Last week we looked at an area of the rules which has historically been pone to "leaking" out-of-character information to players. This week we dive into another, similar, topic and explore what steps Realm of Runes takes to help prevent characters from acting on information that was inadvertently gleaned by their respective players.
In any good story, people lie. Heroes and villains alike have information that they need to keep to themselves. As a game based on stories, lies are just as much of an integral part of the experience as combat, exploration and downtime, and figuring out whether someone else is telling the truth can be a matter of life and death. Realm of Runes uses two inter-connected systems for lies and lie detection, splitting the experience along player lines in order to keep secret information secret.
The obvious place to stat is the most straight-forward. One of the basic uses of the Deception skill is Lie. When a character says something false that they wish to pass off as true, it requires a Deception check. The basic difficulty of this check is the Perception DC of each listener, though the GM has the authority to adjust the DC based on the plausibility of the lie. Such adjustments are left up to GM discretion. Since the circumstances of every lie are different, there is no simple rubric for which lies are more plausible than others.
This system handles well for when players lie. They come up with the content, and they make the check. It doesn't work so well when it's the GM lying to the players. When a player lies to the GM, the GM is typically already aware of the lie and is simply using the dice to properly adjudicate how it was received. For the reverse case, the nature of a tabletop game is such that the players themselves are aware of dice rolls that happen at the table. Even if the results are hidden behind a screen, everyone knows that a die has been rolled. In most conversations, there can only be one reason for that die roll, and it puts players and their characters on high alert.
For this reason, the GM never rolls dice to lie on the behalf of NPCs in Realm of Runes. Instead, if a character (or player) is suspicious of the veracity of an NPC's words, they can use the universal activity Consider Intent. Consider Intent is a Perception check against the speaker's Deception DC, but it is not an automatic lie detector. Let's take a look at the activity and its degrees of success for a better understanding of what happens when a character wants to probe the honesty of an NPC:
{F} Consider Intent
[Intricate]
Trigger: You can trigger this anytime
Effect: Use body language and other cues to discern another's true motives. Attempt a Perception check against a target's Deception DC.
Success: As failure, and you learn if the target has lied to you since the last time you tried to consider its intent.
Success (+5): As success, and you learn what was the next most recent lie, specifically.
Failure: You learn the target's current general disposition toward you.
Failure (-10): No effect.
The way this is set up still gives players some information on a failed, but not critically failed, check. The NPC's disposition refers to one of five possible relationship categories. From "worst" to "best", these categories are Hostile, Unfriendly, Indifferent, Friendly and Helpful. Even just knowing how an NPC is feeling can be of some use to a character. It may not tell you if they lied to you or not, but you can generally guess that unfriendly NPCs may be more likely to be hiding something than friendly ones, though this is not a fool-proof assumption.
If the character succeeds at the check, they can learn if the NPC has lied recently. This result doesn't tell what that lie was, or how recent it was. A character that constantly Considers Intent with every statement made by an NPC can possibly use this result to narrow it down. One useful wrinkle to this degree of success is that it has a built in expiration for the information it gives. Once you Consider Intent regarding a conversation, that's it. The next time you use this ability, it only covers where the conversation has gone since the last time you tried.
Critical success and critical failure are where things get more interesting. Critical failure simply gives no information at all, and this is an extremely important point. It does not force the characters into believing what they have heard, a suspicious character can still be fully suspicious and act accordingly. Critical success, on the other hand, is the only way to know for certain what specifically was a lie, if anything. As with success, however, there is a built in expiration to the information that can be gained this way. If there were multiple lies, a single critical success increment only tells you what the most recent one was. The increments are multiples of 5, however, so it's not absurd to expect that a very perceptive character that rolls well may learn the two, or even three, most recent lies, if there are even that many to learn. As with basic success, the more often you use Consider Intent the more ability you have to narrow down the timeframe.
Between Lie and Consider Intent, all dice rolls when it comes to lies and lie detection are attempted by players and not the GM. In this way, the only accidental information that a player can glean is the actual physical result of the die, and no more. However, simply knowing that you rolled poorly does not offer much help in this setup. Since at no point does the GM tell you what to think on any result, all you can do with this "information" is to proceed cautiously since you lack any evidence one way or the other.
Lies and lie detection are an important aspect of playing Realm of Runes, and the system is carefully designed to preserve the purity of these interactions without accidentally giving anything away to the players that they can use to circumvent it. Next week we'll explore a relatively recent change to how social interactions are handled, civil social checks and rude ones.
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