Characters with a too low sense motive

[Quentinas]

Silph , Trisha, Pandora and Errethera don't read this thread .

I was creating an NPC that should have infiltrated in an elven forest and to see how much bluff I should give him I checked the sense motive of the PC and...it's quite low for everyone. Consider that they are at level 13 main casters: a shadowcaster/master of shadow CL 12 and a ranger/cleric/sword dancer (CL 10) but the higher sense motive of the party is owned by the factotum which has 8 of wisdom and 6 ranks in sense motive . So at the maximum they can have a +12 if the factotum remember to use inspiration but it's still quite low. So how would you do? Creating an NPC that has something like +15 to bluff /ignore bluffing and using another way to infiltrate that shouldn't go on their sense motive or what else? I would appreciate ideas I admit , the infiltration should be done by a gnoll empire that venerate Yeenoghu that has enslaved various undead , mainly ghoul because Doresain the King of the Ghouls is a vassal of Yeenoghu

[H_H_F_F]

I'm not sure I properly understood the situation, but this doesn't seem like a problem at all. In fact, it is an opportunity!

A skull check is the most boring way possible to resolve an intrigue like this. "You get the feeling he's lying" is not interesting. You know what is?

Attentive players realizing the enemiy's story doesn't quite work, due to information they were exposed to beforehand. The PC's allies begin to make combat plans the PC's can tell are bad, and when they inquire they realize it's based on info given by the NPC.

Think about it as a detective story, and let the players feel smart for catching an excellent liar.

[Jervis]

Silph , Trisha, Pandora and Errethera don't read this thread .

I was creating an NPC that should have infiltrated in an elven forest and to see how much bluff I should give him I checked the sense motive of the PC and...it's quite low for everyone. Consider that they are at level 13 main casters: a shadowcaster/master of shadow CL 12 and a ranger/cleric/sword dancer (CL 10) but the higher sense motive of the party is owned by the factotum which has 8 of wisdom and 6 ranks in sense motive . So at the maximum they can have a +12 if the factotum remember to use inspiration but it's still quite low. So how would you do? Creating an NPC that has something like +15 to bluff /ignore bluffing and using another way to infiltrate that shouldn't go on their sense motive or what else? I would appreciate ideas I admit , the infiltration should be done by a gnoll empire that venerate Yeenoghu that has enslaved various undead , mainly ghoul because Doresain the King of the Ghouls is a vassal of Yeenoghu

A: throw in a Sha’ir with the Silver Tongue feat (Dragon 318) so you can make them make a apposed sense motive check against its, probably high, diplomacy, being confused for a round on a failure. It’s a hilarious way to troll PCs with low sense motive.

B: It’s OK to target a party’s weak points with encounters. Pump bluff to around +12-15ish. Encountering challenges you aren’t prepared for can be good fun as long as it’s isn’t overly annoying or punishing.

Just don’t do something like throwing a Minotaur with spell resistance and a Haste prebuff against a party in a permanent Slow zone where Haste doesn’t work even to counteract the Slow unless it’s from a potion even thought that makes no sense by the rules and call out the party for not buying a potion of Haste even though no one would do that in a party of mostly casters, half of whom have Haste. Ok that example might just be a horror story as a person example but you get my point. Throwing a encounter that targets a weakness in party comp can be good, just don’t throw a all caster party into a anti-magic zone every two sessions or using fire immune enemies against a party of fireball spammers every combat.

[Fizban]

Sense Motive is not a required skill (no skills are required other than Search/Disable), so the party not having it is not a problem. Unless you write an adventure that makes it a problem by requiring it to progress. The standard narrative method for catching someone in a lie isn't just mysteriously somehow knowing they're lying, it's by catching them in the lie. An adventure where the characters uncover someone who's been bluffing them ought to involve anything that's *not* Sense Motive (as in, the skills and abilities they do have), and if they happened to make the check that merely points them in the direction the adventure was already going to take them anyway, to investigate, gather evidence, and foil the plot.

[Saintheart]

Bluff I think is a poor name for what the skill does. Persuasion, or whether the target is persuaded or not, is far more akin to what the outcome of a Bluff vs Sense Motive in social checks like this. Persuasion doesnt necessarily require the target's full credulity, it's perfectly possible to believe the persuader is not telling you the whole story and still go along with what the persuader is saying. Or do you think all those people who said the TV adverts were lying to them didn't go out and buy what they were being presented with?

That is, Sense Motive is not the truthsayer drug. It better suggests whether in that moment the person is persuaded to accede to the other's request. They might even have misgivings about it but go along with it anyway. Maybe further Bluff checks will be required later on.

But either way it should rarely be used on a PC by a NPC, because putting it cynically, we all think we're geniuses at telling truth from lies, and that human arrogance has a session-ending tendency to show up (falsely) as the player-character separation problem in situations like this.

[AsuraKyoko]

Bluff I think is a poor name for what the skill does. Persuasion, or whether the target is persuaded or not, is far more akin to what the outcome of a Bluff vs Sense Motive in social checks like this. Persuasion doesnt necessarily require the target's full credulity, it's perfectly possible to believe the persuader is not telling you the whole story and still go along with what the persuader is saying. Or do you think all those people who said the TV adverts were lying to them didn't go out and buy what they were being presented with?

The pre-Fantasy Flight version of Legend of the Five Rings has the Sincerity skill, which has 2 specializations: Deception and Honesty. It's the catch-all skill for convincing someone that you are serious, and doesn't compel them to actually believe you. I've found that I've missed the skill when playing D&D, because there isn't really a good skill for "convincing someone you aren't lying, when you aren't actually lying". Diplomacy sin't quite right, and Bluff also isn't quite right.

I always thought that having a single skill for sounding sincere and truthful was an interesting approach to the matter.

Edit: Naturally, due to the nature of the game and the setting, the ability to sound sincere is vitally important in intrigues, as sounding insincere can be a deadly insult.

Overall, I like the various social skills in the game, they represent the types of things that are important in the courts, without being colored by "what are you trying to make this person do" like D&D's social skills.

[Mordante]

I don't think a GM should expect a party to have certain skills. A rogue is not required to put any points in Disable Device or a Warlock in use magic device etcetera.

[Silly Name]

What are the consequences of the party failing to notice the infiltrator? It's ok for the PCs to fail as long as the failure point doesn't become a stall or an automatic game over because of a single roll.

What you need to do is create a scenario: the infiltrator obviously has goals apart from infiltrating the elven forest - what are they looking for? Information, a specific object, a person? Does the party know that the gnoll empire is attempting to enter the forest and/or that they may be looking for the "thing"'? Is your infiltrator an elf, or are they disguising themselves as one? What happens if the infiltrator suceeds?

In short - an opposed Bluff check is only one of the ways the infiltrator can be thwarted, as said by others. It's up to the PCs to find a way, and a party full of casters should have some good tricks at their disposal. But, they may simply not figure it out, it happens, so how does the story progress from there if they "lose"'?