Lie to Me
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"These don't exist. No, really guys. Trust me on this."
On a recent episode of Fear the Boot, the hosts discussed “lying to your players”. You’ll note I put that in quotes.
They had a serious issue with the idea of telling your players one thing, then revealing it to not be true later on. They worried it would break player/GM trust.
I personally don’t see it as an issue. I’d go so far as to say it’s an obligation for a GM to lie to their players.
Every time the player roles badly on a Spot check, the GM shouldn’t tell the player, “it doesn’t appear to you that the door is trapped.” No, no, an emphatic no. You should be telling the player “it’s not trapped,” because that’s what the player believes, having failed the check. If you tell them something doesn’t “appear” a certain way, they’re only going to believe that it must be the opposite, otherwise you would have told them. You’re almost giving away the truth by your wording.
I can’t see an issue with GM/player trust when it comes to telling them information about the world. If you say (an example from the episode) that there are no dwarves in this campaign world, then they encounter a dwarf, I can’t forsee a player saying “screw this! I quit! You lied to me!” No, the correct response would be for their character to be confused as to what this creature was.
Player/GM trust comes from a player trusting the GM to not throw an ancient dragon at a 1st level party, or a player not doing something they knowingly know will bother the GM or throw the game out of whack. It doesn’t come from withholding world information from them their characters wouldn’t know anything about.
What do you think?
I honestly don’t understand how giving wrong ingame information could be considered lying. Taking your example, the whole point is giving the right information. Of course you could say: “You don’t see the trap installed at the door”. I guess I’m not the only one who’s going to shout ‘boooring’ here.
There are a few examples where lying to your players might indeed break some trust, but thats all outside the game. Like ‘telling one player he can’t play a certain race, while giving another player the opportunity to do so.
As a player I want my GM to lie to me, and as a GM I’m a liar – so far noone complained.
I gleefully lie to my players when they fail checks, and they know it. But I wouldn’t tell them something untrue in a context where they should believe me. For example, I wouldn’t tell them “That NPC is a friend of your father’s from way back” and then have the NPC act as if they’ve never heard of the character before unless there was a very good plot reason.
Agreed! The GM is one of the storytellers in the game — and, in service to the story, facts are revealed in their own time. So yes, the player fails a trap check and the truth is later revealed, when the trap springs. Players lie to each other and to the GM, about abilities, motivations, feelings. And it is all as it should be for the game and the story.
.-= Beth´s last blog ..Nu53ulB N0itaR0pr0C =-.
Different people will have differing opinions on “lying.” I personally think it’s part of the storytelling, especially if you’re trying to curb metagaming. Recently, I ran an encounter and ended up having one of the baddies disappear for storyline purposes. Two players had already attacked it and were a little miffed by my lie of omission, but the PCs didn’t know it was going to happen, so they would have attacked it anyway. One of the players even said they wouldn’t have used the attack if they’d known. I’m with you on the trust issue.
I don’t think “trust” is the main issue. Clear communication is.
In a RPG, the players need to share a coherent image of a completely imagined world. For this to happen, the GM has to give out enough clear information to set the scene without overwhelming the players ability to absorb and internalize it. The right balance is difficult enough without introducing the added complexity of a fallible narrator, where the players in addition to absorbing the information need to constantly evaluate it for believability. I think the shock value of surprising or fooling players is just not worth this extra layer of potential miscommunication.
.-= Russell´s last blog ..Action Now! Time is almost up! =-.
Not only do I lie to the players, I also tend to fuel their paranoia. If the characters are especially tense, a trap check on a door with NO trap, would have me say “it doesn’t APPEAR like there’s a trap” which immediately makes them fear they failed the roll, and so on. So it’s all about eliciting the characters’ reaction from the players themselves (trust or mistrust according to the PC’s mindset).
.-= Siskoid´s last blog ..The Four Folded Faces of Kid-Flash =-.
Random perception rolls are one of my favorite tools to keep a party on its toes. That and clever uses of the words “should” and “could” can really mess with their minds.
.-= Josh´s last blog ..And So It Begins… =-.