an Intimidate check (if the speaker is trying to be forceful and aggressive). James Jacobs wrote: Skill DCs are a GM's best friend here. You can't have attacks target defenses that only some creatures possess. Those are the ones EVERY rule should reference. The game has four defenses, AC, Fort, Ref, and Will. Having a rule that says Sense Motive is Perception vs passive Deception is like having a rule that says "Since Wizards aren't trained in combat, they should have near zero AC" and thus everybody getting critical successes against them. And specifically, having many attack vectors and many defenses. More in general, this illustrates well the pitfalls of rules design. You really can't depend on the rules for this.įor every case where the rules work, there's a case where the rules doesn't work. A blind reading of the rules mean they're incapable of withholding information.Īn example from the Extinction Curse AP - a character is described as so brutalized and desensitized to violence any Intimidation attempt will get a result one category lower. Many creatures don't even have Deception. This was my thought: have a set Perception DC (based on level, and increasing it if the thing the person is telling is really far-fetched.)Īnd then there's the entire question of how the story is affected. I just wanted to comment on one instance where it felt a little funny and reasons to consider before applying this as a catch-all rule. In the end, quick DCs like simple level or Perception are useful and work great more than 90% of the time. But shouldn't it be easier to convince this walking lie detector that you are telling the truth? You'd almost want a higher Perception to reduce the DC rather than increase.īut I digress. Let's say a PC is trying to convince this skeptical inquisitor that they are telling the truth this inquisitor has very high Perception due to their profession and therefore is appropriately difficult to lie to. Similarly, I could see this being a bit counterproductive in an in-game scenario against an NPC. It was a fun, non-dramatic scene so in the end it didn't matter who failed or passed what, but a couple players commented on it post-game. I used both Diplomacy vs Perception DC as well as Perception vs Diplomacy DC for the truthtelling portions (Performance was used for overall enjoyability), and it led to a few awkward moments where it punished a player for having a high Perception (higher DC for them to notice the truth) or vice versa with Diplomacy. ![]() I used it as part of minigame where players were trying to tell convincing stories - truth or otherwise - and the other players would try to determine if they told the truth or a lie. The players need to choose whether to believe it- though they could decide to roll sense motive to inform that decision. To be fair, I don't think Diplomacy checks are meant to be rolled against PCs at all. Instead, you could use standardized level DCs if concerned with that. In some ways, it can actually punish players that have invested in/boosted Perceptions and if they find out the basis for the DC, some may be annoyed. Not to argue with the James Jacobs, but I do want to caution some amount of care when comparing against the Perception DC of a player on a Diplomacy check. That definitely works in a quick and dirty fashion - and I've done similar in PF1 and other systems. You can pretty safely generate DCs like this for anything that has a modifier, be it a Skill, perception, an attack, or a save. The Perception DC is equal to the listener's Perception skill modifier +10. It all still goes against the listener's Perception DC.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |